Wobbly Claims Abound In Political Debates

By John Hood

RALEIGH — “You are entitled to your opinion,” the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said. “But you are not entitled to your own facts.”

Although I agree with his underlying sentiment, distinguishing opinion from fact is notoriously difficult in practice. As human beings, it is in our nature to interpret information in the context of what we already know — or think we know. Challenges to our cognitive capacities abound, such as confirmation bias (lending credence to such information when it comports with what we already believe and discounting evidence to the contrary).

For 40 years now, I’ve been opining about politics and public policy while also trying to lean against my cognitive biases. I know I’ve sometimes fallen short. Still, if one doesn’t even attempt to distinguish between claims of fact and arguments of opinion, constructive dialogue devolves into shouting matches.

Here are three policy-relevant claims of fact I believe are well supported. If you believe otherwise, feel free to let me know and I’ll explain my sources or do more research.

First, as I have pointed out several times in the past, it is not true that North Carolina manufacturing is dead, dying, or greatly diminished. According to the latest Bureau of Economic Analysis data, companies in our state produced $103 billion worth of manufactured goods in 2025. That is 18% higher than North Carolina’s manufacturing output in 1997 ($88 billion in 2025 dollars).

Yes, it is also true that fewer North Carolinians work in manufacturing than did so in 1997, and that manufacturing now makes up a smaller share of the state’s gross domestic product. But these facts aren’t inconsistent with the fact that our manufacturing sector has grown. It has gotten more productive — through investments in physical, intellectual, and human capital — while service industries have grown faster than goods-producing ones.

Second, it is also widely asserted that, over the past few decades, the rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer, and the middle class taken in on the chin. Only the first of these claims is correct. The richest quintile of households has enjoyed sizable, inflation-adjusted gains in income and wealth. But so has every quintile! The growth rates aren’t identical, to be sure, and depending on the model used there has been either a slight or moderate widening of gaps in income and wealth. That doesn’t mean the poor got poorer, however. Each group has enjoyed economic progress.

As for the fate of the middle class, if you measure it in a consistent fashion over time, you’ll indeed find fewer households in the category than before — but that’s mostly because households previously designated “middle class” have enjoyed such large gains that they are now “upper middle class.”

When these trends are properly measured, “the middle class does shrink,” explained Scott Winship, an American Enterprise Institute scholar who’s coauthored several comprehensive studies of the phenomenon, “but the group that’s poorer than middle class also shrinks and the entire movement is upwards and the upper middle class actually doubles in size.”

Here’s a third factual claim I stand behind even though I know partisans on both sides won’t find it particularly compelling or useful: the effectiveness of North Carolina’s public schools is about average for American education as a whole.

Until fairly recently, that wasn’t the case. Using the only valid measure available across nearly all jurisdictions in the country, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores adjusted for student background, North Carolina’s public schools used to rank in the top 10 in academic effectiveness. Then came COVID-era school closures. Using 2024 scores, we are now tied for 21st with Wisconsin and Idaho. The top 10 states in public-school effectiveness are Mississippi, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Texas, Indiana, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Illinois, and Kentucky. The bottom 10 are Michigan, Missouri, Arizona, Hawaii, Vermont, Maine, Delaware, West Virginia, Alaska, and Oregon.

As far as I can tell, these are the facts. What do they mean? Opinions vary!

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).