It is increasingly common for politicians to mouth statistical absurdities say observers, with the most common errors involving demographic data warped to reflect political biases.

For instance:

• President Clinton reportedly stated at a recent commencement address in California that "there will be no majority race in America" in 50 years -- but the U.S. Census Bureau says 78.4 percent of the population then will be white.
• Newsweek magazine misrepresented the Hudson Institute's 1987 "Workforce 2000," as claiming that "only 15 percent of people entering the workforce from 1985 to 2000 will be white men."

The Hudson study actually said that most white males coming into the labor force would replace retiring white males, while the rest would account for 15 percent of labor force growth.

• During the 1988 presidential debates, NBC's Tom Brokaw asked Dan Quayle about "the 65 million American children who live with their families in poverty" -- a figure approximately twice as high as the total number of Americans in poverty, and marginally higher than the total number of children in the U.S.

• In a 1995 newspaper column, Hillary Clinton stated that "three out of four working women have school age children" -- missing by a huge margin the correct figure of two out of five.

Finally, two years ago the federal Glass Ceiling Commission stated that companies with good records in promoting minorities and women had a stock market performance "2.4 times higher" than companies with poor records -- a figure researchers concluded might have been 2.4 percent higher, if that.

Source: Dan Seligman, "Lies, Damned Lies and Politically Motivated Statistics," Forbes, July 28, 1997.