Annie Jacobson Tracks Down $7 a Day Statistic/ Finds Wacky Data

60 million Americans living on less than $7 a day

and tracks it back to the original source. She found the claim in, where else?, an LAT editorial written by Lisa Richardson and edited by Jim Newton.

Newton claims Richardson was responsible, and she didn’t call Jacobson back. The Times linked to a pretty dubious source, blogger William Shanley–it’s also at the ever reliable World Socialist Web Site. Through some actual research, Jacobson finds that the source wasn’t Census data, as reported along the way, but rather IRS data as interpreted by the NY Times and reported