Republican Delegates

Mr. Walz’s LTE in the Post Review is a rich mine, so let’s dig in again.

He wrote:

The real tragedy, of course, is that McCain did not address the real issues in his acceptance speech: the recession, racism, health care or the environment. Of course he was speaking to mostly white millionaires (more than half of the delegates earned $500,000 or more and there were almost no people of color, far fewer than previous years).

Walz opines, "Of course he was speaking to mostly white millionaires. . ." Those Republican delegates are just filthy rich people! How awful! He explains parenthetically, ". . . more than half of the delegates earned $500,000 or more. . ." I guess this is bad too. Walz did not state a time period during which more than half of the delegates earned $500,000.

So where did Walz get his facts? He couldn’t bother to tell us.

By doing a simple Google search, I think I found the data which Walz is referencing. It is data attained from a poll of Republican delegates to the national convention.

The article states the results of the poll:

Thirty-four percent say their net worth is over $1 million. . . .Seventeen percent say their net worth is between $500,000 and $1 million, while 32 percent estimate their net worth under $500,000.

Adding 34% and 17% gives 51% of Republican delegates who say their net worth is more than $500,000. So Mr. Walz is half right. He said, ". . . more than half of the delegates earned $500,000 or more. . ." That half is wrong. In order to have a net worth of more than $500K, one must earn much more than that. So Mr. Walz didn’t paint the terrible Republicans as bad as he should have. Why those GOP folks had earned more than a million to have a net worth of $500K!

Now Mr. Walz, think about this for a couple of seconds. It’s great that these Republicans have earned so much because they have paid bushels of taxes to support your poor Democrat friends. Without these rich millionaires, you poor Dems couldn’t feed, clothe and shelter your own folks. So you should be happy we make so much money.

Secondly, what’s wrong with you Donkeys that you can’t make as much as Elephants?

Or is it that you make as much as us but don’t know how to conserve what you make because you aren’t conservatives? That must be it. You don’t conserve the money; you liberally give it away to charity so you don’t have much left. Cough. Cough. The polls don’t show that either.

In reality, a net worth of $500K isn’t all that much nowadays. Back in the ’50s a millionaire had some substance to himself. A millionaire today is worth about a tenth of that. A $100,000 might buy half a house these days. By the time a person adds together his $200,000 house, its furnishings, a couple of cars, a boat, snowmobile, some other trinkets, his 401k plan, etc., average people in their fifties and sixties have half a million.

I wouldn’t hesitate to conjecture that Mr. Walz has his half a million net worth. And if he does, that makes him a hypocrite (tongue in cheek!).

Oh, and while Walz was castigating Republican delegates for having so much, he forgot to tell us something. Thirty-four percent of Republican delegates have a net worth of more than a million. And the same article says, "Twenty-two percent of the Democratic delegation has a net worth that high (1 million)." For every hundred delegates, the Democrats are just 12 people behind the Republicans.

Apparently these are unenlightened Dems who have not yet seen the light to give away their money. Walz doesn’t want you to know about them.

Now the Democrats and Republicans have the same opportunities in life. Why does the donkey party have less millionaires than the elephant party? The same article probably has the answer: ". . . 24 percent [of the GOP delegates] say they considered themselves Democrats at one point."

One out of every four Republican delegates once was a Democrat. It must be that as these erstwhile Democrats accumulated their net worth they began to see the Dems keep taking more and more of their hard-earned dollars away from them. They, being greedy Democrats, devised a plan. They switched to the Republican party and promoted less taxation and less spending so they could get richer. That’s why there are less millionaire donkeys. Without this catastrophic shift, the two parties would have about the same number of millionaires.

And there goes Mr. Walz point about Senator McCain "speaking to mostly white millionaires."