Though it’s not billed that way. “Gov’t Estimates 754,000 homeless people,” reads the Yahoo News headline. This is roughly the same figure reached by a homeless advocacy group, after the figure of about 170,000 from the 2000 census was loudly denounced as an undercount. Now the government has it right, according to advocates.
But if the homeless population had really been 3 million, as we were routinely told in the 1980s, doesn’t this new figure represent great progress, especially when we consider the growth in the U.S. population since then? If so, no one says so in the article.
Now here’s a forbidden thought: could it be that the 3 million figure was another leftist fabrication, like the “1 in 4 women will be raped” (sometimes they say 1 in 2!) figure and the zillion other phony stats they’ve invented? Sure, homeless advocate Mitch Snyder admitted to Ted Koppel that his fabricated number had “no meaning, no value,” but major homeless organizations like the the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty have solemnly repeated that figure ever since. Either we have a bunch of liars here, or we’ve made great progress on homelessness. Unsurprisingly, homeless advocates are loath to concede either possibility.
10:59 am on February 28, 2007
