The all-American working man demeanor of Tim WalzāKamala Harrisās new running mateālooks like itās not just an act.
Financial disclosures show Tim Walz barely has any assets to his name. No stocks, bonds, or even property to call his own. Together with his wife, Gwen, his net worth is $330,000, according to aĀ reportĀ by theĀ Wall Street JournalĀ citing financial disclosures from 2019, the year after he became Minnesota governor.
With that kind of meager nest egg, he would be more or less in line with theĀ median figureĀ for Americans his age (heās 60), and even poorer than the average. One in 15 Americans is a millionaire, a recent UBS wealth reportĀ discovered.
Meanwhile, the gross annual income of Walz and his wife, Gwen, amounted to $166,719 before tax in 2022, according to their joint return filed that same year. Walz is even entitled to earn more than the $127,629Ā salary he receivesĀ as state governor, but he has elected not to receive the roughly $22,000 difference.
āWalz represents the stable middle class,ā tax lawyer Megan Gorman, who authored a book on the personal finances of U.S. presidents, told the paper.
Not really. To do a cross generational comparison, you would look at average wealth of 18-25 year olds in the 80ās to compare it to todayās cohort in that age bracket to show age adjusted disparity. But comparing the average 60 year old to an 18 year old doesnāt mean much when one has had 42 more working years and the other has greater future earning potential.
You canāt just bait-and-switch the headline. Donāt say āthese things are equivalentā and then turn around and say āit doesnāt make sense to compare these things.ā
The defacto standard for economists recording and reporting average and median net worth has been to bucket it by age cohort for at least the last seventy years. Using common meanings of the terms isnāt baiting and switching it intending to deceive or bury the lede.
They could have left a naked āaverageā at the end of the sentence and it would have made sense to assume āappropriate methodsā. They could have thrown in an appropriate qualifier do describe the cohort theyāre comparing him to āmost people approaching retirement age.ā
They chose to say āthe average Americanā which makes the statement somewhere between misleading and an outright fabrication.
If weāre going that route you may as well take issue with the word āaverageā instead of using mean, median, or mode. Because the lack of specificity there is even greater than leaving off the age modifier.
But the whole thing is a weird pedantic exercise anyway. They are reporting using the standard models in a way that makes sense to the reader.