Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has described the U.S. economy in grim terms in his recent campaign appearances, raising the alarm on rising inequality and telling voters that it may already be too late to save the nation from the influence of what he calls the “billionaire class.”
His message often conflicts with the optimism that the White House is careful to project. But Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist who represents Vermont in the Senate as an independent, has engaged in rhetoric more often heard from Republicans criticizing President Obama’s record.
Before a crowd of 7,500 in Maine on Monday night, the left-wing senator engaged in a line of criticism of frequently cited unemployment figures that is more often employed by Republicans campaigning against Obama.
Calling for an “honest assessment of unemployment in America,” Sanders said that “once a month, the government publishes a set of figures, and the last figures they published said that, official unemployment was 5.4 percent.” In fact, unemployment was 5.3 percent in the latest seasonally adjusted statistics published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“But there is another set of government statistics,” Sanders continued, “and that says that real unemployment, if you include those people who have given up looking for work and the millions of others who are working part time — 20-25 hours a week when they want to work full-time — when you add all of that together, real unemployment is 10.5 percent.”
Sanders was referring to the U-6 rate of underemployment, which is also calculated from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey alongside the more frequently cited U-3 unemployment rate. It is mostly as Sanders described it, although the U-6 rate does not capture all the workers who might have become discouraged and quit the job hunt.
Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House and then-presidential candidate, among other Republicans, referred to the U-6 rate to criticize Obama’s economic management in the 2012 election. The Republican Policy Committee, like Sanders, mentions it as the “real” unemployment rate in its monthly statement on the jobs report.
Unlike some of the “real unemployment rate” figures that candidates have from time to time suggested, the U-6 rate is a legitimate measure of the health of the economy. But while 10.5 percent sounds high relative to the U-3 rate, the U-6 rate is always significantly higher. It rose above 17 percent during the worst of the recession, and never dropped below 7.9 percent during the during the mid-2000s expansion.
The unemployment rate is not the only figure Sanders has used to try to impress the weakness of the economy on voters.
On Tuesday night, Sanders bemoaned the “tragic reality that for the last 40 years the great middle class of our country — the middle class that was once the envy of the entire world — has been disappearing.”
“Despite exploding technology and increased worker productivity, median family income today is almost $5,000 less than it was in 1999,” Sanders said.
That claim tracks with the income figures published by the Census Bureau, which showed that median household income was $51,939 in 2013, the most recent year for which numbers are available, $4,956 below the $56,895 peak in real terms in 1999.
It’s not settled, however, that those figures are the most appropriate to use. For example, using additional tax data and a different adjustment for inflation, the Congressional Budget Office found that real after-tax median household income, adjusted for changes in family size, rose over that same rough period, from $34,000 in 1999 to $38,500 in 2011, at a much earlier stage of the economic recovery that appears to have raised incomes since then.
Sanders, however, has shown a clear bias for figures, statistics and anecdotes that stress the problems with the U.S. economy.
“I think Wall Street has played a horrendous role in recent years in negatively impacting our economy and in making the rich richer,” Sanders said on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday.
