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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Given the performance of the stock market in 2008, the 360K is not surprising. Had he had it all in the SP500, it would have been 586,000 at the beginning of the year.

As for the house, if I buy a house for 500K and put 20% down, then sell it for 1 million, I walk away with $600,000. (And that does not count the apparently extensive renovations that were done on the house, which can easily run to the hundreds of thousands). But if I then buy a slightly nicer house for $1,100,000, my net worth, looking only at the house, is -100,000. And, depending on timing, given the housing market in 2008, it might be a lot less: If I bought in 2006, the house I paid $1,100.000 for might be worth only $900,000. It is completely believable that, because 2008 was such an outlier, his net worth would be unusually low that year. And note that the subsequent numbers are what you would expect from the recovery of the stock and housing markets.

And, don't underestimate the cost of putting three kids through private school, college, and in two cases, law school (and I guess in one case, rehab).

More to the point, as I said, the chart indicates that he was vastly less wealthy than the norm for Senators. Unless you think that he is somehow much, much better at hiding assets than are other Senators.

The chart only indicates anything if it's accurate. It looks auto generated to me, maybe scraped from public data. It's conceivable that a 65 year old lifelong senator had less savings than your average boomer but I'm gonna go with that unsourced website being bullshit. If it's not then he's certainly done well since then, Forbes put him at $9 million in 2018, so almost 400x as wealthy as he had been a decade before according to your numbers.

It is a very well known website, as it happens. Its parent organization was founded 40 years ago by two retired US Senators to shed light on the role of money in politics.

And, it is common knowledge that, after leaving the vice presidency, Biden unsurprisingly made a bunch of money on books and speaking engagements. [Edit: As noted by your own source, Forbes. It is easy enough to find his returns online, and given the behavior of the stock market and housing market since 2008, pretty much everyone did well.

Finally, look more closely: his savings in 2008 were not $24,000. His net worth was 24,000. Not at all the same thing.