CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Flashback: The massive scale of the Clintons’ speech-making industry.
Last week, Hillary Clinton’s campaign released her most recent personal financial disclosure, detailing ways in which she and her husband earned money in 2015. Most of their income came from book royalties and giving paid speeches. Bill Clinton, for example, gave a speech to the National Association of Manufacturers in March 2015, being paid $325,000 for his time.
You probably don’t need to be reminded that $325,000 is more than most people make in a year. The median income for a family of four in 2014 was $53,657 — what Clinton made about a sixth of the way into that one speech.
And that was one of 22 speeches Bill Clinton gave last year. The NAM speech was the most lucrative, but Bill earned more than $5 million combined from those 20 days of work. Since the Clintons left the White House, Bill and Hillary Clinton have been paid more than $150 million from speeches alone.
If journalists were doing their job, they’d be asking Hillary if Bill would still give paid speeches if she were President. Oh, wait, for that to happen, she’d have to take questions from the press.