McIlheran Watch: Wrong again, Pat

I felt kind of bad about leaving the McIlheran Watch duties to Robola last week--although he did an excellent job!--but it is just further evidence of my being buried under work of late.

And late I am again, just now getting McIlheran's most recent pile of crap:

Polls and pundits are in that '70s groove, there being a decreasingly popular war on, and one of the rehabbed ideas is that the disadvantaged are doing more than their share of the fighting.

Only it may be wrong. A new study this month from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, compared enlistments in 1999 and 2003.

I'm going to interrupt here to point out two obvious things: One, McIlheran's citing the Heritage Foundation, and while he acknowledges Heritage's conservative bent, what he doesn't tell you is that the Heritage Foundation believes the anti-war movement is anti-American. In other words, take anything Heritage says about the military and the war with a greater-than-usual helping of salt. Two, Hertiage's data go through 2003, which, for those of you not paying attention, is before the war started to go so badly, and before recruitment levels started plummeting. So the trends Heritage identifies from two years ago may not match up with reality today (more on that in a minute). Now more from McIlheran:

Labor economist Tim Kane found that not only did enlistees' economic background and education match the country's before 9-11, they were more likely from better-off neighborhoods and possessed more education after it.

If you rank enlistees' neighborhoods by income, the poorest and richest 20% were home to fewer recruits than you'd expect in 1999. By 2003, it was the lowest two tiers that were underrepresented, while wealthier neighborhoods were overrepresented.

While three-quarters of Americans ages 18 to 24 have at least a high school diploma, 98% of recruits do.

Recruits are slightly more likely to come from rural areas, unsurprising in that rural America has been losing its young for decades to places with better job options and has traditionally been more supportive of the military. [. . .] But rural recruits aren't subbing for suburbanites. Measuring by ZIP codes, Kane found that it's only the most urban category that is home to fewer recruits than expected. [. . .]

Similarly, when Kane bracketed neighborhoods by income, every bracket with a household income of $40,000 or above sent proportionately more recruits in 2003 than it did in 1999. Every lower bracket sent fewer.

Now, I don't have the data Kane worked from, and even if I did, I'm not an economist and couldn't verify whether that analysis of information from two years ago is legit or not.

However, I know how to Google. From the Washington Post earlier this month:

As sustained combat in Iraq makes it harder than ever to fill the ranks of the all-volunteer force, newly released Pentagon demographic data show that the military is leaning heavily for recruits on economically depressed, rural areas where youths' need for jobs may outweigh the risks of going to war. [. . .]

Many of today's recruits are financially strapped, with nearly half coming from lower-middle-class to poor households, according to new Pentagon data based on Zip codes and census estimates of mean household income. Nearly two-thirds of Army recruits in 2004 came from counties in which median household income is below the U.S. median.

Such patterns are pronounced in such counties as Martinsville, Va., that supply the greatest number of enlistees in proportion to their youth populations. All of the Army's top 20 counties for recruiting had lower-than-national median incomes, 12 had higher poverty rates, and 16 were non-metropolitan, according to the National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group that analyzed 2004 recruiting data by Zip code.

I doubt that McIlheran reads the WaPo every day, so it wouldn't be a surprise that he missed this article, which ran a couple of weeks before he wrote his column. What is surprising is that McIlheran also cites the National Priorities Project, but in support of his own thesis that Iraq is "not a poor man's war." What does NPP actually say? For one, median income for households sending kids to the military in 2005 was $43,052, more than $1000 below the US median income of $44,389. While the overall poverty rate of military households in 2005 is comparable, the child poverty rate in military households is almost a full percent higher.

McIlheran cites NPP to make a point about the Milwaukee area. "Figures from the anti-war National Priorities Project tell a similar tale," he writes. "The rate at which high schoolers enlist varies, but not by school poverty. Whitefish Bay and Watertown rates in 2004 were similar--triple the rate of Shorewood and North Division." He should look at all of Wisconsin, though; NPP shows that 13 of our top 15 counties for recruits had below-average household income (Dodge and Washington being the exceptions).

Even in Wisconsin, this is a poor man's war now.