BCT Editorial – 9/10/09

This page was last updated on September 10, 2009.

Losing ground; Editorial; Beaver County Times; September 10, 2009.

Though the Times wasn’t upfront and didn’t identify the Keystone Research Center as what appears to be a left-leaning advocacy, policy, and research organization, at least it didn’t claim the KRC is nonpartisan as it has tried to do with other organizations. KRC is a member of EARN, a group of what appears to be exclusively left-leaning organizations whose membership includes ACORN. According to the KRC website, “EARN is coordinated by the [left-leaning] Economic Policy Institute (EPI).”

Why is the above important? An organization’s ideological leaning can color its research. If you look at the subject report, you’ll find some of the data sources are other left-leaning organizations while others are simply “KRC analysis” of this or that data source without providing any detailed citations. This makes it very difficult to assess the accuracy of the reported data. I suspect that’s done on purpose.

You may have noticed an apples vs. oranges comparison. For all but the top one percent the report claimed to use data from 2001 to 2009. For the top one percent the report used 2001 to 2006, a period that conveniently (for the report) predates the current recession. I don’t know what an apples to apples comparison would have shown, but I have my suspicions.

If you had any suspicions about KRC, they were answered by the following paragraph in the editorial: “The center noted that steps taken by the Roosevelt administration to strengthen the middle class made the economic recovery that followed the Great Depression possible.” History shows quite the contrary. Even FDR’s Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau conceded otherwise. Testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee in May 1939, Sec. Morgenthau said, “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong … somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises … I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started … And an enormous debt to boot.” Further, unemployment never got below 9.9% before the U.S. entered World War II.