Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez falsely says “that upper-middle class does not exist anymore in America”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said:

“They [national Democrats] were campaigning most when we had more of an American middle class. This upper-middle class is probably more moderate but that upper-middle class does not exist anymore in America.”

The Washington Post responded with the following:

“… the upper-middle class has actually grown. In a 2016 paper published by the Urban Institute, Stephen J. Rose documented that the upper-middle class has grown substantially, from 12.9 percent of the population in 1979 to 29.4 percent in 2014.”

The same Washington Post article also included this chart:

I don’t think Ocasio-Cortez was deliberately lying when she made her comment.

Instead, I think she is genuinely ignorant of a lot of basic facts that get regularly reported in the mainstream media.