Jeff points me to this:
Actually, my problem is not so much the Fox graphics team’s continuing ridiculous choices of lower bounds (particularly inappropriate when the data are presented as a set of bars rather than as a line) but rather that the starting point is so recent. Why not provide a bit of perspective and go back a few years or even a couple of decades?
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Good post! This bar chart is completely laughable: surely automatic stabilizers kick in during recessions.
But we’ve been in recovery for most of the period of that chart. Shouldn’t the automatic stabilizers be reducing the numbers ‘served’ in recovery? I know we’re in a recovery because Joe Biden told me so.
Although the overall point of the post is valuable, and would be even more so if it were more even-handed, showed similar examples of politically driven graphics from msnbc, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, NYT, etc.
It’s also just not welfare (TANF), it’s food stamps and other aid programs that are probably more popular/less stigmatized than welfare. They sort of get at that by saying “some form of federal welfare,” but I doubt most people who watch this are going to pick up on that distinction.
There is actually an interesting story here if you go back earlier: the increase in the proportion of means-tested aid that’s in the form of food stamps (SNAP) and a decrease in the proportion that’s given in terms of TANF. It’s my sense that this has happened to a significant degree post-welfare reform, and that it’s probably both diluted the effects of it and contributed to the sky-high effective marginal tax rates for the working poor. I don’t expect to see coverage of this on FOX.
“Why not…?” I think we know why. How else would one expose the Not-One-Of-Us Welfare President?
Correct data presentation would not have the same desired bias.