When will the highly left-politicized "fact checking" site known as Politifact evaluate a statement about the unemployment rate among young blacks as "Mostly True"? When Bernie Sanders says it.
When will Politifact take a very similar statement and determine that it's "Mostly False"? When Donald Trump says it — even though, if judged consistently by Sanders' strange definition of "real unemployment rate," Trump was closer to the mark than was the Vermont senator.
Here's how Politifact evaluated the the following statement by Sanders in July 2015:
Statement: "For young people who have graduated high school or dropped out of high school, who are between the ages of 17 and 20, if they happen to be white, the unemployment rate is 33 percent. If they are Hispanic, the unemployment rate is 36 percent. If they are African-American, the real unemployment rate for young people is 51 percent."
Evaluation: Sanders said that for African-Americans between the ages of 17 and 20, "the real unemployment rate … is 51 percent." His terminology was off, but the numbers he used check out, and his general point was correct -- that in an apples-to-apples comparison, African-American youth have significantly worse prospects in the job market than either Hispanics or whites do. The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information, so we rate it Mostly True.
Sanders' 51 percent came from the very liberal Economic Policy Institute. As an indication of how sloppy the Vermont senator was, he referred to "young people who have graduated high school or dropped out of high school," while the EPI's chart relates to unemployment and "underemployment" among "high school graduates age 17–20 who are not enrolled in further schooling." EPI's chart tracks the "U-6" definition used by the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics, which includes "the unemployed (including those only looking for work sporadically, the underemployed (i.e., those "employed part time for economic reasons") and the discouraged" — but again, only for high school grads.
In other words, Politifact should have seen Sanders' attempt to make a sensationalistic point about "real unemployment" as an incoherent hot mess, given that it even included people actually working (not just as much as they'd like to be working) and pretended to include dropouts when the EPI actually didn't. Instead, he only got a wrist slap for his "terminology," but overly generous kudos for his "general point." For the socialist senator from Vermont, who was at the time a candidate for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, that was enough to get a "Mostly True" evaluation.
Now here is how the website evaluated a similar Trump statement made on June 11 of this year:
Statement: "If you look at what’s going on in this country, African-American youth is an example: 59 percent unemployment rate; 59 percent."
Evaluation: The unemployment rate is a widely used term with a specific definition: It refers to the percentage of jobless people in the workforce who are actively seeking employment. In May, the unemployment rate for blacks ages 16 to 24 was 18.7 percent, or less than one-third of Trump’s claim.
Clearly, black youths have a harder time finding work than whites. But Trump exaggerates the issue through his misleading use of statistics.
We rate his statement Mostly False.
Trump's indeed made his "59 percent unemployment rate" statement at a Richmond, Virginia rally on June 10 (at the one-hour, 9-minute mark at the linked video). It is not technically correct, as we will see. But either Trump's people have subsequently tightened up the statement to the point where it's now absolutely true, or his Richmond speech represented a brief departure from what he has been correctly saying all along.
On Sunday, blogger Patterico reviewed a Politico hit on Trump where the nominee said that "58 percent of African American youth are not working." That statement is indisputably correct, as it's the opposite side of the current 41.5 percent labor force participation rate for African-Americans aged 16-24 (note the age range is different than the one employed by Sanders, a point we'll revisit later). Politico's whine is that the ranks of the non-participating include "busy students." So? As Patterico wrote:
... the fact-checkers admit it’s true . . . but call it a “lie” because they don’t like the implications of that true statement.
Now let's get back to how Politifact compared Sanders and Trump.
Sanders got his "terminology" wrong in June 2015, which was supposedly eminently forgivable. Trump got his wrong, which earned him a "mostly false." The double standard is obvious — and it gets worse.
Trump had an out even for the "unemployment rate" statement he made in June — at least if Politifact was interested in treating both presidential candidates equally, which it obviously wasn't.
Trump's June speech didn't specify the age group to which he was referring, and the Trump campaign didn't respond to Politifact's request for an explanation; given their track record of lying to benefit the left, why would they? Given that, why didn't Politifact go back to its year-ago Sanders evaluation?
If it had, and if it had consistently but correctly estimated the true unemployment and underemployment rate among all blacks aged 17-20, it would have realized that Trump's 59 percent was very close to the mark — accidentally so, as if that matters — and clearly more accurate than Sanders was, if one were to adjust the EPI graph used referenced earlier for ages 17-20 and shown below to include high-school dropouts:
EPI's 51.3 percent, which only included high school grads, would certainly be higher if high school dropouts were included. Unfortunately, as of 2012, the high school graduation rate for blacks was only 69 percent. If the dropouts, the other 31 percent, had a combined unemployment and underemployment rate of about 65 percent, that would bring the overall average up to within a few percentage points of Trump's 59 percent. Sadly, given that black male high school dropouts had an unemployment rate of over 50 percent three years ago, it likely that the combined unemployment-underemployment rate really is pretty close to that level.
Trump referred to "the unemployment rate." Oh the humanity!
But so did Bernie, who only prefaced it with the word "real." No problem!
If we grade Trump on Bernie's definition, as seen above, he's actually far closer to being correct than Bernie, who failed to include high school dropouts when he was supposedly referring to overall black unemployment (and underemployment).
If we grade Trump as if he really meant to say (as he is saying now) that 59 percent (now 58 percent) of black youths "aren't working," he's absolutely correct.
Politifact's pass to Sanders and its blast at Trump demonstrates its double standard perfectly. This example can't possibly be the only instance of such blatant, agenda-driven hypocrisy.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
