Democrats who have been a bit too obscenely eager to damn Mitt Romney as Mr. Moneybags may want to reconsider. The media has spent a great deal of time touting the claim that Romney would be the richest president in half a century. But Romney’s net worth of approximately 200 million dollars would not even make him the richest senator. Senators Kohl, Warner and Kerry all beat out Romney in the wealth sweepstakes. And they’re all Democrats. For all the news stories about his wealth, if Romney ran for Congress, he wouldn’t even make it as the wealthiest member of the House of Representatives.
If the Democrats really believe that wealth is a disqualification for public office, why do they keep selecting some of the wealthiest senators in the country? If Romney wins then he may become the wealthiest president in half a century, but if Kerry had won the honor would have gone to him.
The combined net worth of Obama and his cabinet in 2010 was around 150 million dollars. Slate Magazine sneeringly put up a calculator offering readers a chance to see how long it would take Mitt Romney to make the same amount of money that they did. The annual income figure that Slate used for Romney was 21.6 million dollars. Obama’s tax return showed him earning 5.5 million dollars. Romney’s annuals weren’t that much more than the 16 million that the Clintons took him in one year as part of the over 100 million dollars they amassed since Bill left office. There were no Slate calculators to let people figure out how long it would take Obama or Clinton to earn what they made in one year.
There’s something ridiculous about pretending that 21 million a year is a lot of money, but 5.5 million is a modest income. To most Americans both figures represent a lot more than they make. But then few presidents leave the Oval Office as paupers anyway. Ulysses S. Grant might have gone so badly into debt that he was reduced to poverty, but that’s uncommon today when former presidents have any number of lucrative moneymaking options.
Clinton has a higher net worth than George W. Bush does and every Democratic President has been or ended up wealthier than his Republican predecessor, except Carter who tied Ford. And their wealth is relative. Romney isn’t anywhere in the range of political billionaires like Bloomberg or Meg Whitman who can sink tens of millions of dollars into an election. To put those numbers into context, Bloomberg and Whitman combined spent nearly all of Romney’s net worth on trying to win just two elections.
But the net worth and the political clout of their wealth pale next to George Soros who along with the billionaires of the Shadow Party funded the rise to power of the Democratic Party and its takeover by the left. Soros’ Open Society Institute spends between 400 and 500 million dollars annually. That’s twice Romney’s net worth in a single year being tossed around by the godfather of the Democratic Party
Democrats hoping to use sheer numbers as a talking point may find that those numbers go places they don’t expect and asking the public to adjudicate between millionaires playing class warfare will earn them a shrug and a grunt. The real numbers to be worried about are even bigger than Obama’s millions or Romney’s millions or even Soros’ billions that power the Democratic Party. They are the trillions of dollars in national debt amassed by a class warfare administration that refuses to contemplate spending cuts for anything but the military. And that debt is the monkey on the back of generations living and yet unborn. It’s an anchor around the United States economy and a ticking time bomb waiting to blow up whatever prosperity and stability is achieved this decade.
The federal government spends over 20 billion dollars per work day. Romney’s entire net worth isn’t even 1 percent of the money spent by the federal government in a single day. A higher tax rate for Romney would be no more than a snowflake in the avalanche of federal spending.
If we were to confiscate Romney’s entire fortune, what would that buy us?
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