Is This the World's Most Dishonest Headline?

Cato Institute Senior Fellow, Dan Mitchell, excoriates the EU Observer for what might be the most dishonest headline published in some time. The Observer headlines its story “German poverty at record high despite growth.” Dan says the problem with the headline isn’t just sloppiness, but that it’s a reflection of an “ongoing statist campaign to redefine poverty to mean unequal distribution of income.” Dan continues:

I’m not joking. For instance, the bureaucrats at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development actually put out a study claiming that there was more poverty in the United States than in nations such as Greece, Portugal, and Turkey.

How could they make such a preposterous claim? Easy, the OECD bureaucrats didn’t measure poverty. Instead, they concocted a measure of the degree to which various countries are close to the left-wing dream of equal incomes.

Dan then strikes at the heart of the statists’ motivations.

To put this all in context, the left isn’t merely motivated by a desire to exaggerate and misstate poverty. That simply the means to an end.

What they want is more redistribution and higher tax rates. The OECD openly admitted that was the goal in another report. Much as all the fixation about inequality in America is simply a tool to advocate bigger government.