Greetings, this is podcast number 83 of Blast the Right, Jack Clark from TheRationalRatical.com

Today we're going to have installment two of our series Bill O'Reilly misleads his audience,

lying or just plain ignorant. The subject is poverty. Let's get right into it.

My sources are McClanche news papers OECD.ORG Newsmax.com Common Dreams.ORG

RainEquote.com, FairEconomy.ORG, The New York Times, The British News Paper, The Independent, and FoxNews.com

O'Reilly recently had as a guest Reverend Fred Candler of the Methodist Federation for Social Action.

Reverend Candler was objecting to plans to place George W. Bush's presidential library at Southern Methodist University.

Candler said one of the reasons was that Bush's economic policies violate Methodist social teachings on poverty. O'Reilly challenged him.

Poverty is very low in the United States. It stands at below 10%, even those who are poor have the basic staples of life.

Most of them, unless they're addicted or mentally ill. What's the problem with the president's economic policies which have really been very successful, particularly after 9-11?

Amazing how and less than 50 words O'Reilly compacts so much misinformation. An unsuspecting member of O'Reilly's audience would come away from this believing that poverty in the United States is under 10% that we have a very low poverty rate and that Bush's economic policies have been very successful in this area.

Let's go through these one by one. First and most simply, the poverty rate in the United States is not below 10%, it's 12.6%.

Since each percentage point represents 3 million people, O'Reilly understates the number of people in poverty by nearly 8 million.

Don't let O'Reilly slide by thinking, oh, he probably got mixed up with another year. No, he didn't.

Poverty in the United States has never been under 10% since they started measuring.

A show of O'Reilly size has, I'm sure, one or more full-time researchers. For O'Reilly to make such an era is either gross incompetence or deliberate misrepresentation.

Beyond the 10% era is O'Reilly's broader claim that Bush's economic policies, quote, have really been very successful, close quote, in this area.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Keep in mind that the statistics I'm about to give are the Bush administration's own figures from the Census Bureau.

The cold heart fact is that every year that George Bush has been in office, both the number of people in poverty and the percentage of Americans living in poverty has increased.

Oh yeah, one year they stayed the same. Good job, George.

When Bush took office, the poverty rate was 11.3%, now as we noted before, it's 12.6%. Under George Bush's rule, millions of additional Americans have fallen into poverty.

A total of nearly 37 million Americans live in poverty as I speak these words, 12.6% of the population.

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