Ten Democratic presidential contenders vied for advantage Tuesday night in the second round of the party’s 2020 campaign debates.
A look at some of their statements in Detroit and how they compare with the facts.
BERNIE SANDERS, senator from Vermont: “49 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent.”
THE FACTS: That is probably exaggerated. The figure comes from a short paper by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and leading researcher on inequality, and doesn’t include the value of fringe benefits, such as health insurance, or the effects of taxes and government benefit programs such as Social Security.
But Saez and another Berkeley economist, Gabriel Zucman , have recently compiled a broader data set that does include those items and finds the top 1% has captured roughly 25% of the income growth since the recession ended. That’s certainly a lot lower but still a substantial share. Income inequality has sharply increased in the past four decades, but since the recession, data from the Congressional Budget Office shows that it has actually narrowed slightly.
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TIM RYAN, U.S. representative from Ohio: “The economic system that used to create 30, 40, 50 an hour jobs that you could have a good, solid, middle-class living now forces us to have two or three jobs just to get by.”
THE FACTS: Most Americans, by far, only work one job, and the numbers who juggle more than one have declined over a quarter century.
In the mid-1990s, the percentage of workers holding multiple jobs peaked at 6.5%. The rate dropped significantly, even during the Great Recession, and has been hovering for a nearly a decade at about 5% or a little lower. In the latest monthly figures, from June, 5.2% of workers were holding more than one job.
Hispanic and Asian workers are consistently less likely than white and black workers to be holding multiple jobs. Women are more likely to be doing so than men.
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