Bernie Sanders on economics: what the evidence says · JRE #1330

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Sanders has repeated versions of this wealth-concentration claim for years, with the exact comparison group varying (bottom 90%, 92%, or half of Americans). Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts data, which combine aggregate balance-sheet figures with the Survey of Consumer Finances, has for several years shown the top 1% of U.S. households holding roughly 30% or more of total household net worth, a share comparable to or exceeding that held by the bottom 90%. PolitiFact has separately rated closely related formulations of this claim (top 0.1% versus bottom 90% in 2015, and three richest Americans versus the bottom half in 2019) as Mostly True and True, based on Federal Reserve and Saez-Zucman/Forbes-derived wealth data. Economists have flagged some methodological caveats, including that these net-worth measures count debt as negative wealth (which can understate the position of people with high future earning potential but current student or mortgage debt) and, in some versions, exclude Social Security wealth, but no independent fact-check found the underlying top-1%-vs-most-of-the-rest comparison to be false or fabricated. The specific "bottom 92%" figure is a minor variant of the more commonly cited "bottom 90%" statistic and is directionally consistent with it.