Reliability of Government Data Often Requires Asterisks, a Hazard That Predates Liberal Gripes About Trump Manipulating Statistics

Seattle slugger Cal Raleigh this year matched what once stood as a signature baseball record: Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs for the 1927 Yankees. Roger Maris first surpassed Ruth’s record, hitting 61 homers in 1961, but for decades his achievement was accompanied in record books by the most famous asterisk in history. Maris played a 162-game season, the asterisk explained, while Ruth’s mark was set during a 154-game season. Similar caveats apply to key government data, which have long merited their own asterisks. Critics blame President Trump for firing the messenger after a disappointing jobs report, yet ignore flaws in federal poverty and food insecurity statistics that long predate this administration. During the pandemic, even normally reliable unemployment claims figures were vastly inflated. In each case, liberal politicians and the press gladly used — and often miscast — official data to boost calls for more government benefits. Take the nation’s official poverty measure, which counts only a fraction of the benefits taxpayers provide to assist low-income families. Since its origins in the 1960s, that measure has become steadily more incomplete as the safety net has expanded beyond just paying welfare checks. In 2023, the official poverty measure ignored benefits from government programs representing nearly 11 times as much spending as it counted in determining who is poor. Liberals in the past regularly lamented “stubbornly high” official poverty rates, made inevitable by ignoring growing benefits even as they called for more. Yet instead of just counting more anti-poverty benefits, today the left favors a newer “supplemental” poverty measure that sets the bar for escaping poverty far higher. That raises the apparent poverty rate, with the Census Bureau defining 7.8 million additional Americans as poor last year. In covering the latest poverty report, the New York Times for the first time didn’t mention the falling official poverty rate, focusing instead solely on the higher supplemental rate. Other data display similar leanings. Since the 1990s, the federal government has conducted an annual survey on food insecurity. Criteria include being “worried” about food running out, and the survey finds 13 percent are “food insecure.” Meanwhile, there is no official measure of “hunger,” which is inherently difficult to measure. The rate of “very low food security,” which reflects reduced food intake due to a lack of resources, is often considered a close proxy. That affects only about 1 percent of households with children, yet advocacy groups often simply conflate the two conditions. The nonprofit Feeding America argues “hunger in America” affects every one of the 13 percent who today “face food insecurity.” That’s not so, but such rhetoric helps explain why food stamp caseloads and spending remain near all-time highs well after the pandemic ended. The Trump administration recently proposed scrapping the food insecurity survey, arguing it does “nothing more than fear monger.” Still other data, while normally valid, can be wildly miscast. In September, first-time unemployment benefit claims unexpectedly jumped 10 percent in one week. Press accounts first attributed the spike to rising layoffs, then to surging weather-related claims, and finally to the real culprit — a wave of new fraudulent claims in Texas. That was a minor blip compared with the pandemic, when the number claiming unemployment benefits was misreported by millions. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office confirmed that the Department of Labor had “improperly presented state-reported claims volumes as the number of individuals claiming benefits.” Some lawmakers went even further. In arguing for an enormous Democrat-drafted relief bill that Republicans dubbed a “liberal wish list,” the Ways and Means Committee’s chairman, Congressman Richard Neal, said in June 2020 that “more than 42 million are out of work.” That figure was apparently a reference to accumulated claims for benefits since the pandemic started, which was inflated by double-counting and fraud. Yet the actual number of unemployed was 21 million. Cynics and cranks will always question government data, conjuring dark conspiracies about the deep state and beyond. Sometimes reality is simpler, if troubling in its own right, with flawed metrics exploited to advance an ideological agenda or lawmakers and the media simply taking liberties with the facts. That merits more than an asterisk denoting such flaws — it requires fixing them.

Reliability of Government Data Often Requires Asterisks, a Hazard That Predates Liberal Gripes About Trump Manipulating Statistics

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