The Thread of Democrats

[pErvinalia]

[Brian Peacock]

Old people are funny eh?

[JimC]

Old people are funny eh?

We're fuckin' hilarious, Brian...

[Cunt]

It's possible that Biden is the best they have at the moment.

I wonder if anyone will ask Sanders what he dislikes about communism...be interesting to hear him answer that.

[Tero]

Biden had fewer senior moments this debate!

[pErvinalia]

[Cunt]

Maybe you should have...

(spoilered to protect the Bernie-bros)

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

[Cunt]

Bernie used to speak out against millionaires and billionaires.

How did Bernie allow himself to become a millionaire?

Bernie currently speaks out about billionaires.

[pErvinalia]

How do you know he's a millionaire?

[Cunt]

How do you know he's a millionaire?

He didn't deny it, nor did he deny owning 3 lovely homes, when talking with Bloomberg.

He will probably forgive MiniMike for doing it to him in public, not that money has anything to do with it. (he rolled over and showed his belly for Hillary too)

[Tero]

Democratic socialists are allowed to be millionaires. We are only banning billionaires.

[Cunt]

Democratic socialists are allowed to be millionaires. We are only banning billionaires.

And three houses.

By the way, how did he let it happen that he accumulated enough wealth to be embarrassed by a guy like Bloomberg?

How in the world will it look if he wins, and has to answer for a lifetime in government, making millions? Did he help his wife get cushy jobs?

[pErvinalia]

[Cunt]

Was thinking, some of my criticisms of Bernie were his unwillingness to fight for his mic/platform, and his long history of not getting a lot of 'coalitions' of like-minded government folk.

So Sanders/Bloomberg ?

I've had 2 crazy theories now (crazy to ME anyway)
1. Presidential Throuple with Klobachar/Sanders/Warren
2. Conventional Sanders/Bloomberg ticket

And if I think about which is crazier, in that particular context, the line 'conventional' does apply to theory 2

I am going to sit down with a drink and think this through more sensibly. Now the important question...friendly gift whisky or conventional rum...?

[Hermit]

Bernie used to speak out against millionaires and billionaires.

Millionaires? Got a link where he said "millionaires"?

How did Bernie allow himself to become a millionaire?

1. Sanders has earnt a six-digit salary sine he became a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1991. Now he is in his 13th year of serving the country as a Senator. He started on an annual salary of $165k in 2007. Since 2009 Senators are paid $174k per annum. I guess that helped a bit.
2. Sanders published a book titled Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In. It reached number three on The New York Times Best Seller list and is still selling reasonably well today. The following year he published another book that sells reasonably well. I guess the royalties from them helped.
3. When his wife's last parent died the couple inherited their property. I guess that helped their net worth along too.

Bernie currently speaks out about billionaires.

In April last year Forbes published an article titled "How Bernie Sanders, The Socialist Senator, Amassed A $2.5 Million Fortune". FFS, with $2.5 million you are well off, but you are not sitting on a fortune, especially when you are 77 years old by the time you get there. Compared to billionaires it's chickenshit. Imagine being worth a billion dollars. That's 1000 million. Bloomberg's net worth is $65,200 million. If he gave you $652 million of it you'd be happy as Larry, and Blooms would hardly notice being 1% poorer. So stop going on about Sanders's $2.5 million.

You can become a millionaire almost accidentally. Bear with me. It's story time.

I was a surf bum until I got tired of my hand to mouth existence at the age of 33. So I got a fulltime job delivering cartonned meat. After a bit over two years I had a few thousand dollars in my savings account. I used that, and a few thousand more that I borrowed from a finance broker to buy an old, clapped out truck with work. Wohoo, subcontractor. Three months into the new job that truck had cost me so much in repairs that my bank account balance had dropped to 64 dollars. Merry Christmas 1988. But I persevered. Two years later I replaced the hill detector by leasing a brand spanking new truck with a 6 ton payload. No more unscheduled expenses. Hooray. Come 1992, I started wondering what I should do with the money now idling in the savings account. It finished up as the $48k deposit on a house I bought for $154K.

The house was a tiny, single story, 2½ bedroom thing, one in a row of similar ones, each with a 5 metre street frontage and sitting wall to wall on about 45m² of land. The neighbourhood was, shall we say, somewhat Bohemian, but that was precisely what I liked about it. Luckily for me it had dual street frontage, and the back street was considerably wider than the front. That's where I parked my truck. The truck was almost twice as long as each house was wide, but the neighbours were OK with that (until the husband of one of them burnt his brains out with alcohol and went mad, but that's another story).

Then I got tired of living in the Big Smoke and looked to settle in a smaller town. Almost moved to Newcastle, but finished up in South Australia two years after that. The price I got for my little abode had me utterly amazed, but all the other houses in my street that were sold around that time went for very similar amounts, so, it sold for "the going rate", I suppose.

I just had a look at what houses like mine were sold for in that street since 2019. Turns out you can't get a two bedroom, single story, unrenovated house on 45m² of land for under $1.25 million, and you'll need at least $1.5 million for a three bedroom version. So, yeah, had I staid put, you could have called me a millionaire, but calling me rich you could not. I would have just been this bloke who lived in a house he bought for $154k. I would have become a millionaire without even trying.

Oh, and my daughter's mother is in a similar position in Auckland. You wouldn't believe the offers she gets now for the tiny two bedroom semi-detached home she bought circa 1980 for around $27k.