THere are other listings for Perry's net worth (most of which is tied up in a blind trust that he has no control over and which doesn't generally disclose it's value).
David Frum, everybody's favorite conservative (sarcasm), making about the exact same argument against Perry as you do here, claims Perry's net worth is now $2.8 million dollars.
Frum of course isn't attacking Perry because he thinks he's too liberal, quite the opposite. But I wanted to disclose that number as an alternative.
However, Frum gives no evidence for that number, and this link says $1 million, as does every other reference I can find; Frum seems to be an outlier in the Perry net worth guessing-game. Rick Perry: Net worth: $1 million
BTW, when he was a state legislator, that was a part-time job which paid about $7200 a year -- so he wasn't really living off the public for all of his 27 years, unless you consider $7200 a living wage.
As I said, I'm guessing this attack, which was launched first by Bill White the democrat in the 2010 election, and has been resurrected in the past week by lefty blogs and David Frum, will go nowhere, simply because making $1 million in 27 years as a 61-year-old is unremarkable.
And when you look at the details, most of the money came from a couple of very fortunate deals, but deals that were out in the public, and not offered to Perry as exclusives. IN other words, this isn't the case where someone privately sold Perry land which later was found valuable. His two big deals he bought on the open market, they were available for ANYBODY to purchase, just he was smart enough or informed enough to purchase them.
In the one case, the investment was a sound one to begin with, but then Dell (of Dell computers) needed the land to get to public sewers so they paid a pretty penny for it.
Interestingly, the argument there was that somehow Perry knew that Dell would need access to the sewers, but that Dell himself did NOT know he'd need it -- hence why Dell didn't buy the land when Perry did, but rather looked at it two years later.
In the other case, it was a long-term investment where everybody who bought land in the area made a killing, not just Perry. So yes, he did profit off good investment, but not exclusively, everybody who thought it would be a good investment and bought the land made money. And there doesn't appear to be any specific government action that MADE the land suddenly worth more.
But with all of that, he's worth $1 million, or if you believe David Frum, $2.8 million. If he was trading his political connections for fortune, he didn't do a very good job.
Charles, You wasted a decent bit of bandwidth to establish that you don’t know his exact net worth. He has definitely made millions in deals that are not kosher by my standards with legislators and with crony contributors.
These kinds of deals raise an appearance of impropriety. And the fact that he is steering hundred of million of dollars of taxpayer money via the so-called investment fund to his big contributors ought to give you pause as well.
"We've already established *what* you are. Now we're just haggling over the price."
Cheers!