It’s Not Very Much (Relatively)

Hey, he is actu­ally right. When you think about it, $375,000 is not really very much money. Well not really very much com­pared to $21,000,000. But for cry­ing out loud, just how out of touch with nor­mal peo­ple is some­one who would say “For the past 10 years, my income comes over­whelm­ingly from invest­ments made in the past, rather than ordi­nary income or earned annual income. I got a lit­tle bit of income from my book, but I gave that all away. Then, I get speak­ers fees from time to time, but not very much.” Well, not very much is rel­a­tive. Accord­ing to his per­sonal finan­cial dis­clo­sure, from Feb­ru­ary 2010 to Feb­ru­ary 2011, Mitt Rom­ney earned almost $375,000 in speak­ing fees.

But then this pales com­pared to Mitt Romney’s total income

“The tax returns, which Rom­ney had stead­fastly refused to release until now, show he earned $45m over the past two years, and paid just $6.2m in taxes, a rate of about 15%. Most of the income was derived from invest­ments from his $200m-plus fortune.

…

In 2010, Rom­ney earned more than $21m and paid $3m in tax, a rate of less than 14%. He expects to pay $3.2m in taxes on his 2011 income, a rate of 15.4%.”

So the speaker’s fees made up less than 2% of Mitt Romney’s income. For the aver­age U.S. fam­ily income of about $60,000, 2% would be only $1,200. I hate to tell Mitt Rom­ney, but if he walked up to an aver­age Amer­i­can fam­ily and handed them $1,200 in cash they would not say “it is not very much”. So maybe what I said back in the open­ing is a bit of an exag­ger­a­tion. But then if you make $21,000,000 a year, $375,000 is prob­a­bly pocket change. I really have trou­ble imag­in­ing how it feels.

Mitt Rom­ney has proven he is out of touch with the finan­cial con­di­tions of real Amer­i­cans with his words. What about other lead­ing can­di­dates for the Office of Pres­i­dent of the United States?

“Newt Gin­grich revealed at the week­end that he paid nearly $1m in income tax, a rate of about 31%.

The Oba­mas had a joint income of $1.7m in 2010, much of it from sales of the president’s two pop­u­lar books. They paid 26% in tax.”

They seem down­right poor com­pared to Mitt Rom­ney. But I think most of us would accept their income very will­ingly. I will make no other com­ments on the stand­ing of the two can­di­dates, or any of the oth­ers. On this par­tic­u­lar topic none have been quite as bla­tantly out of touch as Mitt Romney.

But we need to accept the fact that we shall prob­a­bly never see a per­son rise from a back­ground as hum­ble as Abra­ham Lin­coln reach the Oval Office again. Time and pol­i­tics have changed to the point where only those who have a cer­tain level of per­sonal wealth can play the game.

Is Still Here