Few things in life are more fascinating than other people’s money. As the New Hampshire phase of the presidential campaign draws to a close, those of us who are tired of comparing the details of Jeb Bush’s plan for medical savings accounts with Bernie Sanders’s plan to enroll everybody in Medicare (as if I didn’t feel old enough already) have a better way to stay involved in the democratic process: nosing around the candidates’ finances. John Kiernan, a reporter for Wallethub.com, has chosen to immerse himself in financial disclosure statements, and who can blame him. Which sounds better to you: scraping the frost off your eyelashes in the Nashua Best Western or warming yourself by the fires of envy and schadenfreude?
Envy is the motive force behind the economic policies of both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, as it has been for nearly every Democratic presidential candidate since William Jennings Bryan. Envy is also the reaction many voters will enjoy as they confront Mrs. Clinton’s financial affairs. The figures are familiar enough but bear repeating.
Kieran reminds us that according to the disclosure forms, which list dollar amounts only within a broad range, Mrs. Clinton total assets might be as low as $11 million but likely hover closer to $52 million. (Her two houses alone are worth $8 million.) Her cash reserves rise as high as $25 million. As an awestruck world has discovered, she has piled up her treasure in part by making high-pitched speeches before audiences of people who are almost as rich as she is. Her speaking fees average (Kiernan calculates) $231,000 per appearance. Her overall income from speeches totaled more than $11 million. Ira Gershwin said it first: “Fighting for progressive change for the hard-working middle class is nice work if you can get it.”
Only Ben Carson rivals Mrs. Clinton as speechmaking catnip. His total assets range between $14 million and $44 million, and they have been goosed considerably by his own speaking fees, which Kiernan calculates have risen 72 percent since he moved from being a lowly brain surgeon to a man who desperately wants to be president. (That’s nice work too.) Jeb Bush does pretty well, too. He made more than $90,000 giving two speeches to a children’s hospital in Florida and a church in Houston. Given how slowly Bush talks, that might amount to only $10,000 an hour, but still. Donald Trump, of course, doesn’t need to give paid speeches to maintain his fabled fortune. Indeed, he would be the envy of every red-blooded American if it weren’t for the hair and the scary wife.
But what about that fabled fortune? Trump’s net worth, according to Kiernan, is not nearly as impressive as Trump often suggests. His disclosure form runs to 92 pages, but this seems less a matter of financial necessity than incontinent self-love – the man has companies the way a cat has kittens. In any case, it doesn’t show the “billions and billions” that Trump has airily referred to. Indeed, if the high end of his liabilities — $450,750,000 – were marked against the low end of his assets — $1.42 billion – the Trump billions don’t even cross the $1 billion mark. Loser.
Still, figures such as those found in the disclosure forms of Clinton and Bush, of Carson and even Ted Cruz, are extraordinary – surely enough to inspire any young dreamer to a life of public service. But then we bump up against the financial realities of the two laggards in the field. These may not be sufficiently pathetic to rouse warm feelings of schadenfreude – even Marco Rubio probably owns assets worth more than $750,000, a sum that would dazzle most Americans. Yet they do carry a suggestion of ordinary life missing from the finances of the other candidates.
As wallethub.com puts it in an unfortunate turn of phrase, “Bernie Sanders brings up the rear, asset-wise.” In my opinion, his total assets (probably three quarters of $1 million) are unbecoming a socialist, but they are refreshing in a presidential candidate. But that’s not the most interesting thing about Sanders’s finances. Looking over the list of his holdings in more than a dozen stock funds – from the VALIC Social Awareness Fund to the VALIC Socially Responsible Fund – we find, as Kiernan puts it, “as much as 97 percent of Bernie Sanders’ assets are in his wife’s name.”
Ninety seven percent! Even Mrs. Mitty gave her henpecked Walter a greater say in the household finances. Think, New Hampshire! Do we really want to entrust the federal government’s money to a man whose wife won’t even trust him with his own?
