In October 2008 I wrote “Will Obama be a friend to the poor once in office? Would you?“. Excerpts:
Barack Obama’s campaign has been damaged to some extent by quotes from his days as a community organizer. He sounded like a socialist back then. …
Suppose that Barack Obama arrives in the White House and reminds himself that he still has about 40 years to live, only 8 of which will be spent as President. Those 32 post-presidential years could be spent being celebrated by welfare recipients or as the guest of Fortune 500 CEOs. Those 32 post-presidential years could be spent living on a government pension or as billionaire.
…
My prediction that Obama will win stands, though I fear that my 5 percent margin of victory may be understated now that the Republicans have nominated a candidate who is 90 percent dead. My new prediction is that Obama will be the friendliest president ever to the rich and powerful and that Obama will be the richest person ever to have been president.
Now it seems that Obama is “speaking truth to power” at $400,000 per hour (USA Today).
What do readers think? Did I call this one correctly? Stepping back and taking the long view, was Obama reasonably friendly to the one-percenters (including those in the health care industry!) during his Presidency?
If the prediction is:
– that Obama will be the friendliest president ever to the rich and powerful? Certainly he was not unfriendly. Income inequality has continued to grow, although in some statistics the growth seems to have decelerated, although it’s hard to say if it’s not due to economic woes external to the presidency. [1,2] If you go by income inequality gradient, then now, he was not the friendliest. But what metric do you use for validating this prediction?
– that Obama will be the richest person ever to have been president? There’s no timeline here, so he could eventually become richer than Trump, but by all current available data he is not the richest person to ever have been president [3].
Also, both Clinton and Obama left the Whitehouse essentially at the same age; allegedly Clinton and his family have obtained much gain in their post-presidency years, yet they are nowhere near to becoming billionaires. So, again, it may be that one day Obama will be the richest person ever to have been president, but currently your prediction is wrong.
[1] – http://inequality.org/income-inequality/
[2] -https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-2016/reports/51361-HouseholdIncomeFedTaxes_OneCol.pdf
[3] – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_by_net_worth
Well, he certainly shielded Wall Street banksters from prosecution, something George H. W. Bush did not during the S&L crisis, not even to spare his son.
“My new prediction is that Obama will be the friendliest president ever to the rich and powerful and that Obama will be the richest person ever to have been president.”….. says you. Of course this is already false. I think the richest person to ever have been president is Trump. Some say Washington was pretty rich but it’s hard to compare the two. I don’t think he will be able to make more than the King Donald even if he gave 400,000 dollar speeches all the time!
Those 32 post-presidential years could be spent living on a government pension or as billionaire.
This has got to be false. At $400k a pop he’d have to give 2,500 speeches to accumulate a billion. If the government takes half in taxes (oh, the horror!), that would make it 5,000 speeches. Within a few years his price has to start to decline as well. I doubt that anyone’s willing to pay Bill Clinton even $100k for a speech at this point.
Vince: I agree with you that paying a 50% tax rate and working by the hour would not be President Obama’s best strategy. Why not be a Board member of a company that is subject to government regulation? Why if Obama were on the Boards of Apple and Google? That wouldn’t be helpful to those companies in getting what they need from governments worldwide? He can get paid in stock or stock options and have most of his income be long-term capital gains, taxed at about half the rate for ordinary income. Or, to look at my own industry, why not on the Board of an airline? The FAA bureaucrats whose decisions can kill an airline would pick up the phone if it were Obama calling? (More likely, an industry that actually does make some money… why not a Board position at Verizon?)
Giving speeches isn’t the only way Obama cashes in. He’ll also have a book deal (an easy $8-15M). No doubt he’s also invited to various corporate boards, with stock options and other lucrative investment opportunities.
And of course there’s “consulting” or quiet lobbying. I can easily imagine somebody forking over six figures for the right phone call or personal introduction.
J: That’s a good point. Why be publicly on a company’s Board rather than work behind the scenes? If a Fortune 500 company pays Obama Facilitation Inc. $20 million for a project, that wouldn’t need to be disclosed to the SEC, I don’t think, because the amount is too small (“not material”).
I agree with you that paying a 50% tax rate and working by the hour would not be President Obama’s best strategy.
It’s make you wonder if he take advantage of the carried interest loophole. He could form a corporation in which he is the only shareholder and the only employee. Then he could pay himself a very small salary and receive most of his compensation in dividends.
He’ll also have a book deal (an easy $8-15M)
Of course, that’s only a mere one percent of a billion bucks, so it’s inconsequential..
The FAA bureaucrats whose decisions can kill an airline would pick up the phone if it were Obama calling?
It’s hard to imagine that he’d want to spend his time making such phone calls. Besides that, he’s quite powerless now. The bureaucrats would really have no reason to take his calls. To maintain political power he could spend a lot of his time flying around the country raising money for Democratic PACs and candidates. Then members of Congress would be responsive to his lobbying efforts. Even that career has its time limits, probably 10 years at most. So he’d have to earn 100 million a year to accumulate a billion.
Vince: “It’s hard to imagine that he’d want to spend his time making such phone calls.” Okay, let’s accept that President Obama wouldn’t want to get out of bed and pick up the phone in exchange for tens of millions of dollars. (Lord knows I would need to be paid a lot more myself, though since I can use the phone while still in bed I would be willing maybe to make one call per day at $5 million per call.)
How about pharma startups seeking approval from the FDA? Especially now that Donald Trump is ruining everything in the U.S. that is vaguely related to science (pharma at least uses some scientific-sounding terms, even if most of the benefits found can’t be replicated), wouldn’t FDA bureaucrats love to hear from Obama, the Smart President (TM)? President Obama gets stock in companies seeking approvals and helps them navigate Congress and the FDA. Only one or two of these companies have to succeed for him to become a billionaire. Check out the Board of Directors at Theranos, for example. http://fortune.com/2015/10/15/theranos-board-leadership/ All of them would have presumably gotten pretty rich if the company had delivered on its promise. Here’s a pharma startup that did pretty well, rising to $7 billion in value in 2015 (see http://fortune.com/2015/12/17/best-vc-deal-company-youve-never-heard-of/) despite none of its drugs having been approved.
Perhaps he would like to make a million dollars or whatever per call. Unfortunately for him, no such job opportunity is available to anyone. My more important is that’s he’s yesterday’s news as far as the bureaucracy is concerned.