https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/02/democrats
As is their well-practiced custom, the Democratic presidential candidates continue to screech about stagnant wages, and an economy that doesn’t work for everyone.
We’re not saying they’re lying. Let’s just say the truth is out there and they’re missing it.
In the first set of debates, New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker said that he was seeing “every single day that this economy is not working for average Americans.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat, groused about “an economy that does great for those with money and isn’t doing great for everyone else.”
Tuesday night, the first evening of the second round of debates, Ohio Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan complained that union members’ “wages have been stagnating.” The following evening, Julian Castro, secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Obama, was quite sure that “the idea that America is doing just fine is wrong.”
It’s a familiar beef. Not long ago, Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders claimed that “for the last 45 years the average American today has not seen a nickel more in real wages than he or she got 45 years ago.” More recently, Warren has lamented “a generation of stagnant wages.”
Even President Trump has brought up “decades of flat wages.”
The numbers don’t seem to back the narrative, though. Factcheck.org, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, has shown that after falling for about 20 years, wages have been climbing since the mid-1990s.
Not all agree that the measurement used by Factcheck.org is the best way to determine if we’re better off than we were in previous decades. So forget for one moment the data and think about what today’s wages can bring compared to wages in the 1960s and 1970s.