[Brices Crossroads]

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.

[onyx]

GOOD post, BC. As you know, the Governor of Texas has his "net worth shielded" in a blind trust, and hasn't filed his income taxes, yet. Perry became a millionaire while serving in office

[CharlesWayneCT]

Not a single one of the deals you presented made him "millions". IN fact, we seem to be talking about 3 deals, the biggest of which was the $780,000 deal which involved a single property which he bought for $315,000 and sold at the height of the market for $1.1 million. That deal was investigated, nothing was found. THe purchase and sale price were fair market price, he didn't get any special offers for buying or selling, the purchase wasn't secret, the sale was public.

Pay to Play -- giving someone money to do what you want. Grass Roots DOnations -- giving money to a candidate who you expect to do what you want.

Every donor gives to a candidate because they expect something back. How many times do we read here at FR "The stupid republicans stabbed us in the back on that vote -- I WANT MY DONATIONS BACK". How is that not "I paid them to do what I want, and then they didn't, so I want a refund?"

That game is a liberal's game, and if we try to play it, they will burn every one of our candidates, because the media will NEVER ONCE label the millions of dollars of union funding for democrats as "crony capitalism", or say it's pay-to-play.

But it's funny to see this attack on the guy who seems to have the lowest net worth of ANY of our candidates.

Mitt Romney - $264 million
Herman Cain -- $18 million
Michelle Bachmann - $1.05 million
Newt Gingrich - $20 million
Jon Huntsmann - $11 million - $74 million
Rick Perry - $1.1 million
Rick Perry - $1 million
Rick Santorum - $2.5 million
Sarah Palin - $12 million

So as you can see, Rick Perry is tied with Michelle Bachmann for the lowest net worth among the announced candidates and Sarah Palin. Going after him for profiting from public service (when he made his money on unrelated real estate deals for which he has the qualification to perform well), when he's 61 years old and has a little over a million in net worth, is silly.

Again, every link I find says 1.1 million, except David Frum who says 2.8 million; the fact-checkers in Texas reported 1.1 million in 2010, is it possible his real estate holdings jumped 1.7 million in 1 year?

Maybe because he has done such a good job in Texas that their economy is coming back. As most of his money is in a blind trust, he has no control of how it makes money, nor can anybody claim he is making money by selling influence. But you could say that he is profiting from his public service -- he's the Governor, and he's made things so good in Texas that he made money in real estate. I don't think that's a bad thing.

[CharlesWayneCT]

BTW, people actually spend money. So just because you make $780 thousand in a real estate deal doesn't mean that your net worth goes up by $780 thousand.

First, as investment property, this doesn't fall under exclusions -- he had to pay the long-term capital gains federal tax.

Second, If he took his family on a big vacation to celebrate the sale, he could easily have spent $10,000 or more.

When you are talking about making less than a million dollars, that is within the spending parameters for many people. If he bought a $1 million dollar home with the money, that home may have dropped to $0.5 million, wiping out the entire gain after taxes.