PoliGraph: Fact-checking the MN 1st District debate
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The two candidates vying to represent Minnesota’s 1
st
Congressional District debated in Rochester earlier this week.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Tim Walz and his Republican opponent Jim Hagedorn sparred over a number of issues, including whether the government has a role in job creation and economic growth. PoliGraph looked into two claims from that section of the debate.
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Jim Hagedorn: “We have record welfare.”
Hagedorn says the number of people on welfare exceeds 45 million. He couldn’t think of specific sources to back up his claim and he didn’t define what he meant by welfare, which to some departments and experts means only cash assistance and to others is much broader than that.
In this case, PoliGraph used Census data that counts the number of people who live in a household where one or more people are benefiting from means-tested government assistance excluding school lunch programs.
In 2006, before the recession took hold, 67 million people were on government assistance. In 2013, which is the most recent data, more than 95 million people were on government assistance. That said, if you narrow the definition to look only at cash assistance the numbers are down to 20.3 million recipients after peaking in 2011 at 21.7 million recipients.
Because there are a few ways to define welfare – and the definitions produce different results – Hagedorn’s claim is inconclusive.
Rep. Tim Walz: “Hour by hour, minute by minute, American workers outproduce anybody else in the world….We’ve seen CEO pay go from 40 times what an average worker makes to 600 times what an average
worker makes. The wealth is there, it simply has moved in a direction that doesn’t value the working person.”
During the debate, Walz made the case that American workers are undervalued – even though they are highly productive.
To make his case, Walz said that American workers outproduce workers in other countries. And that’s basically true, according to two economists with the Conference Board, a business research organization.
By several measures, American workers produce more hour and more per worker than workers in most or all other developed countries. In some cases, very small or very resource rich countries outpace the United States, said Abdul Erumban, a senior economist with the Conference Board.
“But output per worker or output per hour in resource rich economies are less meaningful, as they are mostly reflective of resource income [like oil income in the Middle East], which is a highly capital intensive industry.”
On his first point, Walz is correct.
But on his second point, Walz is significantly overstating the gap between CEO pay and average worker pay according to two left-leaning organizations.
The Economic Policy Institute found that CEOs made about 30 times more than the average worker in 1978. In 2012, they made about 270 times more.
Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO, a labor union, found that CEOs made 46 times more than the average worker in 1983 and made about 331 times more in 2013. That number skyrockets to 774 times more when compared to minimum wage workers.
That’s a big jump and CEOs do make much more than the average worker, but not as much more as Walz said.
As a result, PoliGraph gives this part of Walz’s claim a misleading.
