The all-American working man demeanor of Tim Walz—Kamala Harris’s new running mate—looks like it’s not just an act.
Financial disclosures show Tim Walz barely has any assets to his name. No stocks, bonds, or even property to call his own. Together with his wife, Gwen, his net worth is $330,000, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal citing financial disclosures from 2019, the year after he became Minnesota governor.
With that kind of meager nest egg, he would be more or less in line with the median figure for Americans his age (he’s 60), and even poorer than the average. One in 15 Americans is a millionaire, a recent UBS wealth report discovered.
Meanwhile, the gross annual income of Walz and his wife, Gwen, amounted to $166,719 before tax in 2022, according to their joint return filed that same year. Walz is even entitled to earn more than the $127,629 salary he receives as state governor, but he has elected not to receive the roughly $22,000 difference.
“Walz represents the stable middle class,” tax lawyer Megan Gorman, who authored a book on the personal finances of U.S. presidents, told the paper.
Socialistic polices get a bad rap because of the cold war-era communist=atheist association. Theoretically, you can reframe vast social safety nets by the government as citizens (read: also Christians) coordinating charity to be distributed more effectively. This is a bottom-up approach that has the common person’s buy-in. The reasonable criticism of the same policies lies in the top-down, legislation by fiat enactment of policy. No different than, let’s say, Netflix arbitrarily raising their prices without your input.
To be fair the reason most eastern european socialist movements were militantly atheist is that they had to deal with the Russian Orthodox church as it functioned in the late Russian Empire (a willing tool completely subservient to the czar that helped him oppress the people and opposed literally any form of progress). It was real bad
I mean yeah it’s incidentally also how it functions in the modern Russian federation (quelle surprise). But that’s not relevant to 20th century US anticommunist propaganda