Patterico's Pontifications

6/23/2014

Lifestyles of the Rich and Liberal: the Next Generation

Filed under: General — JVW @ 9:45 pm



[guest post by JVW]

Dana has already led us in some fun earlier tonight as we gleefully mock Joe Biden for pretending to be a couple of missed paychecks away from the breadline (or at least having to buy a coach class ticket on Amtrak). Clearly he is trying to get in on the “I know what it’s like to be financially insecure” bandwagon that his putative 2016 rival Hillary Clinton so clumsily set in motion recently. Comes now (channeling George Will here for no particular reason) one Chelsea Clinton to indulge her inner hippie by proclaiming in a recent interview: “I’ve tried really hard to care about things that were very different from my parents. I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t. That wasn’t the metric of success that I wanted in my life.”

Ahem.

Chelsea Clinton and her husband bought a $10.5 million home in Manhattan last spring.

– JVW

29 Responses to “Lifestyles of the Rich and Liberal: the Next Generation”

  1. as vapid bimbos go, Chelsea strikes me as being very similar to Gwyneth Paltrow

    so that’s a helpful starting point if you need to find her exact place in the vapid bimbo taxonomy

    happyfeet (8ce051)

  2. About that girl who doesn’t care for money:

    So how many stories do you think Chelsea filed since joining NBC in November 2011?

    Our count using the Nexis news-data retrieval system is 28. That’s 14 stories in her first 12 months, 13 in her second 12 months, and only one since last November. Four of those ran more than once, so that’s 24 original stories. Most of her stories were fluffy stories about baby elephants or street musicians.

    In other words, she was producing less than one story a month for about $50,000.

    Dana (fe2228)

  3. Dana, Dana, Dana — listen to Chelsea in her own words from the same interview to which I linked above:

    As with every new job during these years, Chelsea had to make people forget her heritage. She explains that her method of debunking assumptions is pretty simple: She behaves as the overachiever that she has always been. “I will just always work harder [than anybody else] and hopefully perform better. And hopefully, over time, I preempt and erase whatever expectations people have of me not having a good work ethic, or not being smart, or not being motivated.”

    But ultimately, she was becoming more frayed than focused. She took a leave of absence from Avenue to work on Hillary’s 2008 campaign. After returning to her Wall Street job, she decided to also get her master’s in public health at Columbia, which entailed night and weekend classes. It was a grueling schedule. While she enjoyed being in the same industry as Mezvinsky–“We both built lots of Excel models and can talk about pivot tables together. We geek out a lot,” she says–the couple had little downtime. Chelsea left Avenue to finish her master’s and got a job as an assistant vice provost at NYU.

    So there you have it. She outworked everyone at NBC to do those fluffy 28 stories in 24 months for $50k per.

    JVW (feb406)

  4. her life sounds like a textbook case of white privilege…

    redc1c4 (abd49e)

  5. Sunday’s Parade magazine which is included with many Sunday newspapers also got on the bandwagon. It featured the Obamas on the cover with the story inside of how they had struggled as newlyweds, paying off student debt, driving a used often broken down car, living for a while upstairs at Michele’s mom’s house. etc. Barack might have even worked a few minimum wage jobs along the way. Just like you and me. Looks kind of like the Dems are on another new meme kick with the media’s assistance.

    elissa (af2728)

  6. Pant something be done to make the Clintons just go away. Some legislation perhaps? If Ed Klein’s new book is to be believed Obama would sign it. And it just might polish up his legacy.

    Funeral Guy (afbf7b)

  7. “I’ve tried really hard to care about things that were very different from my parents. I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t. That wasn’t the metric of success that I wanted in my life.

    “But my husband? He’s all about that s%!+.”

    JVW (feb406)

  8. Man… I can’t even imagine $10.5 million.

    Leviticus (1aca67)

  9. That said, we should probably leave this entire comment thread to Mark. He’s writing his dissertation on this very subject.

    Leviticus (1aca67)

  10. With 20% down and a 4.5% interest rate on the mortgage, their monthly payments are a paltry $42,561.57, plus tax and insurance.

    Come on, you can’t expect them to live like the commoners.

    Chuck Bartowski (11fb31)

  11. With 20% down and a 4.5% interest rate on the mortgage, their monthly payments are a paltry $42,561.57, plus tax and insurance.

    My God, at that rate Chelsea will have to do a two-minute segment on NBC every month just to cover the mortgage.

    JVW (feb406)

  12. That’ll check her privilege but good.

    Leviticus (1aca67)

  13. What she is saying is that her parents wanted her to care about money, as an end in itself, in ther wodrs tried to get her to look at how much money she could make, and view that as success, but she just couldn’t.

    Or at least anyway that’s her explanation as to why, for a while, she focused on accumulating wealth, but then quit that job.

    I think Bill and Hillary Clinton would have wanted her to make money, because that money would be “clean” and could be used to post bail and pay for lawyers, if things went bad for them. Their own assets might be subject to a freeze.

    Sammy Finkelman (9257c5)

  14. So Chelsea is now working for the Clinton Foundation. What is her salary?

    Davod (4cc250)

  15. Cribbing from Insty:
    “I don’t like this job because of the money. I like this job because I never have to think about money.”

    That’s when you have ‘enough’, or much more than you need to survive.
    As The Great One (not Mark Levin) used to revel in saying:
    “How Sweet It Is!”

    askeptic (8ecc78)

  16. 14- That’s an interesting question, and as an officer in a charitable foundation, I’m sure their IRS (public) filings would have to reflect that.

    askeptic (8ecc78)

  17. So Chelsea is now working for the Clinton Foundation. What is her salary?

    I looked it up. The Clinton Foundation only has posted their financial report dating back to 2012. Allegedly there is no compensation for board members (of which Chelsea has been one). Here are the reported 2012 salaries paid by the Foundation:

    Ira Magaziner, CEO/Vice-Chair of Board – $131k
    Mustapha Leavenworth Bakali, COO – $171k
    Julie Feder, CFO – $245k
    Frank Wignall, Advisor – $194k
    Pascal Bijeveld, Exec. VP, Health Financing – $163k

    Interestingly enough, Bruce Lindsay — Clinton’s old consigliere and now a Board Member of the Foundation — is reported as receiving about $353k in “Reported compensation from related organizations” and $30.5k from “Estimated amount of other compensation from the organization and related organizations.”

    So I’m sure that Chelsea will be paid, but I’m equally sure they will find a way to keep it off the books.

    JVW (feb406)

  18. What she is saying is that her parents wanted her to care about money, as an end in itself, in ther wodrs tried to get her to look at how much money she could make, and view that as success, but she just couldn’t.

    Nope, Sam — read it again. I have added some key emphasis in the original quote.

    “I’ve tried really hard to care about things that were very different from my parents. I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t. That wasn’t the metric of success that I wanted in my life.”

    She says that she tried to get interested in money as a way of differentiating herself from her parents (meaning that in Chelsea’s estimation her parents don’t care about money), but that at the end of the day she is just so Clintonian altruistic that she couldn’t rouse herself to be interested in money either.

    JVW (feb406)

  19. JVW @ 18:

    You’re right. The excerpt I looked at was too much out of context, but what you have is the way to parse it.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  20. Man… I can’t even imagine $10.5 million.

    In Manhattan, that will buy you a nice house. Or one of those nice apartments that you see in NYC-based TV shows and imagine that’s how everyone lives there. No, only people with lots of money get to live like that.

    Milhouse (b95258)

  21. I think it was very important to Bill and Hillary Clinton that Chelsea “earn” her money.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  22. To be fair to Chelsea, in Manhatten 10.5 million will probably get you a fixer-upper.

    Of course that brings up the question of why anybody with the sense God gave a grapefruit would want to live in manhatten……

    C. S. P. Schofield (e8b801)

  23. I know a number of kids like that (“I just don’t care about money”)- we call them Trust Fund Babies.

    They KNOW (at a gut level) that they never have to worry about whether there will be a roof over their head that night, or that food will just “be there” when they’re hungry. They’ve never lacked for anything material in their entire lives.

    They don’t care about money because they don’t HAVE to.

    bud (30d398)

  24. Interestingly, Jewish law says that trust fund babies and professional gamblers, i.e. people who don’t make their money from doing anything productive, are not to be regarded as reliable witnesses in a civil suit, because they won’t take it seriously enough to be careful with their testimony. They will tend not to understand why it’s a big deal if their testimony is not completely accurate and the wrong person wins the suit, because after all it’s just money, “easy come, easy go”, and not anything important.

    Milhouse (b95258)

  25. Good thing Chelsea’s not Jewish….but her husband?

    askeptic (8ecc78)

  26. There is a Trust fund baby in my immediate neighborhood. He is a monster. I wouldn’t say he doesn’t care about money, though, because his evil hobby is suing people over stupid stuff–people he knows don’t have the resources to properly defend themselves against his agression.

    elissa (1e86bf)

  27. Well father in law, was a crook, similar to Jan Schakowsky’s husband, Robert Creamer, who wrote up the stimulus and health care strategies,

    narciso (3fec35)

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