Politico - The Secret of Bernie's Millions

[TomCADem]

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/05/24/bernie-sanders-millionaires-226982

BURLINGTON, Vt.—Early on in his eight years as the mayor of this city, when he typically dressed in a tieless ensemble of work boots and corduroys, Bernie Sanders one day left City Hall and found a ticket on the windshield of his rusty Volkswagen Dasher. The offense: This was the mayor’s spot, and, surely, a cop had thought, this was not the mayor’s car. But it was. It matched perfectly with both Sanders’ image as a scrappy advocate of the little guy and his own shaky financial reality. It was the beginning of the 1980s, and he was approaching 40, a single father of a not-quite-teenage son, renting a sparse second-floor apartment and having a hard time keeping up with his bills. “Not only,” he wrote on his yellow, coffee-splotched legal pads kept in archives at the University of Vermont, “do I not pay bills every month—‘What, every month?’—I am unable to …” His scribbles in barely legible cursive in the margins read like reminders and afterthoughts: “gas,” “light,” “water.”

He was, said Bruce Seifer, a friend of Sanders, an economic aide in his administration and one of many people who know him who told me this, “frugal.” Seifer paused and considered the right way to put it. “That’s a nice way of saying he’s a cheap son of a bitch.

Today, he might still be cheap, but he’s sure not poor. In the wake of his 2016 presidential run, the most lucrative thing he’s ever done, the 77-year-old self-described democratic socialist is a three-home-owning millionaire with a net worth approaching at least $2 million, taking into account his publicly outlined assets and liabilities along with the real estate he owns outright. In a strict, bottom-line sense, Sanders has become one of those rich people against whom he has so unrelentingly railed. The champion of the underclass and castigator of “the 1 percent” has found himself in the socioeconomic penthouse of his rhetorical boogeymen. This development, seen mostly as the result of big bucks brought in by the slate of books he’s put out in the past few years, predictably has elicited snarky pokes, partisan jabs and charges of hypocrisy. The millionaire socialist!

Sanders has been impatient to the point of churlish when pressed about this. “I wrote a best-selling book,” he told the New York Times after he releasing the last 10 years of his tax returns. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.” Asked on Fox News if this sort of success was “the definition of capitalism,” he bristled. “You know, I have a college degree,” he said.

[FreeBe]

1. He didn't use the college degree for about two decades after getting it.

[YOHABLO]

2. So what is your point. Bernie not giving all his money away makes him a hypocrite ?

[Skittles]

4. he's very unprepared with his reponses

surely he knew he would be asked these things

[JI7]

10. they didn't ask anything in 2016 so he might have thought the same

would have happened again.

[Skittles]

11. he wasn't really vetted because the guns were all trained on Hillary

but he knew that.....everyone did

[Tipperary]

16. No shit.

His advisors seem to be a bit slow on the uptake.

[Skittles]

32. same with abortion gotcha questions

Buttigieg, for example, did not take the bait and shot back at them without hesitation.......Bernie fumbled. This issue has been front and center for some time now, how could any politician not be prepared to respond

[George II]

18. To quote the article, he "found himself in the socioeconomic penthouse of his rhetorical boogeymen"

None of the other candidates have centered their political careers around bashing "millionaires and billionaires", now only "billionaires".

[Skittles]

3. "You know, I have a college degree"

OMFG

[Mr. Evil]

5. With everything going on right now in this country this is what someone's worried about?

Bernie has $2 million. So the fuck what!

[crazytown]

12. FDR and the Kennedys were loaded.

If Sanders was not so defensive and secretive about it, no one would give a damn.

[NYMinute]

28. I don't care how much money Bernie has

I am only offended by the hypocrisy. The stench of hypocrisy wafts through the air of America and leaves one with a taste of cynicism on one's taste buds.

[MasonDreams]

6. He's risking his life speaking truth to power

[BlueMTexpat]

15. ...

[BannonsLiver]

23. Oh my

[NastyRiffraff]

29. Oh dear

Risking his life?

[Fresh_Start]

36. not really, otherwise power is powerless

since no one got Bernie in the last 30 years

[ucrdem]

7. Hoo boy.

Not gonna touch this one. But, yeah.

p.s. the problem is not the money, it's how he came by it.

[KitSileya]

8. Nah, neither. The problem is he expects everyone to be able to do what he did

- that is, leverage an unsuccessful campaign to write a book they can sell to their next campaign. It's the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps"-like tone of his dismissal of the questions he gets about it that is the problem.

It's his refusal to see his own privilege that is the problem - not very many women, or men of color for that matter, could afford to spend two decades chasing elected office without worrying about supporting their family (a black man stealing electricity from a white neighbor is looking to get shot by the police in many states in the US then and now) and a woman who had to apply for food stamps because her child's father didn't pay child support would have her political career knee-capped before it begun. A black man certainly wouldn't have been given all the chances Senator Sanders got - a twenty year gap in his resume would stop his Presidential dreams before he began his campaign.

[FreeBe]

9. You are right about all of this. Further, for me is the fact he changes million and billionaires

rhetoric to then only state billionaires are the evil ones, refusing to produce his tax returns until he was forced to put out his taxes showing he was a millionaire as if no one would notice.

[Hortensis]

25. Yes. In addition, I see his most basic problem as his lifelong

passion for class struggle, not concern for people themselves. His goal is socialist takeover by "the people," which supposedly would (at least theoretically!) create equal wellbeing for all people, but that's not the same as actual caring about people themselves. In fact, seems to me caring about what people want would inevitably conflict.

[YOHABLO]

13. How he came by it? A book deal? Check out Bidens book deal and his recent gain in wealth.

Let's be fair here. The front runner, Biden is estimated to be worth 3 to 5 million.

[Voltaire2]

14. That's different because Biden isn't going

to make substantive changes, he’s just going to be another caretaker president, he doesn’t pose a threat, so it’s not relevant.

[JI7]

17. Sanders hasn't really done much in his many years in public office

he named a couple post offices

[George II]

19. Who is the biggest purchaser of his books?

[ucrdem]

35. How and when.

And the books are about over his great triumph of having taken on the Democratic establishment. He still brags about it. Who did that benefit?

[Hortensis]

20. I don't care if he managed to accrue some money

by his age. It'd only be surprising if someone paid $174K a year for nearly 30 years in an era of enormous wealth growth didn't end up well to do. Capitalizing on belated national name recognition through book sales, including his own mass purchases funded by his campaign -- which are totally legal, is SOP for people in his position.

[George II]

22. What is puzzling is the fact over the course of the almost 30 years prior to 2016, he and his wife..

...earned somewhere around $6 million, yet in 2016 his net worth, according to his Senate Personal Financial Disclosure, was $500-$800K.

[Hortensis]

27. :) Don't think of them as big spenders, not much into

charitable giving, and anyone with high incomes in the past 40 years only had to not spend it all and let investments explode into wealth. Living in DC is reportedly very expensive, but their equity in just their DC townhouse alone probably accounts for much or most of that.

[aidbo]

21. Racist article from Politico.

They literally have a picture of a Jew with a money tree and a mansion that is not his.

And y’all eat it up because you hate Sanders so much. SMH.

[RandiFan1290]

24. Agree 100% nt

[Autumn]

26. The money tree and the mansion, nothing like his homes, is a "nice" anti semitic dog whistle.

[srobertss]

39. AOCs tweet

“Can ⁦@politico⁩ explain to us how photoshopping money trees next to the only Jewish candidate for president and talking about how “cheap” and rich he is *isn’t* antisemitic?”

Sorry, I don’t have a link. Just copied and pasted from Dailykos’ coverage of this https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/5/25/1860349/-Politico-piles-on-the-anti-Semitic-attacks-to-go-after-Bernie-Sanders-as-rich-but-cheap

[aidbo]

41. another one

Link to tweet

[backtoblue]

42. The article's visuals are ridiculously anti-Semitic

Like Bernie or not, that article is all kinds of dog whistling.

[torius]

30. You don't make money when you buy your own books

Last edited Sun May 26, 2019, 02:14 PM - Edit history (1)

You don’t make money when you buy your own books. You can make some profit selling them. He would make money if he sold a whole lot himself—a few dollars per book. But the sales of the book are not that high.

When you buy your own books they are in bulk, so those do not go into your books that you get royalties on. Even if it’s just one box of books. You buy in bulk and you get a discount.

If your book does not earn out, meaning earn back the advance via royalties (not cover price—royalties are a small percent—usually around 10%—some publishers offer zero) then technically you owe them the rest of the money. An advance is just that, an advance against royalties. So if he writes another book with that publisher (and likely they get first dibs), they could simply not pay him an advance or royalties until his other book earns out. (Publishers don’t usually go after people to repay their advance.) 99% of books do not earn out.

Buying your own book also does not get you on publications’ (such as NYT) bestseller lists. That’s not that easy to game. Books you buy go into your total sales number but that does not help you get on those weekly lists.

He did get a big advance. Plus any profits from selling his own books if he kept the profits. Maybe they have go to the campaign if they were sold at campaign stops, I don’t know. There are costs associated with selling, simply transporting and selling the books costs in labor, transaction fees, and transportation.

I just don’t think this thing about him getting rich off from buying his own books makes sense if you know how publishing works. There’s no guarantee that people will buy them, you have to spend money buying them, and you get no royalties from the publisher for those books.

[caraher]

31. How can Gillibrand's net worth be $300k?

My understanding is that she worked for high-powered law firms before entering politics and her husband is a venture capitalist. Sounds like some misleading bookkeeping on the part of whomever put those figures together...

[aidbo]

33. Lol at a bunch of people recommending a racist article.

[FreeBe]

34. KellyAnne tried to use the woman card with Pelosi the other day, too.

[BannonsLiver]

37. +1

The attempt to hijack the thread was so lame they had to make two attempts.

[FreeBe]

43. That is how I see it.

[aidbo]

40. what does that have to do with this racist article?

[melman]

44. Nothing

Nothing at all.

[melman]

38. AOC

Link to tweet