Opinion | Facts are stubborn things. So are falsehoods about U.S. poverty.

What our second president did not note, or at least anticipate, was that falsehoods can be just as stubborn, or more so, than the facts that refute them. In our day, falsehoods’ level of obstinacy appears to be rising fast. Consider the example of election results, numerical tabulations that, though counted and recounted, verified and reverified, are still disbelieved by millions. The encouragement to reject established facts has done terrible damage to public unity — and nurtured the instinct to disbelieve other objectively demonstrated facts.

Just as powerfully refuted, yet every bit as immune to plain factual evidence, are various reflex responses in the catechism of today’s political left. Aren’t more than 12 percent of Americans living in poverty? Isn’t income wildly unequal in the country and becoming more so? Aren’t U.S. living standards lower and less equal than those in other developed countries?

The answers, every bit as documented as the last election’s results, are no, no and no. The difference is that our political “narratives,” and those shaping them, routinely label the election denials as false or even “lies,” but ignorantly (I’m making the charitable assumption here) and uncritically parrot these nostrums, though they’ve been disproved continuously over many years.

The latest, and most comprehensive, demolition of these shibboleths comes from the doubly credible former senator Phil Gramm, who before public life was a professor of economics. From both careers, Gramm is vastly more knowledgeable and familiar with the facts about poverty and income distribution than most national legislators, let alone those who inform, and misinform, the public about those topics.

In “The Myth of American Inequality,” Gramm and his two co-authors – Robert Ekelund and John Early, both deeply experienced economic scholars – assemble an overwhelming sledgehammer of facts to establish that we overstate true poverty by a factor of 5 or more. A corollary is that the “Gini coefficients” and other measures of inequality are grossly distorted in the official published numbers.

The primary culprit is the Census Bureau and its archaic and truly astonishing refusal to take account of the hundreds of billions of dollars the government takes in taxes (and borrows) from middle- and upper-income citizens and transfers to those at lower-income levels. Other methodological distortions — such as the bureau’s ignoring of fringe benefits and its overstatement of inflation, practices rejected by a broad consensus of statisticians — compound the inaccuracy.

The typical household in the census’s bottom quintile spends twice as much as the income the bureau counts. These household members live in more space than middle-class Europeans, and own appliances unknown to the wealthy of a generation ago. A caring society makes this possible by transferring an average of more than $45,000 per year (2017 data) to each such household, lifting its true living standard to a level almost identical to that of the two quintiles above it.

As the authors summarize, “Government takes and redistributes enough resources to elevate the average bottom quintile household into the American middle class.”

It has been said over the years that “We made war on poverty, and poverty won.” No, it didn’t, not if we mean, as most people do, material deprivation. What remains of that in the U.S. population, 2.5 percent by the authors’ calculation, is surely a low in human history. If one means the poverty of spirit that can come with chronic dependency and the lack of active, productive purpose, we haven’t won, but that’s a different column.

We should keep debating the right means and right amounts of assistance to send from some Americans to others. But constantly misrepresenting and understating what we do for each other, and the results achieved, disrespects the taxpayers who fund this assistance, and fosters misimpressions as societally poisonous as other political assertions now routinely labeled as untrue.

Our commitment to lift our fellow citizens out of poverty should be a matter of national pride. It cannot be if those whose professional responsibility is, or at least once was, the unearthing and sharing of objective truth, instead propagate its opposite.

Gramm and his co-authors’ book begins with a maxim often attributed to Mark Twain, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Today too many of us “know” things about our economic well-being that ain’t so. Facts might still be stubborn, but unfortunately so are falsehoods.