New York congressional candidate and socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does not believe there is an “upper middle class” in American any longer, a point even liberal news networks contest.
Ocasio-Cortez has made some fairly eyebrow raising statements on the economy in America during her meteoric rise to stardom in the Democratic party. Ocasio-Cortez has claimed that unemployment is low because people are working “two jobs” and that people are working “70 or 80 hours a week.” These claims have been rated “pants on fire” by fact checkers.
Ocasio-Cortez is continuing the habit of claiming economically dubious data in public. In a recent interview, Ocasio-Cortez was asked about how rank-in-file Democrats are hesitant about the party embrace of socialism. On the podcast ‘Pod Save America’ Ocasio-Cortez was asked about Dems who think “We should not go down this path” to further socialism, “This is a recipe for failure.”
Ocasio-Cortez launched a broadside against the older Democratic establishment saying, “We don’t have a party that has been investing in their future,” noting that the average age of a congressional Democrat is 65. Ocasio-Cortez lamented that national dems are too busy “working on their own reelection” to make an “investment” in future party leadership. She said that national Democrats are stuck in “90’s politics.”
“They were campaigning most when we had more of an American middle class,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “This upper middle class is probably more moderate but that upper middle class does not exist anymore in America.”
Ocasio-Cortez blames de-regulation of Wall Street and rising income inequality for destroying the upper middle class.
The only problem is that the middle class is actually growing , according to CNN.
Economists at American Enterprise Institute have found that the upper middle class is changing. In fact it is growing. All while the number of people in American who are classified as “poor” is shrinking.
Yes, the America middle class is disappearing. At least as defined by the above WSJ chart. 38% of US families were middle class in 1979 vs. 32% in 2014.
But where did that 7% (6.8 percentage points to be exact) go? Well, of the five income groups (poor, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class, and rich) displayed, the bottom three got smaller, the top two bigger.
The poor shrank by 4.5 percentage points, the lower middle class by 6.8, the middle class also by 6.8% But the upper middle class got a lot bigger, expanding by 16.4 points, and the rich by 1.8 points.
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