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He is surely still very near the bottom of the league table

I think of a “millionaire” as being someone with access to a million dollars in a reasonably liquid form; it’s someone who has about a million dollars in net assets. Becoming a millionaire is surely no longer a signifier of membership in a financial elite, but more like a reasonable life goal for a skilled worker who invests wisely.

So the Times’ use of the term is a little eccentric. Sanders’ income is pretty well known: in running for president in 2016 he released tax returns up to the reporting year of 2014, and he is subject to financial disclosure as a member of the Senate. The NYT’s evidence that the senator is a millionaire is that he is known to have earned one million dollars in a single year, 2016 — and he repeated the trick, barely, in 2017. A million dollars in annual income, especially earned more than once, is a very different proposition from having a million dollars.

When it was pointed out to Sanders that the term pertains to him one way or another, his answer was straight from the capitalist gangster textbook. (Road to Serfdom? Atlas Shrugged?) He sounded — and this will not surprise Sanders’ critics on the ideological left, or those who saw him live pretty comfortably with defence-industry giants in Burlington — a bit Republican. Bernie, you see, is making bank because his fight for the 2016 nomination made him a celebrity. “I wrote a best-selling book,” he told a press conference. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”