Media treatment of Bernie Sanders: a story in pictures

[PyramidHead]

I love how 24% is ever so slightly higher than 24%

 

[Elixir]

I love how 24% is ever so slightly higher than 24%

Lol! 24% of the 615 polled would be 147.6
Probably Biden got 148 (24.065%), and Bernie got 147 (23.902%)

 

[ZiprHead]

I love how 24% is ever so slightly higher than 24%

Lol! 24% of the 615 polled would be 147.6
Probably Biden got 148 (24.065%), and Bernie got 147 (23.902%)

I was thinking the same thing.

 

[PyramidHead]

I love how 24% is ever so slightly higher than 24%

Lol! 24% of the 615 polled would be 147.6
Probably Biden got 148 (24.065%), and Bernie got 147 (23.902%)

I was thinking the same thing.

You're very probably correct and there's nothing underhanded happening here, I just thought it was funny... like why not just change the scale or the significant digits if you're going to report it that way.

 

[Derec]

I love how 24% is ever so slightly higher than 24%

It could be that the raw number for Biden was slightly higher (resulting in taller bar) but that both rounded to 24% to nearest whole number. For example, if Biden had 24.3% and Bernie 23.8% that's a 0.5% difference, which is about right for the graph. You can see the same thing happening with Amy Klobuchar and Andrew Yang.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I love how 24% is ever so slightly higher than 24%



View attachment 21515

It could be a rounding thing, showing to the nearest whole number, but the bar is showing the exact percent. Harris has 10%, but doesn't rise to it. O'Rourke has 5% but is above 5%. Buttigieg looks a little under 14%. And Klobuchar and Yang sit at 2%, but have uneven bars too.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Well, here's the source (emphasis mine):

Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are locked in a tie in Iowa atop the large field of Democrats running for the presidential nomination. An Iowa Starting Line/Change Research Poll of 615 likely Democratic caucus-goers that was conducted this past week, May 15 to May 19, found both Biden and Sanders garnering 24% among the Democratic candidates. The poll’s margin of error is +/- 3.9%.

Three contenders trailed the leaders with healthy percentages of support: Pete Buttigieg at 14%, Elizabeth Warren at 12%, and Kamala Harris at 10%. Beto O’Rourke came in at 5%, while Amy Klobuchar and Andrew Yang both had 2%. Everyone else polled at 1% or less.

In most national polling, Biden was blowing away the rest of the Democratic field in the immediate weeks after his announcement. A national CNN poll at the end of April had Biden up 24 points over the next closest Democrat; a Fox News national survey put Biden up 18 last week.

But here in Iowa, it’s a much closer contest for Biden. Part of that is due to Sanders’ residual strength here from his 2016 run and remaining volunteer network. In this survey, 45% of those polled who said they caucused for Sanders in 2016 list him as their first choice in the caucus. Given the expansive primary field, retaining even just around half of his former support in the caucus may be enough to get to a win.

 

[Derec]

Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are locked in a tie in Iowa atop the large field of Democrats running for the presidential nomination. An Iowa Starting Line/Change Research Poll of 615 likely Democratic caucus-goers that was conducted this past week, May 15 to May 19, found both Biden and Sanders garnering 24% among the Democratic candidates. The poll’s margin of error is +/- 3.9%.

These bar charts really should include error bars.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are locked in a tie in Iowa atop the large field of Democrats running for the presidential nomination. An Iowa Starting Line/Change Research Poll of 615 likely Democratic caucus-goers that was conducted this past week, May 15 to May 19, found both Biden and Sanders garnering 24% among the Democratic candidates. The poll’s margin of error is +/- 3.9%.

These bar charts really should include error bars.

Or, someone should actually read the source material before taking the graphic out of context. Like what I posted or this additional information from the article (emphasis mine):

The Iowa Starting Line/Change Research Poll is part of the 2020 Change series of polls, and was conducted online and is quite extensive. It’s obviously rather difficult to poll a field this large, especially when many caucus-goers like multiple candidates. Fortunately, Change Research asked several questions where poll-takers could pick up to five separate candidates for specific questions. That produced some insightful results.
...
If you read the rest of the poll before looking at the horserace numbers, you might think that Warren would come in first or second. She scores top marks among Democratic caucus-goers on a number of fronts. Warren gets a 40% “very favorable” rating, higher than anyone else. Combining her “very favorable” and “somewhat favorable” numbers puts her at 78% favorable, a significant jump ahead of Sanders’ next-closest 71%.

“Good news for Elizabeth Warren: her favorability exceeds that of any other candidate in the race and her name recognition is near universal,” Loria observed. “In some states, we see a large spread between the front-runners and the so-called second-tier in the excitement barometer, but in Iowa the candidates are all pretty tightly clustered. When we ask respondents to identify the five candidates they’re most excited about, 54% say Warren, followed by Biden (53%), then Harris (53%), Sanders (49%), and Buttigieg (46%).”

Warren also leads the rest of the Democrats in three other poll questions, when asked which candidates caucus-goers describe as “smart,” as “tough,” and as “honest and ethical.”

And Warren’s support is not dependent on one slice of the electorate. Her favorability numbers stay relatively even among age groups – 36% of 18-34, 38% of 35-49, 41% of 50-64, and 43% of 65+ of those polled said they view her very favorably. Compare that to Sanders, where 63% of the 18-34 age group rates him very favorably, while only 28% of the 65+ age group does so. Biden has the opposite issue, where 47% of the 65+ group has him as very favorable, when just 20% of the 18-34 age group feels that way.

That bolded part in particular is the author of the piece noting that the "horserace numbers" reflected in the graphic are misleading.

 

[PyramidHead]

Totally not a trope to show a Jewish man with a money tree in his yard, balancing houses on his shoulders, called cheap, and... *checks notes* called out for collecting a salary for decades as mayor and senator

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

So, if he were not Jewish, then it would be just fine. So who is making the association of his being Jewish and the graphic?

Here's the piece you're referring to: The Secret of Bernie’s Millions

Here's the slugline:

How did he amass three houses and a net worth approaching at least $2 million? The surprisingly conventional middle-class climbing of a radical-sounding socialist.

So the artist depicted him resting on a white picket fence in front of a large home with a money tree growing in the backyard wearing preppy clothes.

Here's the Hill article you also referenced: Millions of taxpayer dollars fueled Bernie Sanders to wealth success. Here is the graphic they chose:



So is he a Jewish trope there too? No?

So, in your mind, just depicting a Jewish person next to money axiomatically means anti-semitism and therefore no Jewish person can ever be depicted as having money in spite of the fact that the piece the graphic is illustrating is specifically about the contradiction of someone who became so prominent based in no small part on his attacks against millionnaires. Did you read the Politico piece?

In a strict, bottom-line sense, Sanders has become one of those rich people against whom he has so unrelentingly railed. The champion of the underclass and castigator of “the 1 percent” has found himself in the socioeconomic penthouse of his rhetorical boogeymen. This development, seen mostly as the result of big bucks brought in by the slate of books he’s put out in the past few years, predictably has elicited snarky pokes, partisan jabs and charges of hypocrisy. The millionaire socialist!

Sanders has been impatient to the point of churlish when pressed about this. “I wrote a best-selling book,” he told the New York Times after he releasing the last 10 years of his tax returns. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.” Asked on Fox News if this sort of success was “the definition of capitalism,” he bristled. “You know, I have a college degree,” he said.

Based on a deeper examination of his financial disclosures, tax returns, property records in Washington and Vermont, and scarcely leafed-through scraps of his financial papers housed at the University of Vermont, Sanders’ current financial portrait is not only some stroke-of-luck windfall, it’s also the product (with the help of his wife) of decades of planning. The upward trajectory from that jalopy of his to his relative riches now—as off-brand as it is for a man who once said he had “no great desire to be rich”—is the product of years of middle-class striving, replete with credit card debt, real estate upgrades and an array of investment funds and retirement accounts.

As an immigrant’s son who started close to the bottom and has ended up near to the top, Sanders has a narrative arc that would form the backbone of the campaign story of almost any other candidate. But it’s more complicated for him. There’s never been anybody like Sanders in the modern political history of this country—somebody who made a career out of haranguing millionaires … and who is now a millionaire himself. There is no set strategy for how to run for president as a democratic socialist with an expensive lakefront summer house. Americans generally don’t begrudge millionaires their millions—and, as Donald Trump has confirmed, the aura of wealth can serve as a useful means of self-promotion—but what to make of Sanders’ apparently conflicting narratives?
...
Does all of this make Sanders’ abiding calls for economic justice more authoritative or compelling, especially as he, the ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, argues on the 2020 hustings for costly programs like tuition-free college and universal health care, or does it defuse his drilled-home political brand and somehow muffle his message?

“I think it’s only awkward if someone has sort of a facile understanding of what Bernie is trying to accomplish,” senior Sanders adviser Jeff Weaver told me, “which is to give lots of people opportunities to have a modicum of security.”

It then goes into a lengthy bit about Sanders' past and how he struggled and compares his current wealth to others in the running right now and, more importantly, a deep-dive into how his personal fiscal responsibility did (or did not) impact how he managed as Mayor and the like.

Iow, it's a comprehensive, in-depth piece about the totality of Sanders' political history and rhetoric about and in regard to economic considerations/policies/applications in both his private and public lives as well as noting what he argued against Hillary in the primaries:

He all but compared his finances to those of front-running Hillary Clinton, she of the high-dollar speaking fees. “That type of wealth,” he said, “has the potential to isolate you from the reality of the world.”

Iow, he vilified her for being paid to speak and being part of the "establishment" etc, while it was perfectly fine for him to be paid for writing a book (which is identical to being paid to speak), but the piece also concluded with:

"I don’t think any of Bernie’s supporters said, ‘Oh, well, now that he’s made a lot of money selling a book … I can’t support him anymore,’” Terry Bouricius, a former Burlington city councilor and progressive who’s known Sanders since the '70s, told me. “No—I don’t think that happened to anybody.”

A spectrum of politicos I talked to don’t think this is that big of a political problem for Sanders. He has problems, they said, that are bigger than his bottom line—his persistent lack of appeal to female voters and black voters, for instance, and his generally sagging poll numbers ever since an evidently formidable Joe Biden entered the race, and the slap-in-the-face mathematical fact that this time around he’s running against not Hillary Clinton but 20-plus Democrats. He is, in other words, no longer the beneficiary of the anybody-but-her voters.

“The least of his problems,” Marsh, the Democratic strategist from Boston, said of Sanders' wealth.

“Detractors will needle and pester and continue to push that argument,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist who’s been working on presidential campaigns for almost 40 years. “But I don’t think in the end it’s going to have much impact.”
...
“I’m not going to sit here and shit on Bernie Sanders for being a millionaire,” the former South Carolina lawmaker and current Kamala Harris supporter told me.

Why not?

“I want to be a millionaire, too!”

As for The Hill, they are a pro-DNC website. Sanders is by no means a welcome component of the DNC and that has never been a secret nor does it need to be. His refusal to leave the primaries in March, when it was clear he could not win, resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars being utterly wasted on a zombie civil war (weaponized by both the GOP and the Russians) and is a primary factor giving us Trump in the first place. He is not a Democrat and yet continues to leech onto the DNC to serve his interests.

He absolutely should be castigated and pushed out of the primaries just as he tried to castigate his opponents and push them out of the primaries and just like every candidate that runs tries to castigate their opponents and push them out of the primaries.

The notion that he is the poor-poor-put-upon martyr is the exact same strategy he ran in his disastrous 2015 primary bid, where, after all the smoke and mirrors and detritus and bullshit about a "revolution" cleared away, he couldn't even convince more than 5% of Democrats to get out and vote for him.

The picked-on-Bernie underdog strategy didn't work then, so I'm not sure why it's being regurgitated now, but don't try to pretend it isn't exactly that; a strategy and part of that strategy, evidently, is to raise the spectre of anti-semitism. Which is ironic because should he actually win the nomination this time around, wtf do you think the right is going to use against him in their attack ads?

So if you think the Politico piece is being subtly (or even overtly) anti-semitic just because they pictured him in an upper-middle class posture in front of a political money-tree (get it? he grows money from his celebrity as the result of being in politics, just like he and his bros once accused Hillary of doing), then you'd better fucking brace yourself for what's to come, because it's going to actually be anti-semitic and not just what you are projecting onto an otherwise benign graphic.

 

[PyramidHead]

The headline literally called him cheap, which was a quote from one of Bernie's friends in the article but was not depicted as such, and thus the tweet was removed. People don't always read the whole article in cases like this, as I'm sure you know. That's why it's so important for media outlets to get their sniping in at the level of the sound-byte or byline.

Iow, he vilified her for being paid to speak and being part of the "establishment" etc, while it was perfectly fine for him to be paid for writing a book (which is identical to being paid to speak)

That's an impotent, forced equivalence. Being paid to speak, without specifying who is being spoken to, what is being said, how much one is paid, by whom, and the consequences of the speech, as if those details aren't the entire point of the comparison being made.

I know you love Bernie and are only interested in correcting the record about him so he can run a stronger campaign, so I'm going to leave it at that.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

The headline literally called him cheap

The "headline" did not; the Tweet teaser did and as you noted, it was taken from a quote from one of Bernie's friends in the article.

People don't always read the whole article in cases like this, as I'm sure you know.

Correct, but then, that's not the fault of the publication. The reference was not only perfectly in keeping with the article, but, again was also a quote.

That's why it's so important for media outlets to get their sniping in at the level of the sound-byte or byline.

It can't be "sniping" if it's something that was actually said by someone who is supposedly his friend. It no doubt was intended to get people to read the piece--as ALL such marketing is--but it is you that is ironically projecting anti-semitism onto a piece that is specifically about the man's entire history of financial policies/actions/rhetoric in both his private and public lives.

And yes, it is critical because he was critical; he made his entire bid about wealth inequality and how being rich just axiomatically meant you were corrupt and part of the "establishment" etc. Iow, he has hoisted himself with his own petard and now that he is one of the people he railed against, a deeper look into his finances and financial history (both public and private) is perfectly legitimate ground to cover for a publication like Politico.

Iow, he attacked the very idea of being rich because of politics as being equivalent to being corrupt and therefore a strong impediment to serving, etc. Ok, so now that he is rich because of politics, does that still stand? Why not? Why is perfectly ok for him to profit off a book and yet Hillary being paid for her speeches is somehow axiomatically the most evil, corrupting thing in the world?

In short, he is being caught in his own hypocrisy--and the piece actually favorably deconstructs that criticism--going into a new presidential bid. Again, perfectly logical and acceptable ground for an in-depth piece like the Politico one.

Iow, he vilified her for being paid to speak and being part of the "establishment" etc, while it was perfectly fine for him to be paid for writing a book (which is identical to being paid to speak)

That's an impotent, forced equivalence.

Not in the slightest. Sanders wrote a book about his experiences, his opinions. That's what polticial speeches are; people who have served relating their experiences and opinions.

Being paid to speak, without specifying who is being spoken to

How is that relevant?

, what is being said

How is that relevant?

how much one is paid

How is that relevant?

, by whom

Same question.

and the consequences of the speech

"Consequences?" This is the crux, of course; the insinuation that she was not paid to speak her mind, but was instead paid to somehow put Goldman Sachs at the front of whatever line you're imagining. The problem being that she gave those speeches after she left office. So exactly what "consequences" are you alleging?

as if those details aren't the entire point of the comparison being made.

Horseshit. The ONLY fallacy being employed is yours; an argument from incredulity. You are IMPLYING that Hillary Clinton was somehow being paid to vote not being paid to simply give her opinions on a variety of topics and to a variety of audiences.

Here is a section of one of her Goldman Sachs Q&As. Absolutely NOTHING about it had anything to do with her being bribed to somehow favor Goldman Sachs, particularly since, once again, she wasn't even in office when it happened. She was a private citizen who was paid to give her opinions:

Here is how Clinton responded to being thanked by a Goldman executive for being “courageous in some respects to associate with Wall Street and this environment”:

Well, I don’t feel particularly courageous. I mean, if we’re going to be an effective, efficient economy, we need to have all part of that engine running well, and that includes Wall Street and Main Street. And there’s a big disconnect and a lot of confusion right now. So I’m not interested in, you know, turning the clock back or pointing fingers, but I am interested in trying to figure out how we come together to chart a better way forward and one that will restore confidence in, you know, small and medium-size businesses and consumers and begin to chip away at the unemployment rate. So it’s something that I, you know, if you’re a realist, you know that people have different roles to play in politics, economics, and this is an important role, but I do think that there has to be an understanding of how what happens here on Wall Street has such broad consequences not just for the domestic but the global economy, so more thought has to be given to the process and transactions and regulations so that we don’t kill or maim what works, but we concentrate on the most effective way of moving forward with the brainpower and the financial power that exists here.​

Her statement amounts to: we all need to work together to solve the problems in the finance industry. OMG! Run for the hills!

Here is a list of the speeches she gave in 2014-2015 (again, while out of office):




The biggest payouts were from the National Automobile Dealers Association ($325K); Cisco ($325K); eBay ($315K); Nexenta Systems, Inc. ($300K); A&E Television Networks ($280K); The Vancouver Board of Trade ($275K); Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal ($275K); and Cardiovascular Research Foundation ($275K).

Does this mean she ALSO is owned by A&E and all of Canadian trade, evidently? No? I don't understand. There must be "consequences" to her being paid all that money from eBay and the Cardiovascular Research Foundation right?

She gave four speeches to tinePublic Inc (another Canadian entity), so surely that must trump all of the others. You know what they do? Nothing. They just book speeches (ironically starting their business by booking Bill Rancic, the first season winner of The Apprentice).

But, I mean, she got paid so the "consequences" of those payments must just automatically be that tinePublic Inc owns Hillary Clinton and can instruct her--in spite of the fact that she's a millionaire (from her own books, too, no less)--to do their bidding any time they want. She is powerless to stop them because paid speech=pay off.

I mean, come on, right? It just is, dude. It just is. Don't be so naive.

 

[PyramidHead]

Act... I lost count



Read a little into the article, however:

“Frankly,” Sanders continued, “the American people are sick and tired of subsidizing the greed of some of the largest and most profitable corporations in this country.”

Sanders was invited to speak as a proxy for Walmart worker Cat Davis, a leader of the pro-worker group United for Respect. It was Davis’ proposal that Sanders pitched.

Sanders called out Walmart’s CEO for the “grotesque level of income and wealth inequality,” noting that Doug McMillon makes 1,000 times more than the average Walmart employee. Sanders said the company had a profit last year of nearly $10 billion, paid McMillon more than $20 million in compensation and authorized $20 billion in stock buybacks to benefit its wealthiest stockholders.

Invitations aren't invitations unless they come from upper management apparently

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

So, now you're upset that Politico is running a decidedly pro-Sanders story that depicts him as a fearless maverick taking on no less a giant than Walmart and accusing the CEO to his face of "starvation wages" in front of their shareholders?



And, no, an "invitation" from a Walmart employee to pitch his idea for him is not the same thing as being invited by the Walmart board to talk to their shareholders during their annual shareholders meeting. That would be like me showing up to your birthday party because your dogwalker "invited" me. Even if your dogwalker were invited to your party and you considered him to be the very best of people and your bestest bestie of all the besties, he still wouldn't have permission/authority to invite me to your party.

 

[PyramidHead]

Exhibit 394: Fun with Math (part 1 - the transitive property of opinion polls)



Fun with Math (part 4 - using "millions" to describe 8 million is misleading)

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Since when does "subsidized" mean free? People at public Universities still often take on plenty of debt, and money remains a huge barrier to many from getting a higher education.

That's even true up here in Canada, where the vast majority of schools are public, and subsidized moreso than in the US.

 

[PyramidHead]

More fun with "fact" checking:



The article is literally saying: Bernie is wrong that 3 people own more than the bottom half, because the bottom half don't actually own anything when you take into account how much they owe, therefore things are actually much, much worse than the statistic he cited, and somehow this casts Bernie as disingenuous

We once gave Sanders Three Pinocchios when he asserted that the six wealthiest people had more wealth than the half of the world’s population. That was an even more problematic comparison, and we said at the time it was better to focus on inequality within a country.

Bernie: [focuses on inequality within a country]

WaPo: not especially meaningful, as people without wealth don't actually count as people

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

"So the comparison is not especially meaningful."

should read

"So the comparison is even worse than it sounds."

That is a particularly odd fact check.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

The article is literally saying

Not what you mischaracterize it as saying.

Bernie is wrong that 3 people own more than the bottom half

Correct, because people in the bottom half do, in fact, "own" assets, it's just that the economists Sanders gets this shit from include the amount of debt those people also have and draw a net conclusion.

Iow, I can have a million in stocks, but if I also have a million in credit card/mortgage/school debt/personal business loans, etc, then the economists (and subsequently Sanders), would say I don't own any assets. I have a million in stocks and a home, it's just that I also have debt, so on paper and for the selective purposes of making such misleading headline grabbing campaign slogans, that part isn't made clear.

This is precisely why Sanders campaign slogan (that he evidently still keeps repeating) is such misleading bullshit, because the economists he took that from (Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman) broke that down in a very different way.

Here's a copy of the report where Sanders originally got his slogan. They state categorically:

Let us first define the concept of wealth that we consider in this paper. Wealth is the current market value of all the assets owned by households net of all their debts.

So the way they (and subsequently Sanders) define "wealth" is net of debt. You can have eight homes around the world, but if they're all mortgaged and you also hold some credit card debt or student debt--regardless of your ability to pay your monthly nut--then you have no wealth in their calculations, which is absurd.

What they also pointed out that never gets mentioned:

The increase in wealth concentration is due to the surge of top incomes combined with an increase in saving rate inequality.

So it's about top income being reinvested/saved and bottom 90% not saving/investing their money. They go into further detail (emphasis mine):

The second key result involves the dynamics of the bottom 90% wealth share. There is a widespread view that a key structural change in the US economy has been the rise of middle- class wealth since the beginning of the twentieth century, in particular because of the rise of pensions and home ownership rates. And indeed our results show that the bottom 90% wealth share gradually increased from 20% in the 1920s to a high of 35% in the mid-1980s. But in a sharp reversal of past trends, the bottom 90% wealth share has fallen since then, to about 23% in 2012. Pension wealth has continued to increase but not enough to compensate for a surge in mortgage, consumer credit, and student debt. The key driver of the declining bottom 90% share is the fall of middle-class saving, a fall which itself may partly owe to the low growth of middle-class income, to financial deregulation leading to some forms of predatory lending, or to growing behavioral biases in the saving decisions of middle-class households.

Clear? If not, there's more:

Our definition of wealth includes all pension wealth—whether held on individual retirement accounts, or through pension funds and life insurance companies—with the exception of Social Security and unfunded defined benefit pensions.

So, again, if you have an IRA that's got a million invested, but you also have a house with a mortgage of a million, regardless of whether or not you can pay your monthly mortgage payments no problem at all, they aren't counting either the house as equity or your IRA. The mortgage is considered debt and therefore it cancels out the value of your IRA for the purposes of their (and therefore Sanders) calculations.

If I owned a home worth a million dollars, had a job that allowed me to pay the monthly premium on it with no problems and I had a million in an IRA, there's no way in hell anyone would or should consider me in the bottom 90%. Yet Saez and Zucman do, which means Sanders does as well.

They continue:

For the bottom 90%, average wealth is $84,000, which corresponds to a share of total wealth of 22.8%. The next 9% (top 10% minus top 1%), families with net worth between $660,000 and $4 million, hold 35.4% of total wealth. The top 1%—1.6 million families with net assets above $4 million—owns close to 42% of total wealth and the top 0.1%—160,700 families with net assets above $20 million—owns 22% of total wealth, about as much as the bottom 90%. The top 0.1% wealth share is about as large as the top 1% income share in 2012 (from the results of Piketty and Saez (2003)).

Get that? So the campaign slogan of "the top one-tenth of one percent owns about as much as the bottom ninety percent" is based on the misleading notion that there is a total or finite amount of wealth (there isn't) and that, one group "owns" 22% of it, while another group "owns" 22.8% of it, so they are about equal.

But I could just as easily take those exact same percentages and say, "The bottom 90% own more wealth than the top one-tenth of one percent!" The bottom "own" 22.8%; the top .1 "own" 22%, so my statement is just as "true" as Sanders' claim.

In regard to the bottom 90%, where the "average wealth is $84,000" they further break that down:

The second key result of our analysis involves the dynamics of the bottom 90% wealth share. The bottom half of the distribution always owns close to zero wealth on net. Hence, the bottom 90% wealth share is the same as the share of wealth owned by top 50-90% families— what can be described as the middle class.
...
The share of wealth owned by the middle class has followed an inverted-U shape evolution: it first increased from the early 1930s to the 1980s, peaked in the mid-1980s, and has continuously declined since then (Figure 8, bottom panel). The large rise in the bottom 90% share from 16% in the early 1930s to 35% in the mid-1980s was driven by the accumulation of housing wealth, and more importantly pension wealth. Pension wealth was almost non-existent at the beginning of the twentieth century. It first developed in the form of defined benefits plans, then from the 1980s in the form of defined contribution plans such as IRAs and 401(k)s. The decline in the bottom 90% wealth share since the mid-1980s owes to a fall in the net housing and fixed income (net of non-mortgage debt) components. The net housing wealth of the bottom 90% accounted for about 15% of total household wealth from the 1950s to the 1980s, while it now accounts foabout 5–6% only. In turn, the decline in the net housing and net fixed income wealth of bottom 90% families is due to a rise in debts—mortgages, student loans, credit card and other debts. On aggregate, household debt increased from the equivalent of 75% of national income in the mid-1980s to 135% of national income in 2009 and, despite some deleveraging in the wake of the Great Recession, still amounts to close to 110% of national income in 2012. Since about 90% of (non-mortgage) debt belongs to the bottom 90% of the wealth distribution, the upsurge in debt has had a large effect on the bottom 90% wealth share. It has more than offset the increase of pension wealth, and as result, in 2012 the bottom 90% share is as low as in 1940.

Strikingly, average real wealth of bottom 90% families is no higher in 2012 than in 1986. As Figure 9 shows, the average bottom 90% wealth rose a lot during the late 1990s tech-boom and the mid-2000s housing bubble, peaking at $130,000 dollars (in 2010 prices) in 2006, but it then collapsed to about $85,000 in 2009. Middle-class wealth has not yet recovered from the financial crisis: in 2012 it is still as low—even slightly lower—than in 2009. Despite an average growth rate of wealth per family of 1.9% per year, for 90% of U.S. families wealth has not grown at all over the 1986-2012 period. This situation contrasts with the dynamics of the average wealth of the top 1%, which was almost multiplied by 3 from the mid-1980s (about $5 million) to 2012 ($14 million), fell by about 20% from mid-2007 to mid-2009, but quickly recovered thereafter.

And in regard to what is causing the rise at the top:

Top wealth shares have followed a marked U-shaped evolution since the early twentieth century. As shown by Figure 6, the top 10% wealth share peaked at 84% in the late 1920s, then dropped down to 63% in the mid-1980s, and has been gradually rising ever since then, to 77.2% in 2012. The rising share of the top 10% is uncontroversial. In the SCF, the top 10% share is very similar in both level and trends to the one we obtain by capitalizing income tax returns (Bricker et al., 2014; Kennickell, 2009b). According to our estimates, all of the rise in the top decile is due to the rise of the very top groups. While the top 10% wealth share has increased by 13.6 percentage points since its low point in 1986, the top 1% share has risen even more (+ 16.7 points from 1986 to 2012), so that the top 10-1% wealth share has declined by 3.1 points (Figure 7, top panel). In turn, most of the rise in the top 1% wealth share since 1986 owes to the increase in the top 0.1% share (+ 12.7 points from 1986 to 2012, see bottom panel of Figure 7) and in the top 0.01% wealth share (+ 7.8 percentage points from 1986 to 2012).

What contributed to the disparity:

Wealth concentration has increased particularly strongly during the Great Recession of 2008- 2009 and in its aftermath. The bottom 90% share fell between mid-2007 (28.4%) and mid-2008 (25.4%) because of the crash in housing price. The recovery was then uneven: over 2009-2012, real wealth per family declined 0.6% per year for the bottom 90%, while it increased at an annual rate of 5.9% for the top 1% and 7.9% for the top 0.1% (see Appendix Table B3).At the very top end of the distribution, wealth is now as unequally distributed as in the 1920s. In 2012, the top 0.01% wealth share (fortunes of more than $110 million dollars belonging to the richest 16,000 families) is 11.2%, as much as in 1916 and more than in 1929. Further down the ladder, top wealth shares, although rising fast, are still below their Roaring Twenties peaks. The top 0.1% share is still about 2.8 points lower in 2012 than in 1929 (22.0% vs. 24.8%), and the top 1% share about 9.6 points lower (41.8% vs. 50.6%). Wealth is getting more concentrated in the United States, but this phenomenon largely owes to the spectacular dynamics of fortunes of dozens and hundreds of million dollars, and much less to the growth in fortunes of a few million dollars. Inequality within rich families is increasing.

The long run dynamics of the very top group we consider—the top 0.01%—are particularly striking. The losses experienced by the wealthiest families from the late 1920s to the late 1970s were so large that in 1980, the average real wealth of top 0.01% families ($44 million in constant 2010 prices) was half its 1929 value ($87 million). It took almost 60 years for the average real wealth of the top 0.01% to recover its 1929 value—which it did in 1988. These results confirm earlier findings of a dramatic reduction in wealth concentration (Kopczuk and Saez (2004)) and capital income concentration (Piketty and Saez (2003)) in the 1930s and 1940s. As these studies suggested, the most likely explanation is the drastic policy changes of the New Deal. The development of very progressive income and estate taxation made it much more diffi 梌 怀ﱠ怀 ぀cult to accumulate and pass on large fortunes. Financial regulation sharply limited the role of finance and the ability to concentrate wealth as in the Gilded age model of the financier-industrialist. Part of these policies were reversed in the 1980s, and we find that top 0.01% average wealth has been growing at a real rate of 7.8% per year since 1988. In 1978, top 0.01% wealth holders were 220 times richer than the average family. In 2012, they are 1,120 times richer.
The growth of wealth at the very top is driven by both corporate equities and fixed income claims, as shown by the top panel of Figure 8. Business assets, pensions, and housing play a negligible role.
...
Besides, the rise in the top 0.01% owes even more to fixed income claims—for which reclassification issues and capital gains are irrelevant—than to corporate equities.In 2012, the fixed income claims—mainly bonds and saving deposits—owned by the top 0.01% amount to 5.4% of total household wealth, up from 1.0% in the mid-1980s.

What's their solution (and concluding paragraphs)?

Encouraging saving for the bottom 90% could also boost middle-class wealth by reducing the growing inequality in saving rates. The best policy to encourage middle-class saving depends on the reasons for the observed drop in the saving rate of bottom 90% families. Middle-class saving might have plummeted because of the lackluster growth in middle class incomes relative to top incomes, fueling demand for credit to maintain relative consumption (see e.g., Bertrand and Morse (2013)). In that case, policies to boost middle-class incomes would probably boost saving as well and powerfully affect the bottom 90% wealth share. Financial deregulation may have expanded borrowing opportunities (through consumer credit, home equity loans, subprime mortgages) and in some cases might have left consumers insufficiently protected against some forms of predatory lending. In that case, greater consumer protection and financial regulation could help increasing middle-class saving. Tuition increases may have increased student loans, in which case limits to university tuition fees may have a role to play.

Yet the fall in the bottom 90% saving rate might also owe to growing behavioral biases in the saving decisions of middle-class households; many individuals, for instance, do not know how to invest optimally and end up spending too much on servicing short-run debt at high interest rates (see e.g. Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). To address these biases, recent work in behavioral economics shows that nudges are more effective than tax incentives (see e.g. Chetty et al., 2014a). A good model for building wealth among the bottom 90% might therefore have three components: (1) nudged long-run savings, (2) directed investment, (3) ability to borrow against oneself. First, a fraction of earnings (e.g., 3 or 4% of pay up to $100,000 of annual earnings) could be directed by default to individual tax-deferred savings accounts that can only be used for retirement, home purchase downpayment (to build housing wealth), and education expenses (to build human capital) as in the existing automatic IRAs proposals. Second, such accounts could be invested in a broad fund delivering a rate of return r close to the global return on capital, ensuring that even modest accounts earn substantial returns. Third, individuals would be allowed to borrow (up to some level) against their savings account for any expense at an interest rate above r, but interest payments would be credited back to the account so that individuals e↵ectively borrow against themselves (Mullainathan and Shafir, 2013). Tax refunds (or extra tax withholding) could be used to ensure repayment and keep default to a minimum.

I don't recall Sanders ever blaming the "90%" (which is really the top 50-90%) for not saving or investing their money and I sure as shit have never heard him encourage the conclusion his favorite economists came to; that we should "nudge" them to invest in an IRA-type savings account.

So, the whole shooting match here is a combination of the top .1% investing their income primarily in the bond market and earning a modest, but consistent 3-5% return over the past thirty years, while my side of Gen X basically said "eat the rich" and fuck you to the idea of saving or investing (because we all thought we'd die by the magic age of 27 and/or were living a "Say Anything" punk ethos) and just got into serious credit card debt/mortgage debt/student loan debt, while at the same time not saving or investing any of our money during the same time period (emphasis mine):

average real wealth of bottom 90% families is no higher in 2012 than in 1986. As Figure 9 shows, the average bottom 90% wealth rose a lot during the late 1990s tech-boom and the mid-2000s housing bubble, peaking at $130,000 dollars (in 2010 prices) in 2006, but it then collapsed to about $85,000 in 2009. Middle-class wealth has not yet recovered from the financial crisis: in 2012 it is still as low—even slightly lower—than in 2009.
...
Over the 1986-2012 period, the wealth of top 1% wealth holders grew at 3.9% per year on average, much more than average wealth (1.9%) and bottom 90% wealth (0.1%). The growth of income was also unequal, but not as much. The annual saving rate of the bottom 90% has been extremely low since 1986 (0% on average) while the saving rate of the top 1% has been very high (36% on average). Asset price e↵ects were positive across the distribution, but roughly neutral. These results underscore that the key drivers of the rise in wealth inequality have been the surge in income inequality combined to an increase in saving rate inequality—and in particular the collapse of the saving rate of the bottom 90%.
...
The Forbes 400 list have been used to estimate very top wealth shares (see e.g. Kopczuk and Saez, 2004). As displayed on Figure 13, the Forbes 400 richest list from Forbes Magazine shows a sharp increase in the share of total wealth going to the top 400 (normalized for population growth) from 1% in the early 1980s to over 3% in 2012-3. Hence, the top 400 accounts for 2 percentage points of the increase in the top wealth shares.55 As shown in the figure, this tripling is roughly on par with the tripling of our top 0.01% wealth share from 3.5% to 11% over the same period.

And in that time period, while we who didn't save/invest, saw a HUGE market surge under Bill Clinton, but also a HUGE housing market crash under Bush, thus causing a severe debt driven (on paper) disparity. And THAT is what is accounting for all of these highly misleading statements about "inequality."

ETA: What also is never mentioned by Sanders is the fact that the bond market consists of municipal bonds as well, which translates into money from the top .1% being invested in cities, states and federal government. They are, in fact, the most stable of the bonds--which is why anyone invests in them--because they are backed by government.

But saying something like, "The average middle class American--in spite of being worth around $84,000--isn't fiscally responsible enough to invest for their future, so we should nudge them into mandatory 401K-style investing of a small portion of their paychecks and teach them about the perils of credit card debt," isn't as sexy as blaming people who invested their money three decades ago in the low yield, but stable bond market for having reaped the benefits.

Oh, and let's constantly misuse the word "inequality" (is there a financial equality?) and the idea that there is a finite wealth pie that can only be sliced up in certain pieces and once that's done, nobody else can ever "own" anything.

My piece of pie has been taken by the rich!!!

Plus, there's absolutely nothing that can be done about any of this other than to do what Sanders' own economists recommend; require that middle class citizens to save and invest their money.