Partisan anti-Howard Schultz zealotry leads liberals to disparage the poor

This outrage has produced a number of insane — and entirely partisan, mind you, not at all ideologically progressive — attacks against the perfectly boring liberal billionaire businessman. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, claims Schultz is a plutocrat who is trying “to undermine resistance” to President Trump. However, the lowest point so far in the lathery anti-Schultz frenzy that the Left has whipped itself into is the criticism of his completely accurate claim that he’s a “self-made” man.

“Howard Schultz: I’m a self-made billionaire. Also Howard Schultz: The federal government paid for my housing,” tweeted Jamison Foser, who serves currently as a senior adviser to the Tom Steyer-founded political action committee NextGen America.

New York Times magazine’s Nikole Hannah-Jones said elsewhere that “Growing up in government-(i.e. taxpayer) subsidized housing is actually the opposite of making it by yourself. Your fellow Americans put in so your parents could provide you decent housing.” She was re-tweeted in this anti-poor sentiment by no less than MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.

For reference, Shultz’s personal story begins in the projects in Brooklyn, N.Y.

“His father Fred never graduated from high school and held a series of blue-collar jobs including truck driver, factory worker and cab driver. He never made more than $20,000 a year, and with three children to feed, Fred was never able to afford to buy a home,” CNBC reported in 2016.

Schultz went on to graduate from Northern Michigan University, which he was able to attend only because he had a full football scholarship. He was the first person in his family to graduate college. He later went to work for Starbucks in 1982, when there were only four stores. In 1987, he bought the still-tiny chain, which he grew in the following decades into a mega, multibillion-dollar success.

It’s true that Schultz is an extremely wealthy man, but that’s only because he worked for it. He certainly wasn’t handed his wealth and success. He started as a kid from the projects and retired a billionaire innovator of a company with nearly 30,000 shops worldwide.

But don’t you dare call him a “self-made” man!

“No one is self-made,” grumbled economist David Rothschild. “‘Projects in Brooklyn’ are government funded housing. Government also educated him, etc. [Starbucks] thrives because US military ensures the security of our international trade, police/fire protect its buildings, roads/sidewalks transport their customers.”

Lastly, there’s New York Daily News columnist and former Obama administration official Brandon Friedman, who said, “If you ‘grew up in the projects,’ then you’re not ‘self-made.’ The ‘projects’ are taxpayer-funded public housing. Your friends, neighbors, family members and millions of Americans you never met all worked and paid their taxes so that you wouldn’t have to grow up homeless.”

You’re welcome, poor people!

We’re really going to do this? We’re going to stupidly pretend that “self-made” means something other than “I did not inherit my wealth”? It’d be one thing if these critics were aiming to tear down the idea of individualism. It’d be one thing if they sought to underscore a contradiction between Schultz’s personal story and his position on whether social safety nets ought to be eliminated (he hasn’t advocated for this).

But they’re not doing any of those things. Their complaints amount to nothing more than: You’re not “self-made” if you were once poor enough to qualify for government assistance. As New York magazine’s Ezekiel Kweku notes, this is just as stupid as saying, “you’re not self-made, your parents didn’t let you starve to death.”

At this rate, it’s a guarantee we’ll see even dumber attacks on the most vanilla personality ever to mull a presidential bid in the United States. For now, though, dunking on kids from the projects is the low point of the Left’s anti-Schultz freak out.