Judd Gregg (R-NH) requested that the Congressional Budget Office prepare a study measuring how low-income households with children have fared from 1991 to 2005. CBO dutifully complied, and found that low-income households with children have seen their income rise 35% over this period. The result is trumpeted in a lead editorial in today's Wall Street Journal. The poor get richer! shouts the Journal. There are the predictable sneers at John Edwards for his insistent belief that there are poor people in the United States, and demands that the "class envy lobby" accept "this dose of economic reality." But wait. Why fifteen years? Well, it is a nice, round number. But fifteen years (from the last year where data) is available is 1991. That was a recession year, when incomes for this group collapsed. So the CBO study that Gregg demanded measures the change from a recession year to a boom year. Incomes for the poor -- or anybody -- always rise over the course of a business cycle. The measurement Gregg demanded is simply useless. If you look closely at the study, you find that all the low-income growth occurred in the 1990s -- more than all, in fact. It peaked in 2000, and has fallen since. One table in the study shows that low-income households with children had their income drop more than 10% from 2000 to 2005. You could take that point and argue that the Bush administration has made the poor poorer. That wouldn't be a fair argument-- Bush didn't cause the 2001 recession -- but it would be much fairer than the point Gregg and the Journal are making. The interesting question is whether, by the time the current business cycle hits its peak, incomes for people at the bottom will recover to where they were at the peak of the last business cycle. As of 2005 they still haven't caught up. --Jonathan Chait