15 Statistics That Destroy Liberal Narratives

1/13/2015
John Hawkins

1) President Obama's own Department of Justice completed a six-year study on college rape, and it turns out that instead of 1-in-5 college coeds being raped, the figure is 0.03-in-5. Less than 1 percent of college students are the victim of a sexual assault -- 0.6 percent to be exact -- not to be confused with the 20 percent, or "one in five," claimed by feminists and President Obama. -- Ann Coulter

2) In ’92, the general sense was that New York was rotting from the inside. Now, crime feels like the exception rather than the rule. The city is the safest it has ever been.

Demonstrators beg to differ. They claim black people are at special and heightened risk from cops.

They argue this in a city in which a police force of 34,000 serving in a city of 8 million residents discharged bullets from their weapons exactly 81 times in 2013 — compared to 312 in 1993.

Nationwide, “police could end all killings of civilians tomorrow and it would have no effect on the black homicide risk,” writes City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald. “In 2013, there were 6,261 black homicide victims in the US — almost all killed by black civilians.” -- John Podhoretz

3) Gallup found that support for President Obama’s amnesty order was primarily among the foreign born population — whether Latino or not. Hispanics born in the United States only backed the amnesty plan by 51-42. Latinos born outside the U.S. backed it by 75-17. (Non-Hispanics born outside the U.S. backed Obama’s plan by 60-32). Since only one-quarter of Hispanic voters are foreign born, this finding is electrifying! It means that the knee-jerk approval Democrats are expecting from the Latino community may not be forthcoming, particularly not in sufficient numbers to offset the backlash among non-Hispanic voters. -- Dick Morris

4) It's also not true, as widely asserted, that the wealthiest Americans (the notorious top 1 percent) have captured all the gains in productivity and living standards of recent decades. The Congressional Budget Office examined income trends for the past three decades. It found sizable gains for all income groups. True, the top 1 percent outdid everyone. From 1980 to 2010, their inflation-adjusted pretax incomes grew a spectacular 190 percent, almost a tripling. But for the poorest fifth of Americans, pretax incomes for these years rose 44 percent. Gains were 31 percent for the second poorest, 29 percent for the middle fifth, 38 percent for the next fifth and 83 percent for the richest fifth, including the top 1 percent. Because our system redistributes income from top to bottom, after-tax gains were larger: 53 percent for the poorest fifth; 41 percent for the second; 41 percent for the middle-fifth; 49 percent for the fourth; and 90 percent for richest. -- Robert Samuelson

5) Less than 3 percent of the workforce earns the minimum; more than 60 percent of those who do earn it get a raise within a year; more than half of minimum-wage earners are students or other part-time workers from households with average incomes of $53,000. -- George Will

6) Teenagers under 17 who use cannabis daily are 60 percent less likely to complete high school or get a degree than peers who have never taken the drug, researchers said on Wednesday. They are also nearly seven times likelier to attempt suicide and are almost eight times likelier to use other illicit drugs later in life. The data, published in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry, comes from an analysis of three large, long-running studies in Australia and New Zealand. -- Newsmax

7) Claims that the (wicked, wicked) “1 percent” saw their incomes go up by such and such an amount over the past decade or two ignore the fact that different people compose the 1 percent every year, and that 75 percent of the super-rich households in 1995 were in a lower income group by 2005. -- Kevin Williamson

8) According to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, 36 percent of the country’s 18- to 31-year-olds were living in their parents' homes in 2012 -- the highest proportion in at least 40 years. That number is inflated because college students residing in dorms were counted as living at home (in addition to those actually living at home while going to school). Still, 16 percent of 25- to 31-year-olds were crashing with mom and pop -- up from about 14 percent in 2007 and 10 percent in 1968.1 In a Pew survey conducted in December 2011, 34 percent of adults aged 25 to 29 said that due to economic conditions they’d moved back home in recent years after having lived on their own. -- Zara Kessler

9) Yet the undocumented population remains upwards eleven million. Largely unskilled and undereducated, roughly half of adults 25 to 64 in this population have less than a high-school education compared to only 8 percent of the native born. Barely ten percent have any college, one third the national rate. -- Joel Kotkin

10) But the evidence shows that women lie about rape all the time -– for attention, for revenge and for an alibi. All serious studies of the matter suggest that at least 40 percent of rape claims are false. The U.S. Air Force, for example, examined more than a thousand rape allegations on military bases over the course of four years and concluded that 46 percent were false. In 27 percent of the cases, the accuser recanted. A large study of rape allegations over nine years in a small Midwestern city, by Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University, found that 41 percent of the rape claims were false. -- Ann Coulter

11) Sentier Research, a firm led by former census officials, used census data to tabulate an estimate of the median household income — how much is earned by families at the exact middle of the nation’s income distribution. In June 2014, it found in a report issued Wednesday, the median household income was $53,891, down from $55,589 in inflation-adjusted dollars when the economic expansion began in June 2009. The economic paradox isn’t much of a paradox at all in this light: The purchasing power of the typical American family is 3.1 percent lower now than it was five years ago. No wonder people are unhappy about the economy! The benefits of rising levels of economic activity have simply not accrued to middle-income wage earners. -- Neil Irwin

12) Yes, the richest one percent have some genetic advantages in terms of intelligence. Yes, luck can be a factor. Yes, it helps to have connections. But the portion of the one percent who didn’t work hard to get there is fairly small and unrepresentative. (In 2007, wealth transfers (mainly inheritances, but also including gifts) made up, on average, 14.7 percent of the total wealth of the 1 percent.) -- Jim Geraghty

13) The more progressive the city, the worse a place it is to be poor and/or black. The most pronounced economic inequality in the United States is not in some Republican redoubt in Texas but in San Francisco, an extraordinarily expensive city in which half of all black households make do with less than $25,000 a year. Blacks in San Francisco are arrested on drug felonies at ten times their share of the general population. At 6 percent of the population, they represent 40 percent of those arrested for homicides. Whether you believe that that is the result of a racially biased criminal-justice system or the result of higher crime incidence related to socioeconomic conditions within black communities (or some combination of those factors) what is undeniable is that results for black Americans are far worse in our most progressive, Democrat-dominated cities than they are elsewhere. The progressives have had the run of things for a generation in these cities, and the results are precisely what you see. -- Kevin Williamson

14) From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule. In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. -- The New York Times

15) The survey taken by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked a simple question of 34,557 adults nationwide: “Which of the following best represents how you think of yourself?” The five possible answers were straight, lesbian/gay, bisexual, “something else” and “I don’t know the answer.” Transgenders, the “T” in LGBT, were not included.

The survey found that a mere 1.6 percent of the adult population self-identifies as “lesbian/gay,” and an even smaller 0.7 percent told interviewers they were bisexual. The bisexuals were outnumbered by the 1.1 percent who didn’t know, wouldn’t answer or said they were “something else.”

This result was far from the 10 percent that homosexual rights advocates have claimed since the 1970s. -- The Washington Times

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