THE PLANK NOVEMBER 4, 2009
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Every once in a while I like to fact check the Wall Street Journal editorial page just to see how unbelievably low the intellectual standards on that page are. On today’s page, John Steele Gordon argues that "the liberal paradigm [does] not even come close to agreeing with the social and economic reality on the ground today." What is that reality? Gordon offers up a handful of facts:
[T]he rich are still looked upon by liberals as enemies of the poor and disadvantaged, even though Mr. Obama not only carried a majority of voters earning less than $50,000 but also a majority of those earning over $200,000. He did, in other words, as well among the wolves as he did among the sheep. …
But in a world where a majority of Americans work at white-collar jobs, have high-school and college degrees, own their own homes, and hold financial securities in their own right, the so-called wolves are now a majority.
This is it, the sum total of factual assertions mustered by Gordon in support of his thesis. The rest in nonfalsifiable rhetoric (i.e., "the nastiness in American politics is largely on the left," "liberals refuse to engage [conservative] ideas, simply because they are not liberal ideas and must, therefore, be wrong," and so on.) Let us go through these five factual assertions.
There are a couple true things here. A majority of American workers do work in white-collar fields, though this is not exactly synonymous with affluence. A majority also own their own homes, though the same caveat applies.
Did Obama perform as well with voters earning more than $200,000 a year as those earning under $50,000? Not even close. He won voters earning over $200,000 by 6 points, and those earning under $50,000 by 22 points.
Do a majority of Americans have college degrees? Even assuming he means Americans in the workforce, the answer, again, is not even close. 70% lack a college degree.
Do a majority own stock? No. And it’s only even close if you count things like a pension fund. If you mean direct ownership of stock, only one in five Americans owns any. (Economist Anna Turner at the Economic Policy Institute helped me round up some of these links.)
So, out of 1,279 words of mostly ideological blather, there are five actual facts that bear any relation to the thesis. And three of them are false. This from an author who is accusing his ideological opponents of failing to "come close to agreeing with the social and economic reality on the ground today"!
6 comments
I think we should give him 3/6- before making a false equivalence between Obama's success among the affluent and the poor, he does correctly say that "Mr. Obama not only carried a majority of voters earning less than $50,000 but also a majority of those earning over $200,000"
- Simon Greenwood
November 4, 2009 at 6:10pm
Gee, people earning over $200,000 a year voted for Barack Obama? Whatever could they have been thinking!! That's almost as surreal as the finance industry contributing $6,000,000 to Obama's inaugguration. More than any other industy. Didn't they watch the campaign? Didn't Obama make it clear that, like Jesus, he was going to drive them and Wall Street from the temple? Golly, did they know something about him we didn't? But Chait sets the record straight. Obama won the votes of those earning over $200,000 by only 6%, while garnering a whopping 22% lead among those earning less than $50,000. He's still one of us!! Take that Wall Street Journal!!! george
- iambiguous
November 4, 2009 at 6:17pm
Wait! I figured out why the rich backed Mr. Audacity. They noticed that Barack always seemed to gravitate towards folks less populist like Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin. Whaddya think, possible? gw
- iambiguous
November 4, 2009 at 6:24pm
"[T]he rich are still looked upon by liberals as enemies of the poor and disadvantaged, " Given the amount of ink spilled fretting about the poor on the editorial pages of the Journal, I'd argue that the opposite is actually true. That the rich look upon the poor and disadvantaged as enemies.
- jet
November 4, 2009 at 6:48pm
Hold it, you go to the lefty EPI, which produces a report that shows that in 2001, a majority DID own stock, and the latest figure you've got is 2004 and the number is close enough to 50% to be a rounding error - 48.6%, and you've got the stones to disparage Gordon? Nice going.
- butchie b
November 5, 2009 at 11:24am
Also, the WSJ article noted "But in a world where a majority of Americans work at white-collar jobs, have high-school and college degrees..." That doesn't mean that >= 50% graduated from college. If that was the WSJ author's intent, then he'd have left out high school. You don't have to mention that someone ALSO graduated from high school IF they graduated from college. It is implicit. Thus, the author was marveling that when liberalism kicked off, the core audience for liberalism overwhelmingly didn't graduate from even high school, but today they do. College too. Also, note the author was comparing to a time of about 125 years ago. And yes, at that time, high school graduation rates were well under 50%. In fact, 50 years ago high school graduation rates for black students were under 50%. The wsj authors point that Chait completely missed was that the core liberal constituent is vastly different than the uneducated and unsophisticated counterpart of the late 19th century.
- SeattleEngineer
November 7, 2009 at 11:37pm