You know, I’m starting to understand why Liz Warren has all these weird opinions on how value is actually created: she’s just a creature of her environment. This one is a little involved, so bear with me.

• Thursday, Politico put out a story on the sacrificial lamb candidate for MA-SEN’s upcoming Democratic primary that noted that Warren’s rhetoric about government transparency didn’t extend to her own tenure as chair for the TARP-overseeing (Congressional Oversight Panel). Turns out that “Warren opposed GOP efforts to draft a budget for the bipartisan oversight panel, despite telling The Associated Press in 2008 that she wouldn’t buy a winter coat without a spending plan.”
• A total of 10.5 million was spent by COP over two years (8.3 million under Warren’s oversight), and we don’t actually have a line-by-line breakdown of what that money was spent on. But we know that 8.7 million went to salaries.
• Warren’s pay during that time period? According to her campaign staff’s original disclosure? $64,289 for 2009 and 2010. (pause) Why, that’s quite modest, for Washington DC…
• Oh, wait, never mind: the Warren campaign confessed Friday that she “had been paid $192,722 for serving as chairman of a congressional committee that monitored the 2008 federal bank bailout, three times as much as had originally been acknowledged.” Yeah, that’s more in line with the bloated Dizzy City salary guidelines that we all know and loathe with the collective fury of a billion exploding suns.
• Are you wondering whether Politico made the goof? Nope! The Warren campaign admitted that they gave out the wrong information. “‘In a rush to meet your deadline, we made an honest mistake,'” [Warren campaign flack Kyle] Sullivan said. “‘And we misread a document and thought $64,289 was for 2009 and 2010. It was only for 2010.'”
• At this point, you’re probably asking “Couldn’t Politico look all of this up on Warren’s financial disclosure forms? She’s running for Senate.” Yeah… except that Politico claimed that this N-dimensional genius from beyond space and time didn’t actually make the deadline to file one of those things as per federal law.
• Let me end with the note that this level of pay does not even begin to approach what she was making as a Harvard law professor.

So, let’s recap: Liz Warren is at best exceptionally sloppy about both her personal finances, and the finances of the government agency that she oversaw. Getting information about either was and is as difficult as a broken wisdom tooth extraction – and in the case of Warren’s personal income, the real problem was getting accurate information. Because apparently Liz Warren doesn’t know how much she earns every year. Or she knows, but lies about it. Either way, she is used to making a ridiculous amount of money every year for doing… nothing really productive. Which explains her frankly puerile if somewhat passive-aggressive embracing of class warfare rhetoric: in Liz Warren’s world, the way she became rich* is the way that surely everybody becomes rich. And surely Warren knows, deep down, that she didn’t do anything to actually earn all that sweet, sweet cash.

God save us all from progressive academics: even when they’re racked by shame and guilt over their actions they’ll still try to take it out on the rest of us. Hey, exit question: Liz Warren did pay her taxes, right? I wasn’t going to ask, but since she doesn’t even know how much she earns every year…

(See also Jammie Wearing Fool, Instapundit, Ace of Spades HQ, among others. We are going to have so much fun with this candidate…)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*As near as I can tell, her annual salary indicates that Warren counts by the administration’s own rule of thumb on who to tax into oblivion / incompetently wage class warfare against.