WaPo’s Fact Checker column notes the Democrat’s newest rock star, “democratic-socialist” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the winner of the Democrat primary for Congressional seat NY-14, is not unlike everyone else in not having a firm grasp on the material of governing:
“Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.”
— interview on PBS’s “Firing Line,” July 13, 2018This is an example of sweeping language — “everyone has two jobs” — that can get a rookie politician in trouble. She may personally know people who have two jobs, but the data is pretty clear that this statement is poppycock.
First of all, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that the percentage of people working two jobs has actually declined since the Great Recession — and been relatively steady at around 5 percent since 2010. The percentage bounced around a bit but it was as low as 4.7 percent in October 2017 and was 5.2 percent in the July jobs report, the most recent available. That hardly adds up to “everyone.”
“After reaching a peak of 6.2 percent during 1995-96, the multiple job-holding rate began to recede,” the BLS noted in a report. “By the mid-2000s, the rate had declined to 5.2 percent and remained close to that level from 2006 to 2009. In 2010, the multiple job-holding rate decreased to 4.9 percent and has remained at 4.9 percent or 5.0 percent from 2010 to 2017.”
The July data shows most of these people juggling two jobs — 58 percent — have a primary job and a part-time job. Only 6 percent have two full-time jobs, which calls into question her claim that people are working “60, 70, 80 hours a week.” Indeed, the average hours worked per week for private employees has remained steady at just under 35 hours for years.
It’s close to being a nonsensical statement to my mind. Unemployment should be higher if many people held more than one job. And the column has more examples, including an ICE claim that I think is somewhat inflammatory.
If Ocasio-Cortez wants to have a potent impact on the national scene, she must have a solid grip on the facts and a manner of communicating them that is both precise and effective. Unlike many Republican members of Congress these days, she doesn’t have the history of mendacity or delusion that would make me cynical and distrustful about her as I’m cynical and distrustful of them, but I’m not willing to grant her a pass just because she’s a not-Republican. A continued misstatement of the critical data, particularly if it’s tilted against her political opponents and targets, would soon sour me on her.
Not that I’m particularly sweet, I’ll hasten to add. Her youthful energy and new outlook on old problems, attributes which I value, are inevitably tempered with naivete and inexperience. But I look for detachment and an allegiance to reality, however distasteful it may be, in our elected representatives and other members of government, not a zealous attachment to ideologies incompatible with the facts on the ground. The latter is the cause of our current national disaster, even cognitive dissonance. Ocasio-Cortez’s current popularity should collapse if she proves in capable of mastering the difficult material of governance, and her ideology, whatever it may be, should not save her from herself.
