Posted on 06/27/2014 5:28:18 AM PDT by SJackson
Poor Little Rich Liberals
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On June 27, 2014 @ 12:54 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 9 Comments
No group has been hit harder by the Obama economy than America’s liberals. From Marin County, where bundlers have had to struggle to scrape together a few ten grand bills to attend Obama fundraisers, to Washington D.C., whose bedroom communities now have seven of the ten highest household incomes in the country, poverty is hitting poor rich little liberals hard.
In 2006, Alaska had the highest household income. But voters chose Obama over Palin and these days it’s Maryland because six-figure government consultants on sustainable development and diversity need McMansions to go home to after a long day of team building exercises.
Despite numbers like these, liberals are barely making ends meet. Some like Hillary Clinton are “dead broke”. Forget about a dollar not buying what it used to. Not even a hundred million dollars does. And there’s poor Joe Biden who claimed not to have a savings account or any stocks and bonds. And he doesn’t. He has five savings accounts and eleven investment funds.
But wealth is relative. Despite earning $100 million, Hillary Clinton claims that she isn’t “truly well off”. And if a woman with a colonial mansion for every occasion is, in the words of her adviser, still just “trying to earn a living”, the economy must really be bad.
With income inequality such a hot topic, the Democratic Party’s presidential frontrunners are working hard at pretending to be poor.
If Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden can’t convince Democrats that they’re just one step away from begging for spare change on street corners, Elizabeth Warren is waiting in the wings. After all who better than a Harvard professor who made $429,981 in her last full year of teaching to understand how hard it is to barely get by under income inequality.
Elizabeth Warren has a net worth of around $15 million, making her more working class than Hillary, but less working class than Joe Biden. Like Biden, Elizabeth Warren also isn’t big on investing.
“I realize there are some wealthy individuals – I’m not one of them, but some wealthy individuals who have a lot of stock portfolios,” Warren told an MSNBC host.
Like “Dead Broke” or “Truly Well Off”, “Wealthy Individuals” and “A Lot of Stock Portfolios” are relative terms. Warren only had $8 million in investments. It’s not a lot if you’re a millionaire who, like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, spends a lot of time around billionaires.
When you have twenty bucks in your wallet, a million seems like a lot. But when you have a million and hang around those who have fifty million, it doesn’t seem like so much anymore. And when you earn a hundred million and go to cocktail parties with billionaires, you no longer feel that you are “truly well off”. It’s hard to convince the working class that you “feel their pain” when what you really feel is your pain at having to borrow private jets from your billionaire grocery mogul friend to fly to Africa, instead of being able to buy your own fleet of jets.
There’s nothing wrong with making money, unless you’re a liberal or unless your money comes from dubious sources, such as charging the Boys and Girls Club of Los Angeles $150,000 for a speech (the Clintons), ripping off asbestos victims (Elizabeth Warren) or getting your brother some juicy contracts (Joe Biden).
After rich liberals unleashed class warfare against Mitt Romney, they have been reduced to competing against each other in a game of “Who Is the Poorest Democrat?”
Bill Clinton tried to bail out his wife by rephrasing the question as being which candidate can connect to the plight of ordinary people.
The answer is none of them.
Biden has been in politics for over four decades. Hillary Clinton hasn’t held a non-government job in two decades and most of her work before that was really an extension of her husband’s politics. Elizabeth Warren spent decades in academia.
When Hillary Clinton talks about “working hard” for her money, she means putting her name on books that someone else wrote and reading speeches that someone else wrote to groups that would pay her even if all she did was bark for five hours straight. Bill Clinton may be a compelling and interesting speaker, but no one has ever accused Hillary of either of these things.
Hillary isn’t being paid six figures to appear in front of some trade group to talk about how much she cares about the children of the world because she is a powerful and inspirational speaker. The money is being paid out to buy influence with the likely future president. Hillary’s speaking fees, like her law work, are essentially legal bribes from special interests.
The concentration of wealth around Washington D.C. is not the work of the Tea Party. It certainly isn’t something that the Koch Brothers did. It’s what happens around an imperial capital. It’s not that the rich are getting richer while the poor get poorer; it’s that the politically connected get richer while the politically disconnected get poorer.
The significant division is not along lines of class, but of corruption. The working poor may be suffering, but the politically connected welfare poor have plenty of opportunities to game the system. Most of all it’s the politically disconnected private sector middle class that invests its time in working instead of voting that is sliding down the hole and taking the economy with it.
The radical technocrats of the Democratic Party champion big government policies that concentrate wealth in a smaller number of hands while campaigning against income inequality. They denounce the rich at fundraisers for the rich. They buy mansions so that they can run for higher office and then claim to be dead broke. They create the income inequality they condemn.
Faking poverty isn’t just an election strategy; it’s also protective camouflage as the politicians robbing the country cry poverty.
The Clintons want to enjoy the privileges of their ill-gotten wealth without accepting any of the responsibility. They want to have their mansions and their class warfare. They want to pile up vast fortunes and then talk about the problems of income inequality. They want to have the radical privileges of poverty and the prosperous luxuries of wealth.
The poor little rich liberals have made themselves wealthier and the country poorer. Now they are exploiting the miserable economy that they are responsible for with more class warfare.
They are poor, but not in money. They suffer from severe poverties of honesty, decency and shame. They hardly have a single truth to their name and their poverty is as fake as their concern for the poor.
From St. John Chrysostom, a 4th Century Doctor of the Church
“Should we look to kings and princes to put right the inequalities between rich and poor? Should we require soldiers to come and seize the rich person’s gold and distribute it among his destitute neighbors? Should we beg the emperor to impose a tax on the rich so great that it reduces them to the level of the poor and then to share the proceeds of that tax among everyone? Equality imposed by force would achieve nothing, and do much harm. Those who combined both cruel hearts and sharp minds would soon find ways of making themselves rich again. Worse still, the rich whose gold was taken away would feel bitter and resentful; while the poor who received the gold form the hands of soldiers would feel no gratitude, because no generosity would have prompted the gift. Far from bringing moral benefit to society, it would actually do moral harm. Material justice cannot be accomplished by compulsion, a change of heart will not follow. The only way to achieve true justice is to change people’s hearts first - and then they will joyfully share their wealth.”
I would have to ransack my brain to recall when/if the Clintons EVER spoke a word that was NOT a lie or was NOT so completely self-serving that it WAS a lie!
The cry of poverty should haunt Hillary for the rest of her political life.
This may be the stupidest strategy ever.
the Rockefellers Roosevelts and even Kennedys managed to come across as champions of “the little people”
The Clintons are too nouveau, greedy and crass to pull it off. Breeding (or lack of it) shows
"Honest Graft" as Plunkitt of Tammany Hall explained so well in his book over a hundred years ago.
and in the case of publishers, book royalties are business tax deductable expenses which campaign contributions are not.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
