Are Democrat candidates ignorant about the current economy or lying?

Michael Barone:

We are all, to some extent, prisoners of the past. Things that have already happened — or that we remember as having happened — constitute the world that we know. Anything else is a product of imagination.

But it can also be a pitfall for a politician, particularly for those seeking national visibility when they’re running for president. It’s jarring to see candidates ignore recent changes and describe a world that no longer exists. As when they were asked lead-off questions about the economy in the first two Democratic debates.

Night one: “It’s doing great for a thinner and thinner slice at the top.” “The economy has got to work for everyone and right now we know it isn’t.” “Not everyone is sharing in this prosperity.” “This economy is not working for average Americans.” “There’s plenty of money in this country. It’s just in the wrong hands.”

So spoke Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, and Bill de Blasio.

Night two: “The bottom 60% haven't seen a raise since 1980.” “We have three people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America.” “We do have enormous inequality.” “The economy is not working for working people.” “Forty years of no economic growth for 90% of the American people.”

Those were Tim Ryan, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Michael Bennet.

These are reasonably accurate descriptions of the macroeconomy in the years after the financial crash and recession of 2008 — which is to say, during the Obama presidency — and plausible descriptions of the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency.

Even in the buoyantly prosperous years of the 1980s and 1990s, incomes rose faster among the affluent and well-educated, while blue-collar wages tended to flat-line. Economic inequality tended to increase according to various measures. Those trends continued in the 2000s and 2010s, and were decried by Democratic politicians and by Donald Trump.

But now, there are signs that those trends are reversed. Wage gains in percentage terms seem to be increasing most for those at the bottom of the wage scale. Blue-collar incomes are apparently rising more rapidly than white-collar ones. Unemployment has dropped to levels not seen for 50 years, and unemployment among blacks and Hispanics seems to have dropped to the lowest levels since measurement began.
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 The millions who have been added to the workforce know that what the Democrat candidates are saying is untrue.  So do those who have seen their wages increase.  Those working at manufacturing jobs that have been created have to know that what these Democrats are saying is not true.  Perhaps they think that because Bill Clinton was successful lying about the economy they can too.