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.
The average net worth is skewed by a rich minority and WAY richer super minority. Letās see the median.
It literally says in the post that his net worth is roughly equal to the median.
I get irritated to an irrationally high degree when someone literally only reads the headline and decides right then what their opinion is and that it needs to be shared with the world. Like they wouldnāt even have had to check out the link, itās right in the post.
Median for his age
Of course itās age adjusted. What good does it do to compare accumulated wealth between a 60 year old and an 18 year old?
Itās incongruent with the headline. āThe average Americanā is not the same population as āthe average member of the āpull up the ladderā generation.ā
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.
The median is linked right in the article.
For ages 55-64 itās $364,500
The average American family has a $1.063 million net worth, according to Federal Reserve data. But the median net worth is $192,900.Jul 23, 2024
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