Mrs. Clinton and the 1 Percenters

From Kevin Williamson:

To be a member of the hated, reviled, filthy, wicked “1 percent,” one needs a household income of about $400,000 a year. That’s no small thing — 99 percent of us don’t manage it in any given year — but it’s not Jay-Z money, either. (What, your wife didn’t do like Mrs.-Z and give you a $5 million watch for your 43rd birthday?) A generously compensated high-school principal can make a 1 percent income solo, and a couple of married high-school principals can hit 1 percent territory with relative ease.

If your name is Clinton, you do not even need a full year to make that kind of money — you need an hour.

Sometime National Review contributor Peter Schweizer has a book out this week bearing the straightforward title Clinton Cash, in which he documents the coincidence between the financial contributions of foreign interests to Clan Clinton and favorable treatment by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department. Mrs. Clinton has been doing a fair Elizabeth Warren impersonation of late on the issue of executive compensation, which has led a few critics to point out that at approximately $300,000 an hour, Mrs. Clinton as a maker of speeches out-earns all of the highest-earning American executives on an hourly basis or a daily basis. And we’re talking about Fortune 500 guys, there.

Discussions of CEO pay generally focus on the Fortune 500 or on publicly traded corporations. This is a mistake, for many reasons: The Fortune 500 CEOs are by definition an unusual group — there are only 500 of them in a nation of 310 million — which means that using them to judge executive pay, or even chief-executive pay, is like combining the incomes of the year’s New York Times bestselling authors and those of the screenwriters behind the year’s hit movies and television shows to get an impression of what an American writer makes, or using the New York Philharmonic to get an idea of what an American musician makes. In reality, the average American CEO — the average chief executive — makes a little less than$200,000 a year. Paul Krugman makes more than that for a part-time gig thinking deep thoughts about . . . economic inequality.

Which is to say, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton could each work an hour every year and still have an income that would place them well into the “1 percent,” while Mrs. Clinton by herself could work an hour a year and out-earn, by half-again as much, the typical American CEO.

Being the boss in a for-profit enterprise is less profitable than you’d expect. Profit-making isn’t where the profit is.

Read the rest here.