There's money in being a Socialist. If you're the one in charge of wealth redistribution. Or fleecing your foolish followers who do unpaid labor generating memes for you while you price summer homes.
The "Revolution"has been good to Bernie.
Thanks in large part to his successful foray into authorship, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) made more than $1 million in 2016. That’s according to his latest U.S. Senate financial disclosure, which he filed Sunday after receiving a 20-day extension.
The most notable source of income: book royalties. Sanders received a $795,000 advance for his best-selling book, “Our Revolution.” He got another $63,750 for his forthcoming “Bernie Sanders’ Guide to Political Revolution,” a book aimed at young readers co-authored with Kate Waters. And he took in $6,735 in royalties for his 1997 memoir "Outsider in the House."
Not bad at all.
To paraphrase Lenin, the Capitalists will give us the book deals with which we will hang them. But there certainly is good money in pushing revolution. Bernie went from flying coach to renting jets.
And this is just what we know. The whole Revolution setup has always been suspect. And Bernie has refused to release his tax returns. (Funny how the national mainstream media that rants about Trump's tax returns doesn't dig into where Bernie is hiding his money.)Sanders’ most infamous real estate transaction — his 2016 purchase of a $575,000 lakefront home in North Hero — has been concealed behind an entity named the Islands Family Trust. In his Senate filing, Sanders discloses that he is “a co-trustee in a family trust created when we bought a summer home.”
Because the Senate’s disclosure standards are comfortably loose, we know much less about our junior senator’s finances than we would if he, say, released his tax returns.
But he doesn’t do that. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Sanders released only a summary of his 2014 tax return.Senate rules do not require members to report their government salaries on their annual disclosures, but all rank-and-file members earn $174,000 a year. That, combined with the more than $878,000 Sanders reported in his filing, puts the democratic socialist's 2016 payday at roughly $1,052,000.
In addition to his take-home pay, publisher St. Martin’s Press paid all expenses on Sanders' national book tour last November and December, which took him to 12 states and the District of Columbia. Disclosure of the total was not required, and Sanders did not provide it.
What is Bernie hiding?
When the FBI nails his wife and peels back the facade from the Sanders family finances, we might finally find out what the revolution is really brought to you by. (Hint: It's money.)