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What part of this is a fact? I'd argue this is literally the opposite of a fact - it's a model and a prediction based on it. Those are things that may be based

• haberman 9y ago
  Nearly every statistical fact anyone ever cites does exactly the same thing. When a fact says something like "13% of people are poor," they don't investigate every single person and determine whether they are poor. They create what is intended to be a representative sample, then they create a model that extrapolates the sample set to the entire population. They predict that their sample is representative and that a measure of the whole population would match the sample. The only difference here is that there's no "poverty election day" where the entire population goes to register their poverty level. So we never actually get to see if the prediction was correct!
  • metasean 9y ago
    There's a day every decade where the U.S. Census does their best to get an accurate count of every human in the U.S. [0] Combine that with the data from the correspondinc Apr 15th, and we should have something pretty close to a "poverty election day". [0]: cell phone and spotty network made it too hard to look up a good source - please feel free to add them if you can)