Bill Maher has a column over at HuffPo that caught my eye this morning. The piece was an appeal to fellow wealthy liberals to follow Maher and help fund the president’s Super PAC, Priorities USA.
He begins talking about growing up poor, describing his time in college, living in the slums of Ithaca, New York and his early time in the New York City comedy scene. Now he has a comfortable lifestyle, living in Hollywood, “the only place in America where the millionaires and billionaires are predominantly liberal,” as he notes.
Each year he sits down with his accountant and is always told he’s done a good job saving his money. According to the accountant, who works for many Hollywood celebrities, his other clients are quite the spendthrifts in contrast to Maher’s prudence.
Maher relates the accountant’s response:
…what they spend their money on is always changing, and that’s not even the point — the point is, however much money they make that year, they always spend all of it! That’s how they think: have money, spend it, because the real tragedy would be to die and have money left over.
Maher makes it quite clear that saving is a virtue and anyone who spends everything he brings in is not behaving in the most responsible manner.
But, if liberals will spend their own money in order not “to die and have money left over,” why wouldn’t liberals also spend other people’s money just the same, or more frivolously? At least when these individuals spend their money prodigiously it’s by choice and not based on coercion or force. The same cannot be said of tax money dolled out by the government, which, I assume is the desired outcome of another Obama term.
