I am always happy to give credit to those who acknowledge their mistakes. While David Brooks has more opportunity than most people, he deserves credit for acknowledging one of the mistakes in his "everything is great" column last week. As pointed out in BTP, Brooks claimed that earnings for the working poor had risen by 80 percent since 1991. In fact, this claim only applied to families with children, there were no gains in earnings for low-income families without children. Brooks acknowleged this error in his column this morning, although he did not also point out that earnings for these families have fallen by 20 percent since 2001, or that the vast majority of the gains in earnings were offset by a loss in benefits. Nor did he acknowledge any of the other misleading statements in that column, but it's a start.
--Dean Baker
