Hillary: I'm Not "Truly Well Off"

She and Bill Clinton have $50 million between them.

But she's not truly well off. The real Richie Riches start at 50 million and one dollar, I guess.

CNN anchors mocked Hillary Clinton’s published remarks Monday that she is not “truly well off,” with Early Start‘s Miguel Marquez saying, “Really?” as co-host Alison Kosik openly laughed.

The actual remarks are here:

In an interview with Britain's Guardian newspaper, Clinton was asked whether she could be a credible champion for fighting income inequality in the United States despite her wealth.

"But they don’t see me as part of the problem," she told the paper, "because we pay ordinary income tax, unlike a lot of people who are truly well off, not to name names; and we’ve done it through dint of hard work." The Guardian wrote that Clinton let off "another burst of laughter" in answering the question, suggesting that she found the question "painful."

Hillary Clinton is attempting to draw a distinction between "earned" wealth -- derived from actively working and what I guess she and Thomas Piketty would call unearned wealth, gained from passive investment.

There are several problems here, beginning with the notion, simultaneously Marxist and Medieval, that investors are some sort of predatory class that hurt people by giving them money to start up their businesses.

But even by Hillary's own Medieval-Marxist terms, her distinction is false. First of all, she of course has a lot of her money invested and owns a lot of stock. She is not using that money to buy farmland and work the land.

Second of all, is Hillary really "working" for her money? She and Bill get $500,000 or even a million dollars for giving a 30-40 minute speech.

Is that "working"? Does a roofer sweltering under the sun nailing hot black tiles all day think that Hillary is really "earning" that $500,000?

Or would that roofer suspect that Hillary Clinton is actually just farming influence and status?

posted by Ace at 02:05 PM

| Access Comments