Seeing as politics is always a bunch of self serving in-crowd of rich folks, I’d really like to see this for the previous few presidents to know if this is a unique thing to Trump.
I’m too lazy to keep looking, but here’s a small sampling. Ambassador positions to friendly countries tend to go to friends/donors and not worth comparing. DOGE can’t be compared, as it doesn’t exist. Figures are whatever I found at the top of google, not adjusted for inflation or value the years they were in office. Big enough gap that it didn’t matter. Maybe someone else can check Bush?
2013 Obama - $6M
Secretary of Commerce - Penny Pritzker - $3.6B
Secretary of Education - Arne Duncan - $4.8M
Secretary of Interior - Ken Salazar - $2M
Small Business Administrator - Karen G Mills - “At least” $705,000
NASA Administrator - Charles F Bolden - “At least” $537,000
Thanks for looking into what I’m clearly too lazy to do! A quick lazy Internet search shows that Biden’s cabinet appears to be mostly “only” millionaires according to this.
That article also compares Biden’s to Trump’s previous cabinet. And references Obama’s. I would like to note that framing this all as “measly millionaire” is so disconnected from the remainder of America.
Millionaires seem pretty reasonable, its not surprising for someone who’s presumably had a decades long career to own a house and a bit of savings. If we’re being generous the difference between a billionaire and a millionaire is the same as the difference between a millionaire and someone living in the street, in reality the difference is about a billion dollars.
Except the difference between billionaire and millionaire is considerably more vast than that, and humans are quite poor at understanding that intuitively.
One million seconds is about 11.6 days. One billion seconds is 31.7 years.
It’s an issue when people think of that leap of million to billion as you have, as it greatly discounts how much these leeches have sucked out of working people.
I guess I didn’t emphasize the end of my post enough, I completely agree.
The difference in lifestyle of someone with a net worth of $1000 or $1m could just be that one of them owns their own house and the other rents. Someone with $1b has absolutely nothing in common with either of the other two, they could probably spend 90% of their life savings and not have a noticeable change in their lifestyle. The guy with a million is still going to think about a couple thousand dollar purchase, and the guy with a thousand doesn’t really have a choice.
Most people qualified for a cabinet position are going to be 40+ with a tenured professional career. Which means you’d expect most of them to have a couple million.
Seeing as politics is always a bunch of self serving in-crowd of rich folks, I’d really like to see this for the previous few presidents to know if this is a unique thing to Trump.
I’m too lazy to keep looking, but here’s a small sampling. Ambassador positions to friendly countries tend to go to friends/donors and not worth comparing. DOGE can’t be compared, as it doesn’t exist. Figures are whatever I found at the top of google, not adjusted for inflation or value the years they were in office. Big enough gap that it didn’t matter. Maybe someone else can check Bush?
2013 Obama - $6M
Thanks for looking into what I’m clearly too lazy to do! A quick lazy Internet search shows that Biden’s cabinet appears to be mostly “only” millionaires according to this.
That article also compares Biden’s to Trump’s previous cabinet. And references Obama’s. I would like to note that framing this all as “measly millionaire” is so disconnected from the remainder of America.
Millionaires seem pretty reasonable, its not surprising for someone who’s presumably had a decades long career to own a house and a bit of savings. If we’re being generous the difference between a billionaire and a millionaire is the same as the difference between a millionaire and someone living in the street, in reality the difference is about a billion dollars.
Except the difference between billionaire and millionaire is considerably more vast than that, and humans are quite poor at understanding that intuitively.
One million seconds is about 11.6 days. One billion seconds is 31.7 years.
It’s an issue when people think of that leap of million to billion as you have, as it greatly discounts how much these leeches have sucked out of working people.
I guess I didn’t emphasize the end of my post enough, I completely agree.
The difference in lifestyle of someone with a net worth of $1000 or $1m could just be that one of them owns their own house and the other rents. Someone with $1b has absolutely nothing in common with either of the other two, they could probably spend 90% of their life savings and not have a noticeable change in their lifestyle. The guy with a million is still going to think about a couple thousand dollar purchase, and the guy with a thousand doesn’t really have a choice.
Ah, yes, I misunderstood that very last statement saying the difference is [actually] about $1b. Apologies.
Yep, that’s the same thing I was going to say.
Most people qualified for a cabinet position are going to be 40+ with a tenured professional career. Which means you’d expect most of them to have a couple million.
The margin between top 1% and top 0.1% is vast, Trump’s admin is the 0.1% wrestling away complete control by any measurement.