Everyone may be entitled to their opinions but not to their own facts. The letter “The ‘Better off than four years ago?’ test works against Biden“ (June 30) is a prime example.
For instance, the letter writer claims that Americans have been victimized by murder and other violent crimes due to Biden’s policies. But Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman points out in The New York Times that the data tell a very different story: a “decline in the violent crime rate is in fact a huge Biden-era success story. And the president probably deserves some credit for that success — among other things, the American Rescue Plan included a lot of aid to state and local governments, which may have encouraged additional spending on law enforcement. But no matter how you cut it, crime should be considered one of Biden’s strengths, not a weak point.”
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Moreover, a new study by the right-leaning Cato Institute found that in Texas undocumented immigrants were less likely to be convicted of murder than the native-born. (The numbers were even lower for legal immigrants.)
But Trump, no fan of any inconvenient reality, continues to exploit a well-documented anomaly, the persistent gross overestimation of the crime rate in the country. Polls constantly overestimate the actual crime rate, and by a considerable amount.
Thomas W Allen
Chesterfield
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