You may loathe President Trump on a personal level, but there’s no question that his economy is benefiting the masses, and everyday people know it. Yet that’s either news to Bernie Sanders, or he’s still so willfully ignorant that he can’t face simple facts.
At Tuesday’s Democratic debate in South Carolina, the 2020 front-runner claimed the real wages of “average” or “ordinary” workers increased by less than 1% last year. This makes sense if you’re looking at the literal averages of hourly earnings, but that’s because lower-income earners received the disproportionate amount of real wage gains in 2019. Real median hourly wages increased by 1% overall last year, with low-earning males and middle-earning women seeing the highest wage gains. From 2018 to 2019, median women’s wages increased by a staggering 3.5%.
The Vermont senator also claimed that “half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck,” presumably citing a recent survey from the First National Bank of Omaha. But neither the facts nor the public’s interpretation of facts seem to confirm the survey sample. First, as National Review’s Robert VerBruggen has pointed out, even more academic surveys of personal finance still wildly overstate the number of people who actually cannot provide adequate liquid assets in case of a lapsed paycheck.
Helluva footnote on the source for the claim that 40% of Americans “can’t” cover a $400 expense without borrowing. https://t.co/1JJKKGKsgw pic.twitter.com/0Rpgyam9fB
— Robert VerBruggen (@RAVerBruggen) May 25, 2019
Then, there’s the simple matter that people are reporting higher personal confidence in their own finances than ever before. Nearly 3 in 5 people say they’re better off financially than one year ago, and nearly 3 in 4 say they’ll be better off financially one year from now.
“That’s an economy working for the 1%,” Sanders declared on the debate stage. “We’re going to create an economy for all, not just wealthy campaign contributors.”
If by “an economy working for the 1%,” he meant the first real wage growth in a decade disproportionately benefiting low-income workers with a labor market even tighter than we ever thought possible plummets our unemployment rate to a half-century low while pulling disaffected workers back into the labor force, then sure. But to the rest of the nation, those who haven’t sold their souls to the socialists, it’s abundantly clear that the Sanders campaign simply hasn’t learned how to deal with the reality that even Trump haters like Trump’s economy.
