“I’ve never focused on money for me,” said Joe Biden during Friday’s ABC-hosted Democrat debate in Manchester, New Hampshire, in response to a question posed by former Clinton administration Communications Director George Stephanopoulos about “child poverty.”

“I come from a family where a dad walked in one day and said, ‘We gotta move. Don’t have a job. We gotta move to a different city,’” claimed Biden. “I watched my dad, and I met many people here, in this state and others who’ve gone through the same thing, where the father’s made that longest walk and the mother’s made that longest walk.”

Biden continued, “I was listed for the entire time I was in the United States Congress as the poorest man in the United States Congress. My net worth was net-zero a couple of times. The fact of the matter is that I’ve never focused on money for me, and I was a single dad for five years. It’s not as hard as being a single mom, and I had help from my sisters in the audience and others.”



None of Biden’s Democrat counterparts challenged his claim of economic selflessness. He was not asked by the event’s moderators about his family’s history of self-enrichment in connection with his former political position as vice president.

Biden then framed children as somehow belonging to everyone, saying, “These aren’t someone else’s children. They’re all our children. They’re the kite strings that lift our national ambition — no, they really are — they lift our national ambitions aloft.”

Biden concluded, “They’re all our children. They’re not somebody else’s kids.”

Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and senior contributor at Breitbart News, has investigated and documented Biden’s family members’ blending of business dealings — both foreign and domestic — with Biden’s political position as former vice president in his most recent books Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends and Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.