Nowadays, thanks to the Internet and the abundance of hawk-eyed journalists and economists, it takes only days to debunk the dishonest, slanted "research" of Koch-funded think tanks like the Cato Institute, that attempted to prove that welfare pays better than a job.
Rick Ungar of Forbes summarizes what's wrong with the Cato "study":
Cato has rigged the result by taking only the most highly paid recipients of welfare (women with two children) as their basis for comparison, and then proceeds to pretend that all of these recipients receive benefits from each and every one of the eight programs included while completely omitting those on welfare who receive dramatically less. Then, for extra measure, the study falsely pretends that working families receive absolutely no welfare benefits whatsoever in order to make minimum wage earners look like their income is lower than a welfare recipients’ take.
Ungar concludes thusly:
If the problem is real—and I acknowledge that, to some extent, it is—you ought to be able to provide real data to get to your proposed solutions. When an organization like Cato is forced to offer up one of the most bogus studies I can recall as the means in which to make a point, rest assured that reasonable, thinking Americans will be left to conclude that the conservative side of this argument offers no real solutions—only false propaganda—and that will benefit exactly nobody.
By Rick Ungar
September 3, 2013 | Forbes
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