Hillary’s Hypocrisy

By Ed Hoffman

In case you live under a rock, Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for President last week. The entire week was a magical mystery tour of strangeness, from the outdated van she traveled in to her failed attempt at relatability at an Ohio Chipotle, where nobody even recognized her. Those are the gaffes the media focused on, but what I found far more interesting was a comment made by Ms. Clinton last week at an Iowa community college roundtable event.

“There’s something wrong when CEOs make 300 times more than the typical worker,” Clinton said. “And there’s something wrong when hedge fund managers pay lower tax rates than nurses or the truckers that I saw on I-80 as I was driving here over the last two days.” Of course, these remarks are fairly typical of any Democrat running for President – so what’s the problem? Oh, just that Hillary Clinton has historically accepted donations from some of the richest corporate leaders in the United States.

Let’s break down who some of them are:

• J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, whose latest annual compensation is $20 million
• Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, worth $23 million
• Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, worth $18 million
• James Simons, founder of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, worth $14 billion
• DreamWorks (DWA) CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg who gets $13.5 million in annual pay
• Warren Buffett, whose net worth grew by about $13 billion in 2014

…And that was just during her time as a United States Senator in New York. The Clinton Global Initiative also accepts money from the richest people alive today – and despite the fact that the foundation does some good work around the world, it also pays the Clinton’s daughter Chelsea (married to a hedge fund manager, by the way) a healthy annual salary. Hillary Clinton herself brings in $300,000 for a single speech and prior to her campaign, she booked numerous speeches per year.

Ms. Clinton can moan all she wants about the high taxes truckers and nurses pay compared to hedge fund managers, but Bloomberg reported last year that the Clintons are reducing the “tax pinch” on them by “using financial planning strategies befitting the top 1 percent of U.S. households in wealth.” And we’re supposed to believe she has any grasp on the struggles of average Americans, whose median annual household income is $51,939?

It’s shameful for Hillary Clinton to pretend she understands at all, but what’s worse is the hypocrisy. If she’s going to make demonizing corporate millionaires and billionaires a focal point of her campaign, she had better come up with a really good reason why she is all too eager to accept money from these “big, bad” people.

Ed Hoffman is the host of the Main Event on AM590, which airs Saturday 9:30AM- 10:30AM and Sunday 4:00PM- 5:00PM. Follow him on Twitter @EdHoffman, and like him on Facebook by searching The Main Event 590.