15 Statistics That Destroy Liberal Narratives

1) P_resident 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

> 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

And yet because they are embolden by the gay de Fuehrer they cause much chaos and dissension

Not so fast, please. We should be careful about using some of these statistics to try to bolster our positions.

For instance, #4 uses data over a 30 year period to “prove” that all groups have seen gains in income over the last 30 years. Lord, I would HOPE that they have, or this country really IS a huge failure. But what about over a shorter, more recent, time frame (one that has a more direct effect on the current work-force). What if they only looked at, say, 2000-2010 instead of 1980-2010? Would ALL income groups see similar percentage increases during THAT time period?

Also, #8. The reporter states: “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).” However, if the data from 40 years ago also included dorm-residing college students as living at home, (which it almost certainly did) then that phenomenon’s “inflation” of the numbers washes out and a direct comparison can be made.

There are other examples of statistical tricks in this article, but you get my drift.

Always remember, figures lie and liars figure - and that is true on both sides of the political aisle.

Several recently published studies have established that marijuana use interferes with brain development, which continues until about age 25. Thus, the effects of marijuana use are the most pronounced in the group most likely to experiment with it.

One of the documented effects of marijuana use by young people is that it precipitates psychotic/schizophrenic disorders. Psychosis is often linked to criminality. Schizophrenia, of course, can cause complete disability.

My sense is that as the casualties grow in the form of increased numbers of young people incapable of doing anything productive, this vast experiment with legalizing marijuana will end.

One of the documented effects of marijuana use by young people is that it precipitates psychotic/schizophrenic disorders.

No, all that's documented is a correlation - which is equally well explained by disorders precipitating pot use or (as some research suggests) a genetic factor increasing both the likelihood of pot use and the likelihood of disorders.

My sense is that as the casualties grow in the form of increased numbers of young people incapable of doing anything productive, this vast experiment with legalizing marijuana will end.

As pot use has grown over the past decades, schizophrenia has remained flat.

First of all, let me point out that I used the word "precipitates" and not "causes" for a reason, and that is because the causative effects of marijuana use on these disorders is still unclear. However, the evidence that it causes their manifestation is strong. This could mean that these disorders would happen anyway, but not normally manifest until later, in which case it could exacerbate their severity. Or it could mean that people in the early stages of those disorders tend to turn to marijuana use for whatever reason (the phenomenon often termed "self-medication").

MRI studies that show changes in brain structure hardly qualify as "correlation." Furthermore, that saying "correlation does not equal causation" is meant to inform those who see X and Y happen in close temporal proximity and automatically assume that Y is a result of X, when there is not necessarily a relation at all. OTOH, when you grasp that correlation does not always equal causation, it does not mean that you can automatically reject a causative relationship--because some correlations ARE a result of causation. When two observable variables show a strong correlation, and there is a mechanism by which X can cause Y, then correlation tells you to what extent X is involved in causing Y. Other relationships can also be analyzed through correlation--for instance, X and Y might both be related through some other variable or series of events.

There is a strong correlation between marijuana use and schizophrenia. There is also some evidence that marijuana actually causes psychotic disorder. That is, it is well established that marijuana causes transient psychotic episodes, but how much it might contribute to permanent psychosis is still under investigation.

I am well aware that those who have advocated for legalized marijuana love to spread the story that it is perfectly safe, and often compare it to alcohol (as if, somehow, the effects of alcohol have any bearing on the effects of marijuana). However, this vast experiment in legalization has inspired many researchers to conduct studies, so that where information was lacking before, it is now accumulating at a rapid rate. The often touted "safety" of marijuana is not supported by actual evidence, and more evidence is piling up against it all the time. www.pubmed.org, search term "marijuana", a lot of suggestions come up as to specific sub-topics.

This book is 16 years old, so some of the information is out of date, but still gives an idea of some of the research that has taken place: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK230716/

First of all, let me point out that I used the word "precipitates" and not "causes" for a reason, and that is because the causative effects of marijuana use on these disorders is still unclear.

So noted.

Or it could mean that people in the early stages of those disorders tend to turn to marijuana use for whatever reason (the phenomenon often termed "self-medication").

Indeed.

MRI studies that show changes in brain structure hardly qualify as "correlation."

Those studies did not show changes, since they were not longitudinal - they did not track users over time. Instead they simply compared the MRIs of users and non-users at single times.

When two observable variables show a strong correlation, and there is a mechanism by which X can cause Y, then correlation tells you to what extent X is involved in causing Y.

If there are multiple mechanisms by which X can cause Y, or Y cause X, or Z cause X and Y, then correlation does not favor any one mechanism over the others - nor over 'none of the above.'

There is a strong correlation between marijuana use and schizophrenia.

At some levels - on the other hand, while marijuana use rose in the USA over the past few decades there was no increase in schizophrenia.

There is also some evidence that marijuana actually causes psychotic disorder. That is, it is well established that marijuana causes transient psychotic episodes, but how much [or if at all - CF] it might contribute to permanent psychosis is still under investigation.

Their very names state the substantial difference between transient psychotic episodes and permanent psychosis - so it's a speculative leap from marijuana causing the former to marijuana causing the latter.

I am well aware that those who have advocated for legalized marijuana love to spread the story that it is perfectly safe,

I've never heard that said, and I've certainly never said it.

and often compare it to alcohol (as if, somehow, the effects of alcohol have any bearing on the effects of marijuana).

The differences have never been shown to be relevant to the legalization debate. You might as well say that the legal status of alcohol is irrelevant to the legal status of marijuana because alcohol is a liquid and marijuana is not.

This book is 16 years old, so some of the information is out of date, but still gives an idea of some of the research that has taken place: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK230716/

An excellent reference - here's what it says about psychological harms: "A major question remains as to whether marijuana can produce lasting mood disorders or psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia." "The association between marijuana and schizophrenia is not well understood."

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