Elizabeth Warren, faux Native American, is a master manipulator of her biography. Now news comes that just prior to announcing her candidacy for the Senate, she jettisoned her BMW for a Ford hybrid in order to improve her image as a plebeian, rather than an elitist.
This follows the revelation that she lied about her heritage, claiming she was part Cherokee. Professor Todd Zywicki has pointed out that Warren’s lying goes back much farther than that; in her work on medical bankruptcy and her book “The Two Income Trap,” which launched her to fame, she lied with her data, claiming that middle-class families were hit harder by factors other than taxes. She surmised that household expenses were increased by mortgages by 76 percent; cars, 52 percent; health insurance, 74 percent; and taxes, 25 percent. The trick was that for all other factors except taxes, she spoke in terms of increased dollars; for taxes, she changed the metric to percentage of income. If she had used the standard of increased dollars for taxes, they actually increased 140 percent, not the 25 percent she claimed.
And dealing with medical expenses in bankruptcy? Here’s Zywicki on that:
“Consider Ms. Warren’s much-ballyhooed study on the alleged link among health problems, medical expenses and personal bankruptcy filings. Published in the February 2005 issue of Health Affairs, the report was timed to head off bipartisan bankruptcy legislation that was enacted later that year. Ms. Warren and her co-authors claimed that ‘at least’ 46% of personal bankruptcy filings in 2001 (the year from they collected the data) were the result of ‘medical causes,’ and that this represented a 23-fold increase over 20 years.”
Both conclusions are extremely suspect. First, the study provided an implausibly broad definition of ‘medical bankruptcy’–including any filer who reported uncontrolled gambling, drug or alcohol addiction, or the birth or adoption of a child.
The claim of a 23-fold increase in medical bankruptcies was based on a comparison of their 2001 data with Ms. Warren’s research in a 1981 study–which appears to count only those who self-reported as having filed bankruptcy for medical reasons. This is a completely different and much narrower definition of ‘medical bankruptcy’ than the one she used 20 years later, and obviously inflates the increase.”
Elizabeth really belongs in the BMW, not the Ford Hybrid. Her only connection to middle class families is in exploiting them for her own political gain.
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