It’s amazing how much government tweaks the truth. It doesn’t out and out lie. It simply fits the truth it wants to tell to the facts it creates to prove that truth. Consider the first-of-its-kind study by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on chronic homelessness in America. By now, you’ve seen the headlines: 15% drop in this type of homelessness since last year. A “chronically homeless” person, as defined by HUD, is someone who is disabled and homeless for at least a year or homeless four times in a period of three years.

It’s great news. If it’s true. Which it may not be. At least not if you examine how HUD came up with this statistic ...

According to Newsday, the trick is in the changes that HUD made to how it counts the homeless. Instead of the old method of letting the local counters determine if someone is homeless, HUD required that each homeless person be interviewed before being added to the list. Any homeless person who declined to be interviewed was not counted. Of course any homeless person not in the social service network also didn’t end up in the tally.

HUD of course is denying that it placed this restriction on those who were doing the compiling of the data. A spokesperson for the agency said: “We really believe these numbers.”

He may as well believe in Santa Claus.

The chronically homeless are not an easy population to track. Many don’t want to be found or don’t end up in social services. There’s probably no way to really get an accurate count of the chronically homeless. Or any homeless group in the country.

Even if the study were accurate, there’s another problem: It only looks at a small percentage of the overall homeless population in America.

What about the people who are not chronically homeless? What about those couch surfing? What about families and individuals living in cars and vans? Los Angeles, for example, has a huge population of these folks. What about people piled into houses and apartments out of necessity and not because they want to be living together?

What about those who are victims of foreclosures?

These are all good questions that the HUD study doesn’t tackle. By limiting its scope to a small portion of the homeless population, it allows the government to paint a picture that is far rosier than it really is. It gives people a false sense of security. They actually start to believe that things are improving when they’re not.

Since future funding will be based on reports such as this one, it could mean cuts to how much the government spends to tackle homelessness, chronic or otherwise.

That would be not be good news.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical southern Italian atheist queer writer and activist with a website: www.avicollimecca.com