To its limited credit, the White House acknowledged the next day that there was no such FBI statistic. But it's doubtful the retraction ever caught up with the initial sound bite, which also exaggerated the increase in the number of rapes. Murray and his colleagues have had their successes. For example, they won the White House retraction on violent crime against women. But he often feels like a man standing in the middle of a river of sewage, trying to reverse the flow with a canoe paddle.
Some people seem to enjoy the thought that some catastrophe or another is right around the corner.
The effects of Chicken Little-ism can be quite costly. Happily, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has not yet undertaken a massive program of retraining and new procedures to protect left-handers from early death in the workplace. For most of those who spread phony statistics or make wildly inaccurate predictions about the probable effects of public policy, there is no down side. This idea, however, raises the question of with whom the bond would be posted and to whom it would be forfeited. Certainly the government couldn't do this, because it is such a major source of bunkum itself.