Even Politifact and FactCheck couldn’t parse Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s astonishing statement about the cause of unemployment in a way that made her look anything but ignorant on the subject. From the first site:
During the interview, Ocasio-Cortez said, “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.”…
…[But] by the official statistics, multiple job holders account for a tiny fraction of American workers.
And this percentage isn’t high by historical standards…
…[P]eople who might be working 70 or 80 hours a week amount to a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage — 310,000 people at most in a pool of employed Americans totaling more than 150 million…
… a person is counted as employed as long as they have at least one job. They don’t get counted twice if they have two jobs. So Ocasio-Cortez is wrong in saying multiple job holding and long hours affect the unemployment rate.
The second site, FactCheck, agrees. So Ocasio-Cortez is wrong and wrong, as well as wrong.
But why do I say it’s worse than you think? Two reasons. The first is that you don’t need Politifact or FactCheck to know that Ocasio-Cortez is wrong. I’ve often written here that economics is not a strong suit of mine and that in fact I consider myself weak in that area. I took it in high school rather than college, and it didn’t stick very well.
Nevertheless, when I heard that Ocasio-Cortez had said that, common sense told me that of course she was wrong. I didn’t need (nor should any other even marginally intelligent person need) unemployment statistics to know that a lot of people working two jobs would not lower unemployment rates. It makes zero sense on the face of it. So Ocasio-Cortez isn’t just economics-ignorant, she’s lacking in very very basic common sense.
But it’s even worse than that. Much worse. After all, I said there were two reasons.
The second is this: Ocasio-Cortez is a graduate of Boston University with a degree in (drum roll, please!) political science and economics. Yes, economics.
You can look it up:
She graduated fourth in her class from Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and international relations.
Fourth in her class. In economics.