What we need here is a truth-in-statistics act.
You’ve heard that figures don’t lie but liars can sure figure. Well, there’s a lot of statistical prevaricating going on right now, most of it in statistics being spouted forth about the Democrats’ attempt to take over our nation’s health-care system.
Let’s try this one first. Democrats claim that 14,000 people lose their health insurance every single day.
True? Hardly.
This number came at the height of job-loss crisis — when 14,000 people did lose their jobs in one day. The statistical magicians assumed every one of these people had health insurance through their employer. Apparently no one considered that some were covered by a spouse’s policy or were enrolled in the Cobra program, or that any took new jobs with health coverage.
They just lost their health insurance; end of story.
Democrats want us to believe that this level of health-insurance loss has continued for every single day since then. Simply not true, but so long as the ObamaMedia doesn’t report the truth, keep on telling the lie.
Here’s another: Certainly you’ve heard that more than 50 percent of bankruptcies result from health-care costs. Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin uses the 50 percent figure. Others push the figure up to over 60 percent. I guess they want us to believe that we’ll see a sharp drop in bankruptcies as soon as we get ObamaCare passed.
Last July, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research took a deep dive into these numbers and found that they were nonsense. Instead, the AEI concluded that the number of people who went bankrupt primarily because of medical bills was closer to (are you ready?) 9 percent. That’s right. Someone tell Dick Durbin, as if he cared what the true and accurate numbers actually were.
Now let’s have a little fun with poverty statistics. It was Lyndon Johnson who demanded an official U.S. government measure of poverty. He was looking for a way to maximize the appearance of poverty to create an excuse for even more government welfare programs. So, according to the feds, you could live in a paid-for $5 million home with a five-car garage containing five paid-for $100,000 sports cars. You could have $10 million in your checking account and $50 million worth of jewelry and gold buried in a safe. All of this, and the federal government could still categorize you as “living in poverty.” How’s that? Because the determination is made on your income, not your wealth.
Your income falls below a certain level for the size of your household and, bingo! You’re poor!
Notice in my example above – the guy with the $5 million home – I made no mention of any income.
Now this next one is fun. I developed this statistic myself. Well, I actually hired someone to do it for me. This was many years ago when local governments were preening over their gun buy-back programs. Haven’t seen one for a while, but these asinine gun buy-backs used to be a big deal. We would have some police department hand out a few thousand bucks for about 200 mostly worthless guns, and then the chief would talk about all those lives that were saved. Hogwash. I went to Georgia Tech and engaged a statistician to come up with a number of how many guns had to be bought back to arrive at a statistical certainty of saving one life. For the purposes of his study we defined a statiscal certainty as a 95 percent chance of saving one life. Do you think buying back 200 handguns saved even one life, let alone dozens?
The curiosity must be killing you: To reach a statistical certainty of saving one life you would have to buy back 75,000 guns. I don’t think that many guns have been bought back in all programs across the country. In other words, wasted money and grand rhetoric.
Sounds rather like Washington, doesn’t it?
Neal Boortz's column will appear every Saturday. For more Boortz, go to boortz.com
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