I am relatively new at this, but I am amazed at some of the blogs and some of the bloggers who are posting here.
On Monday I posted an entry on children and poverty—pointing out the rise in child poverty over the past decade and the severe negative consequences of this for the entire county. One response claimed that this was not really a problem-- the poor were not that bad off because large percentages of them owned homes, color TVs, computers, etc.
Unfortunately for the blogger, he or she did not know that I was an expert on poverty and immediately knew the "facts" that the blogger was providing were not correct. I pressed for a reference to these so-called facts about how well all the people in poverty were actually doing.
I then got suspicious when the blogger gave me a link to the Brookings Institution. The Brookings Institution is a middle-of-the-road think tank in Washington, DC. Its work is outstanding and it has a great reputation throughout the world.
This could not possibly be the source of the data presented. Checking the link, all I found was a brief summary of poverty data—percentages of households, percentages of children, etc. There was nothing about how well the poor were doing. When I point this out, I got yet another phony link from the blogger; again, I pointed out that the data was not there to support the view that poor households are doing ok because of all the things they owned.
Finally, I got sent four links. Three were totally irrelevant. The fourth link (sort of hidden among the other three) was a report by the Heritage Foundation.
For those of you who don’t know this organization, the Heritage Foundation, it is a right-wing think tank that opened in the early 1970s. It began with a quarter million dollar grant from Joseph Coors, who thought that right-wing American Enterprise Institute was too middle-of-the-road and mainstream. Its main supporters are Coors, John Scaife and the Olin Foundation. The work that they do trying to influence public opinion and public decisions at best puts them close to the legal boundary between being a lobbying organization and a non-profit organization that engages in research and education and can receive tax-deductible contributions.
It should go without saying that given the sponsors of the Heritage Foundation, the quality of what they produce is not reliable and not respected by most scholars.
The Heritage Foundation study I was pointed to relied on data from a Census Bureau housing survey. The survey asks whether people own their own home, how many rooms in the home, the appliances and amenities that they have in the house, etc. They also ask about income levels, and so presented data for low-income households. Alas, the Census Bureau calls this group "poor" on its tables (probably to save space), but they do make it clear that they are talking NOT about poor households but households with below-average incomes. So the numbers in the Heritage study did not show that the poor were likely to own homes with lots of bedrooms and with lots of TVs, but that people with below-average incomes owned these things. These are two very different things! Certainly, the people at the Heritage Foundation should have known this.
I pointed out to the blogger that the Heritage Foundation study deliberately manipulated the information in the Census Bureau housing study and that they do this sort of thing all the time. All I got back was a tirade that essential said I was biased against "right-wing data".
Where do these people come from? And who are they working for?
At times it seems as though some of the people blogging are being paid by right-wing organizations in order to "spread their word". If so, this is really a "cash for clunkers" program at its worst. Does anyone here have any evidence that this is going on or any further information about this?
In the interests of openness and honesty, I am writing a book on the decline of the middle class and have one chapter dealing with right-wing think tanks, how they have been financed by right-wing zealots with lots of money, and then how these organizations have contributed to bad legislation that has hurt the middle class (e.g., large tax cuts to the wealthy that led to large reductions in federal and state aid to support education that greatly benefit the middle class).
Any insights and help would be greatly appreciated. Also, any ideas on how to deal with these people would be appreciated. Part of me says that the best thing you can do is ignore them (and not encourage them); but on the other hand, nonsense that gets repeated and not responded to generally comes to be "accepted as fact"—something I do not want to happen and something I don't want to let the Heritage Foundation do.