News Reporter: Fact Checker: Ocasio-Cortez wages battle with wage statistics

Friday 25 January 2019

Fact Checker: Ocasio-Cortez wages battle with wage statistics

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The truth behind the rhetoric

Ocasio-Cortez wages battle with wage statistics

With millions of followers on social media, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is the rare politician who can ignite public debate on weighty policy issues such as income inequality. Factual errors don't help, though, and she made several while discussing the minimum wage and the "living wage" during an event in New York.

Here's Ocasio-Cortez: "I think it's wrong that a vast majority of the country doesn't make a living wage. ... I think it's wrong that corporations like Walmart and Amazon can get paid by the government, essentially experience a wealth transfer from the public, for paying people less than a minimum wage."

The living wage measures costs before taxes such as food, child care, housing, transportation and other basic necessities. Many Americans are earning below what's considered a living wage, but Ocasio-Cortez is wrong to say a "vast majority." It's actually somewhere between 32 percent and 43 percent, according to our analysis. Amazon and Walmart both pay workers above the minimum wage. Add it all up and that's Three Pinocchios for Ocasio-Cortez.

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Here's to 8,000 more

As we all know, The Fact Checker spends an ungodly amount of time fact-checking President Trump. Our database keeping track of all of the president's false and misleading statements is like a snowball that keeps rolling downhill, growing bigger and bigger, gaining mass and velocity, sweeping everything in its path, an avalanche.

That's a dramatic way of saying we've just reached 8,158 false or misleading claims as of Jan. 20, when Trump hit the two-year mark in office. An astonishing 6,000-plus claims came in the president's second year. Put another way: Trump averaged nearly 5.9 false or misleading statements a day in his first year. But he hit nearly 16.5 a day in his second year, almost triple the pace.

Not surprisingly, the biggest source of wrong claims is immigration, with a tally that grew by 300 in the past week, for a total of 1,433. Trump routinely links immigration to crime despite all the evidence to the contrary. He routinely misleads about crime and drugs and even terrorists at the border (there's no proof they exist).

All 8,158 claims are categorized and fact-checked in our searchable graphic. Here's to 8,000 more. Send help.

We're always looking for fact-check suggestions.

You can also reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @mmkelly22, @rizzoTK or use #FactCheckThis), or Facebook (Fact Checker). Read about our rating scale here, and sign up here for our weekly Fact Checker newsletter.

Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup.

— Salvador Rizzo

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