Homeless in hot tubs; want to wipe out poverty? Give a conservative a calculator.

• Author: DeParle, Jason

Kitty Kelley needn't fear the competition, a little-known paperback has just hit the Washington market with a dramatic real-life story. The 1991 Green Book* is a 1,641-page compendium of social welfare statistics put together by staff members of the House Ways and Means Committee-the 11th annual volume, and the largest to date. In the past, the book was of interest mainly to a select group of squinchy-eyed policy analysts who combed its bar charts and shrunken type looking for revelations. What's interesting about this year's volume is that it has drawn a counterattack from several conservatives in Congress, who first tried to stop the book's publication and then sent out mock warning labels calling the book "hazardous to economic health."

Led by Rep. Richard Anney, a Texas Republican with a doctorate in economics, they argue that it's a cooked book-a collection of phony statistics ginned up by Democratic staff members to paint a misleading portrait of inequality in America and justify the twin goals of Big government and High Taxes. With as many charts and graphs as the Green Book contains, it's not hard to find a statistical nit to pick. But what's finally striking about the volume is how solid a case it makes for the old liberal concerns about equality and opportunity. Leave aside for a moment the question of liberal solutions-what the book does is show that the nation has a lot of work left to do to make the words "and justice for all" anything more than a vacant slogan. Read the Green Book as a novel and you have Les Miserables a story of the rich growing richer and the poor succumbing to all manner of woes.

While the Green Book covers an endless number of topics-from food stamps to homelessness, Medicare to child care-what angers its critics are the tables that show increasing inequality in the distribution of American income. This is no accident. Democrats played the "fairness issue" with great success during last fall's budget debates, scuttling Republican proposals by portraying them as sop-the-poor measures. And the Ways and Means aide who churned out those analyses during the budget debate, Wendell Primus, happens to be the Green Book's primary author. Calling the book a "database for demagogues," Rep. Armey says that it is the foundation "for the whole fairness debate that the left wing of American politics tries to use." What's more, as university professors increasingly consult it as a reference, he says, its "Marxist, class-conflict" perspective will filter down to American youth and build "a lot of misinformation into our young people's understanding of their own nation."

Along with Republican Senators William Roth and Connie Mack, Armey has sent out a "Green Book Correction Quiz," designed to show the flaws in the Democratic stats. Four of the six items he cites are merely typos, hardly surprising in a volume this large. And even though Armey argues that all the seemingly innocent mistakes "shoot to the Left," two of the four don't exaggerate inequality, they understate...