The all-American working man demeanor of Tim Walz—Kamala Harris’s new running mate—looks like it’s 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 a report by the Wall Street Journal 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 the median figure for Americans his age (he’s 60), and even poorer than the average. One in 15 Americans is a millionaire, a recent UBS wealth report 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 $127,629 salary he receives as state governor, but he has elected not to receive the roughly $22,000 difference.
“Walz represents the stable middle class,” tax lawyer Megan Gorman, who authored a book on the personal finances of U.S. presidents, told the paper.
Of course it’s age adjusted. What good does it do to compare accumulated wealth between a 60 year old and an 18 year old?
It’s incongruent with the headline. “The average American” is not the same population as “the average member of the ‘pull up the ladder’ generation.”
Not really. To do a cross generational comparison, you would look at average wealth of 18-25 year olds in the 80’s to compare it to today’s cohort in that age bracket to show age adjusted disparity. But comparing the average 60 year old to an 18 year old doesn’t mean much when one has had 42 more working years and the other has greater future earning potential.
You can’t just bait-and-switch the headline. Don’t say “these things are equivalent” and then turn around and say “it doesn’t make sense to compare these things.”
