Being a millionaire today does not have the same cachet it did say 20 years ago. Still, even by today’s standards, earning $1+ million in one year is pretty darn good, especially for a socialist like Bernie Sanders.
As NRO’s Jim Geraghty points out, though, Bernie’s $1 million pales in comparison to Hillary’s $14 million deal for her memoir Hard Choices and is downright pathetic next to Mr. and Mrs. Obama’s record-setting $60 million deal for their twin memoirs. Bernie did best New York’s Andrew Cuomo, who was offered only $700,00 for his memoir.
Other than making gobs of money from book publishers, the thread that links the four, each of whom has made a career out of denouncing the greed of others, is that each tends not to think of him or herself as greedy, writes Mr. Geraghty.
- Hillary Clinton: “There are rich people everywhere, and yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries.”
- Barack Obama: “I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”
- Andrew Cuomo crowed that he “took on greedy bankers.”
- Bernie Sanders denounced the “overall culture of greed that is plaguing our nation . . . which loudly proclaims that the goal of human existence is the personal gain of the individual at the expense of everyone and everything else”
In a tweet earlier this year, Mr. Sanders asked, “How many yachts do billionaires need? How many cars do they need?” Then, “Give us a break. You can’t have it all.” This from the Senator whose four-bedroom vacation home sits on 500 feet of Lake Champlain beachfront. By Bernie’s standards then, owning a yacht or two is objectionable, but owning a house or two (or three) is a class warrior’s just due.
“Overpaid,” “undervalued,” “greedy” — these are all value judgments in the eye of the beholder. That wealthy Democratic politicians really enjoy demonizing the mote in somebody else’s eye while excusing and dismissing the beam in their own is not surprising, of course — there’s always been a political benefit to demonizing the rich. But their hypocrisy is at very least good reason to ignore them the next time they try hustling us with talk of class warfare.
Read more from Jim Geraghty here.
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