How one wildly inaccurate chart epitomizes conservative intellectual dishonesty.

By now, it’s easy to be cynical about the Internet’s ability to degrade rational argument. After all, one can only read so many birther blogs without starting to go numb. Still, once in a while, the foggy chaos that is the online world parts, and we catch a glimpse of how the realm’s worst ideas form, adapt to the environment, and, despite their utter lack of fitness anywhere else (well, with the popular exceptions of AM radio and Fox News), thrive in cyberspace.

Perhaps the best recent example is a chart that has been racing around the conservative blogosphere for the last few months. According to its findings, a one-parent family with two children making $14,500 a year has more disposable income than an identical family making $60,000 a year; a family making just $3,625 a year doesn’t quite do as well as the one making $60,000, but it comes close. Those who publish the chart claim it shows that it pays to be poor in America because of government largesse, courtesy of Obama and the Democrats, that the middle class doesn’t have access to.

Problem is, the chart is full of errors. I traced it back to the man who made it, a newspaper publisher in Mississippi, and found that the math, methodology, and logic he used to generate the chart, as well as an op-ed he wrote to accompany it, are wholly unsound. To make matters worse, despite the chart’s cringe-worthy flaws, very few outlets on the Internet, from small-scope blogs to a handful of forums hosted by major national publications, bothered to fact-check it. The story of the chart is a distressing new Exhibit A for those who argue that, practically speaking, there’s no longer any such thing as objective reality in the digital age.

The sentiment that the poor are pampered by “big government” and simply mooch off the system isn’t new. But it took on a heightened resonance recently, as Congress sought to hammer out an agreement on the extension of unemployment benefits—and conservatives jumped at the chance to argue against them. “The truth is the unemployed will spend as little of that money as they possibly can,” Republican Representative John Shadegg of Arizona said on MSNBC. “I’m opposed to giving people money for doing nothing,” Newt Gingrich said in a speech.

Wyatt Emmerich was among those concerned that, with government benefits propping them up, poor people might not have an incentive to work. So the Harvard graduate, who was born into a newspaper-publishing business in Greenwood, Mississippi, and now runs a paper of his own, spent some time this fall playing around with online calculators that, he told me, allow people to determine, by plugging in family size and income, how much in government benefits they are eligible for. Wyatt then published the results he’d found in his newspaper, the Northside Sun. In an October 14 column headlined, “WITH WELFARE IT MAKES SENSE TO WORK LESS,” Wyatt spun out his theory about unemployment and the poor: