RUTHFULLY YOURS

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?

Obama proposed spending 200 million dollars on a Portland to Milwaukie light rail line. Milwaukie, a city in Oregon, is less than seven miles away from Portland. You can drive there in 15 minutes. It has a population of 20,000 which comes out to about 200,000 in light rail dollars per person.

In the last five years, over 600 million dollars in payments have been improperly made to dead federal employees. The good news is that Romney’s entire net worth might cover a year of wrongful payments to dead bureaucrats.

USAID spent a mere 90 million dollars to promote hiring and sales among businesses in Pakistan. Thirty million of that was spent to boost Pakistani mango sales. Put together Mitt Romney and Barack Obama’s annual incomes and it still wouldn’t cover the money that the United States spends promoting Pakistani mango sales.

But why sweat the small stuff? There were 125 billion dollars in improper payments made in 2010. Triple the numbers during the Bush administration. The combined fortunes of the Waltons and Koch Brothers would just barely cover the known improper payments made in a single year by the government.

Americans know this. In a poll last year, people estimated that the government wastes 51 cents of every dollar it spends.  When they think about the big money, it’s not the 200 million dollars that someone else has; it’s the 50,000 dollars in national debt that each and every American is on the hook for. A debt that they know is being enlarged without end.

Playing the wealth card is meant to paint Romney as an out of touch elitist, but it is the people who have drowned the nation in a debt that there isn’t enough money to repay who are the out of touch elitists. Michael Moore (estimated net worth 50 million) emphasized repeatedly that the Forbes 400 had a total net worth of over a trillion dollars, while the bottom 60 percent of households have only 1.2 trillion dollars.

What he failed to mention is that 1.2 trillion dollars wouldn’t even cover the annual budget deficit. Put together the wealth of the top 400 and the bottom 60 percent and it wouldn’t even cover the interest on the national debt.

The people responsible for this are the true 1 percent. The 1 percent of government officials, politicians and crony capitalists in the Obama administration who have spent the money of the other 99 percent. Americans may have varying feelings about the rich, but everyone hates a crook.

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