It’s not news that David Brooks is a pretentious contemptible ass, that he plays fast and loose with facts and at times even ignores them completely.  He was in fine form today with “The Nature of Poverty”.   (It reminded me of his post-earthquake Haiti column from 2010.)   When it comes to substance, his columns are without merit but they do have modest entertainment value.  Spotting the BS in them is a bit like playing Minesweeper or Tetris.  It keeps you entertained for a few minutes while you’re procrastinating.  Anyhow, one sentence in his column today caught my attention in particular:

As Robert Samuelson of The Washington Post has pointed out, in 2013 the federal government spent nearly $14,000 per poor person.

And I think to myself, “Ya know, that sounds like a stretch.”  Low and behold Dean Baker had already called bullshit.   From “David Brooks and the Federal Government’s $14,000 Per Year Per Poor Person”:

Of course if NYT columnists were expected to be accurate when they talked about government programs, Brooks would have been forced to tell readers that around 40 percent of these payments are Medicaid payments that go directly to doctors and other health care providers. We pay twice as much per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries, with little to show in the way of outcomes. We can think of these high health care costs as a generous payment to the poor, but what this actually means is that every time David Brooks’ cardiologist neighbor raises his fees, David Brooks will complain about how we are being too generous to the poor.

The other point that an honest columnist would be forced to make is that the vast majority of these payments do not go to people who are below the poverty line and therefore don’t count in the denominator for his “poor person” calculation. The cutoff for Medicaid is well above the poverty level in most states. The same is true for food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and most of the other programs that make up Brooks’ $14,000 per person figure. In other words, he has taken the spending that goes to a much larger population and divided it by the number of people who are classified as poor.

If Brooks actually wants to tell readers what we spend on poor people, it’s not hard to find the data. The average family of three on TANF gets less than $500 a month.  The average food stamp benefit is $133 per person. If low income people are working, they can get around $5,000 a year from the EITC for a single person with two children at the poverty level. (They would get less at lower income levels.)

In addition to Baker, driftglass is also all over him, The Church of Lyin’tology, Ctd.   (Driftglass is excellent.  He’s one of my daily reads.)

UPDATE 5/2/2015:  Without naming names Paul Krugman also calls bullshit on Brooks.

UPDATE #2 5/2/2015:  Annie Lowery in New York Magazine with some additional fact checking, David Brooks Is Not Buying Your Excuses, Poor People.