The Magic Potion

New York Times editorial "The Magic Potion" (March 29th, 2010) appears to have no factual basis for its claim that poverty and homelessness are rising. Corrections conjectures they are falling, (we lack current data).

Poverty and homelessness are increasing.

Corrections has been unable to discover either current data or news articles on poverty or homelessness in 1Q 2010 (today being the second to last day, this is reasonable). We conjecture that Bob Herbert has made this current trend up, and look forward to posting data on this (just as we hope to do for the IHRSA , which has yet to post new data). We will use HUD's definition of homelessness and the census's definition of poverty, absent a change in how government publishes its statistics. We posit that both will be falling over first quarter 2010, at which Bob Herbert is writing at the tail end.

There is reason to believe we are correct. We graphically display GDP below up to and including the fourth quarter of 2009 (click to enlarge). We conjecture it will continue in much this trend. We will update this figure, along with homelessness and poverty statistics, when available.