Bernie Sanders' income inequality statistic is very misleading

Income inequality statistic that Sanders assersts is misleading.

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last updated 28 January 2016

"Is the economy rigged?" asks Sen. Bernie Sanders in a new presidential campaign ad. "Well, the 15 richest Americans acquired more wealth in two years than the bottom 100 million people combined."

Sanders isn't technically lying: As the Washington Post calculates, the 15 richest people in America collectively gained $170 billion between 2013 and 2015, and the poorest 138 million Americans (the bottom 43 percent) have a combined worth of just $134 billion. That's a big disparity.

But what Sanders doesn't mention is that net worth calculation includes debts. So, for example, a recent Harvard Law graduate with a $200,000 annual income plus $100,000 in student loans and a $600,000 mortgage debt is probably living a comfortable upper middle class life — with a negative net worth.

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In fact, the bottom 40 percent of Americans collectively have so much debt that Sanders himself is wealthier than all of them put together with his relatively modest net worth of $330,000.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.