Maybe that should read “hillarious” results?
A video of her answer to the question of how she squares the reality of her rank as “one of the top earners in this country” with her populist spiel was captured in a tweet by by Bill O’Keefe:
Hillary becomes a bobble head pic.twitter.com/JBtm9zUcoo
— Bill O’Keefe (@DefendWallSt) May 19, 2015
Clinton’s answer — which boils down essentially to “Bubba and I are blessed and grateful but will not forget our humble roots” — might fly as long as nobody reminds her of a comment she made on Apr. 12, when she groused about how much money the average CEO in America earn when compared with what rank-and-file workers pull down. She told a roomful of Iowans, “There’s something wrong when CEOs make 300 times more than the American worker.”
As James Taranto pointed out yesterday, that claim isn’t entirely true — at least not for the average CEO:
[D]ata from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that “the average pay for America’s 250,000 chief executives was only $181,000. So the CEO-to-worker pay ratio for the average CEO compared to the average worker is only about 4 [and not 300].
Taranto then went ahead and crunched the numbers for Hill and Bill:
According to the Census Bureau, the median household income in 2009-13 was $53,046. The Clintons took in 339 times that amount in speaking fees alone [or about $18 million]. (The figure would be higher if we included other sources of income, especially Mrs. Clinton’s more than $5 million in book royalties).
Someone earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour would have to work 2.48 million hours — or about 1,240 years at 40 hours a week with two weeks’ vacation — to take in gross pay of $18 million. To put it another way, a couple working 2,000 hours a year each — considerably more time than the Clintons’ speeches too — would have to earn $4,500 an hour to reach $18 million.
It’s one thing if Hillary Clinton is going to bemoan the plight of the middle class. It’s another if she’s going to do it by attacking the rich.
