OPINION:
Nineteenth-century humorist Mark Twain once observed that “figures don’t lie, but liars figure.”
This has nowhere been more evident than in the rehearsed statements from Vice President Kamala Harris’ during her debate with former President Donald Trump during the ABC News debate.
President Biden’s administration has exhibited a penchant for doing just that, enabling the president and Ms. Harris to claim statistical bragging rights for their “success” in battling everything from inflation to violent crime. Their minions have even rejiggered the way agencies gather and report statistics to give them numbers and statistics they and those who speak for them can use to make their case.
The fact that the figures on which they rely have little, if anything, to do with the everyday reality of the world in which most Americans live doesn’t seem to bother them. Until reality intruded, the administration spokesmen kept assuring Americans that they had the Southern border under control and that concerns about an immigration problem were the result of Republican-inspired misinformation, Trump demagoguery and racism. It wasn’t until illegals began showing up almost everywhere outside Texas and Arizona border towns that reality intruded. The White House admitted there might be a problem, blamed it on Mr. Trump and assigned Ms. Harris to handle it.
The same has been true of inflation. At first, we were assured by administration officials like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin and outside experts like Paul Krugman that no one needed worry about inflation, then told it would be mild and temporary, then scolded for thinking the problem was and is worse than it really is because of Republican hyperbole. None of this jibed with what Americans were experiencing at the gas pump, the grocery store and just about everywhere else, eventually forcing the White House to acknowledge the problem but soothingly promising that inflation was “coming down” so folks should just stop worrying … unless they are foolish enough to elect a Republican this fall as that would reignite a problem that Mr. Biden had, after all, inherited from the despicable Mr. Trump.
When Mr. Biden delivered his last State of the Union message, he described a quasi-utopian world of his making that most of those listening found difficult, if not impossible, to recognize. The narrative was picked up by his supporters in the media, who applauded his accomplishments as president. After all, he had to spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning up the mess handed to him by Mr. Trump and argued that anyone who disagreed with his and their assessment had been taken in by lying MAGA Republicans.
Among the problems the Biden/Harris administration “solved” is the wave of murder and mayhem that has swept the country in recent years. It is claimed that the surge in violent crime that worries most Americans is a myth fueled by misinformation from Mr. Trump and his allies in the right-wing media. Republicans ignore the facts revealing that we supposedly live in a safer nation today as murder and violent crime rates are dropping like a rock thanks to his administration’s anti-crime initiatives.
The problem is that the statistics the president cites result not from any real reduction in violent crime but from cooking the books aided by the inability of undermanned law enforcement agencies to apprehend violent criminals and the willingness of woke prosecutors to bargain violent crimes down to misdemeanors while redefining crime itself combined with an increasing unwillingness of victims who know it will do no good to even report them.
John Lott of the Crime Research Center points out that the government maintains two crime measures. The first is the Uniform Crime Reporting program, which is based on crimes reported to the police and forwarded to the FBI. How these reports are filed and reported was altered in 2020 and several major cities like Los Angeles and New York don’t provide the data and are therefore not included in the reports. It is these reports, which have increasingly underreported what’s actually going on, that allowed Ms. Harris to make such claims during the debate.
The more accurate measure comes from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, which measures reported and unreported crime. The data from this survey suggests that something like 42% of the crime that people fear is ever reported and that since 2022, the situation that appears to be getting better may actually be getting worse.
The citizens of Chicago, with 1700 fewer police than in 2019 and woke prosecutors who cannot bring themselves to charge criminals, have witnessed a 50% drop in arrests for violent crime as the streets are more dangerous than ever. Fewer arrests mean a safer city, according to the data the president relies upon. Chicagoans might differ.
In New York City, when violent crime hit the subway system, that city’s mayor dismissed the public fear of violence, arguing that if the media didn’t report it, it wouldn’t be a problem.
This reminds me of the twentieth-century comedian Groucho Marx’s brother Chico, who, when caught in bed with another woman, asked his wife, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”
That’s what President Biden and Vice President Harris are asking of the American people, but as post-debate polls are demonstrating, they may be asking too much.
• David Keene is editor-at-large at The Washington Times.
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