THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

For instance, in an appearance on CNN on Monday, when challenged on the costs of government-financed health care, she answered: "Why aren't we incorporating the cost of all the funeral expenses of those who died because they can't afford access to health care? That is part of the cost of our system."

Huh? [...]

"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, 2018

This 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.

 

"ICE is the only criminal investigative agency, the only enforcement agency in the United States, that has a bed quota. So ICE is required to fill 34,000 beds with detainees every single night and that number has only been increasing since 2009."

-- in an interview with the Intercepted podcast, May 30

As our friends at PolitiFact documented, this is an urban legend. There is language in the 2016 appropriations bill that requires ICE to have 34,000 beds available -- ICE "shall maintain a level of not less than 34,000 detention beds through September 30, 2016" -- but it is not required to fill them. The main point of such language, a version of which dated to 2009, is to make sure the money is not spent on something else. [...]

"They [national Democrats] were campaigning most when we had more of an American middle class. This upper-middle class is probably more moderate but that upper-middle class does not exist anymore in America."

-- interview on "Pod Save America," Aug. 7

Here's some more sweeping rhetoric. In knocking the current leaders of the Democrats, stuck in " '90s politics," Ocasio-Cortez said the "upper-middle class does not exist anymore."

But the data show that while the middle class overall may have shrunk a bit, the upper-middle class has actually grown. In a 2016 paper published by the Urban Institute, Stephen J. Rose documented that the upper-middle class has grown substantially, from 12.9 percent of the population in 1979 to 29.4 percent in 2014. His analysis showed that there was a massive shift in the center of gravity of the economy, with an increasing share of income going to the upper-middle class and rich.

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