The Washington Post’s fact-checker said Friday that New York’s socialist candidate for Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is repeating several false claims as she has made the rounds with the national media in the weeks following her primary win over Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y.
The paper’s fact-checker said one of her “eyebrow-raising claims” is when she said in an interview with “Pod Save America” on Aug. 7 that, “This upper middle class is probably more moderate but that upper middle class does not exist anymore in America.”
However, the Post noted that while the middle class has shrunk a little bit, the upper middle class has grown. In 1979, the upper middle class made up 12.9 percent of the population, but in 2014 it grew to 29.4 percent, according to a 2016 paper published by the Urban Institute.
A second claim she made is that “everyone” in America is working two jobs. “Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview on PBS July 13. “Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.”
But the Post found that only about five percent of Americans work two jobs, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The percentage of people working two jobs has greatly decreased since the recession in 2008.
It also found that out only about 6 percent of the small group of people working two jobs work up to 80 hours per week. According to BLS the average work hours per week for private employees has been steady at under 35 hours.
The Post also dismissed her claims that ICE is required to fill 34,000 beds will illegal immigrant detainees every night, that “Medicare for all” would be cheaper than the current U.S. healthcare system, and her implication that buying an Obamacare health plan is akin to paying a tax.
