Why The Guardian thinks it has to lie about US politics I’m not sure.
Memoir contradicts Republican Senate candidate’s ‘below the poverty line’ tale
Montana’s Tim Sheehy claims he and wife lived in poverty but own book reveals he had $400,000 to build company
Sigh. “Poverty line” is income in any one year. Not resources, not whatever capital you’ve spent on setting up a business. It’s income.
At a recent campaign event in Whitehall, Montana, the Republican US Senate candidate Tim Sheehy told voters that a decade ago, when he set up the aerial firefighting company through which he made his fortune, he and his wife were living “below the poverty line”.
“My wife and I homeschool our kids,” Sheehy said. “We made that decision several years ago. She’s a Marine, naval academy graduate, she could have a great job and even when our company was tiny, and we … were below the poverty line and making no money, we said: ‘No … the most important job in the world is being a mother.’ And she’s doing that every day.”
So the business is making no money. OK, that’s actually pretty normal at some stage. So, you’re blow the poverty line of $14k per person or whatever it is. Or $25k per family, that sort of level. OK, shrug.
“So, we had amassed a nest egg of close to $300,000. I also had some money that my parents had been putting away for me since I was a kid. All told, we had roughly $400,000 to allocate toward building a business and establishing a new life.”
In 2014, as Sheehy got his company going, the US health department defined the poverty guideline for a family of three in Montana as $19,790. The poverty threshold, as defined by the US Census Bureau, was $19,055.
Great, Saved capital is not, in fact, annual income, is it? Super, so why compare the two?
It is, in fact, entirely normal that people bootstrapping a business fall below the poverty line income at some point. Well, OK, not uncommon at least.
So, why……ah, sorry, election season, this guys an R so any lies or distortions are just fine.
After watching Clarksons’ Farm, I wonder if Jim of this parish has anything to say on this?
On the subject of standard political lies, albeit not ones the guardian will ever report on, it appears that VP candidate Tim Walz lied to a congressional hearing back in 2014 claiming to have been present at the Tiananmen Square massacre. No one cared to check at the time, no one seems over-interested now.
This mis-remembering (aka bare-faced lying) is generally if not exclusively a left wing phenomenon as exemplified by Dick Blumenthal’s fictional Vietnam service and Hilary Clinton’s claim to have dodged sniper bullets after landing in Bosnia when she was actually accepting a bouquet of flowers from a young girl. Best (or worst) of all we have Biden46’s never-ending stream of utter fantasy which would make Walter Mitty blush.
Within a remarkably short period of time it has become apparent that our current PM seems to have similar difficulties in separating fact from fiction.
“Saved capital is not, in fact, annual income, is it? Super, so why compare the two? ”
Because the stupid can’t tell the difference and the malicious are actively conflating the two to further hatred of the rich and successful.
Why The Guardian thinks it has to lie about US politics I’m not sure.
It lies about everything else, so why make an exception?
Just curious, but has the Grauniad tracked down Kamla’s McDonald’s yet?
The Guardian has to lie about US politics because it’s part of the globalist network of institutions dedicated to overthrowing everything from the family to the nation state by any means necessary. Even if its staff weren’t wholly subscribed to this endeavour it would be forced to print lies by the people who fund it.
Ironically I grew up in exactly such a family. My father inherited the farm from his father, and a huge tax bill to go with it, thanks to the ‘make the pips squeak’ inheritance taxes in the early 70s. If he’d cashed in his chips, sold up, paid HMRC off and taken what was left he’d have had a tidy sum left, more than enough to buy a decent house and live comfortably. But he decided to try and trade his way out of the debt, which he did, mainly thanks to a) the Common Agricultural Policy and b) high inflation meaning his debt soon looked far less intimidating. And while all that was happening we definitely lived under the poverty line. At one stage HMRC told my parents they must be not declaring all their income as it wasn’t possible to live on as little as they declared, and made them pay taxes on income they hadn’t had, and penalties to boot. We were living on food off the farm, heating the farmhouse with wood off the farm (it was the 70s, dead elm trees were everywhere), our clothes came from jumble sales. My parents worked 6 days a week, went to church on Sundays, socialised not at all (I think it was the mid 80s before we ever ‘ate out’), there was no TV, no cinema, no magazine subscriptions etc etc. They literally fed, clothed and warmed themselves as cheaply as possible and worked the rest of the time. The house was a tip, terribly cold and damp, one room I remember had wooden floor with a space beneath, when it rained you could look through the cracks in the floorboards and see water below. We basically lived in the 2 rooms that had heat from the Rayburn, the kitchen and living room, everything else was freezing cold and damp, the wall paper was all peeling off the walls. It wasn’t until the 80s when he’d largely paid off his HMRC debts, and managed to get a side business going providing stabling for horses that there was more money around, the house got improved, the car got upgraded from a pile of scrap to a Ford Sierra, and they scraped enough together to send me to a prep school, aged 11.
And to be perfectly frank it was a great childhood. The fact everything was second hand and hand-me-downs never bothered me. I spent my time doing what my parents did, and helping out where I could.
“the ‘make the pips squeak’ inheritance taxes in the early 70s.”
Ah yes, Capital Transfer Tax – which was introduced retrospectively by Healey.
Reminiscent of the income tax >100% introduced retrospectively by Jenkins in the 60s.
True Labour Party days.
Jim @ 1.35. You were lucky…..We lived in a cardboard box etc. etc.
I read the Guardian article: I can’t see a line in it which seems to be untrue.
It’s ridiculous for someone with $400,000 to talk about living in poverty.
There have been years when my income has been below 20k. But it would be dishonest of me to talk about ‘poverty’ because of it – I’ve got millions.
He didn’t say he lived “in poverty”. He said he lived “below the poverty line”. Which is defined by a cash income, not by assets.
https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/10/01/tim-sheehy-dominates-in-debate-is-the-montana-senate-race-over-now-n4932966
This is the reason the guardian felt it necessary to lie about this otherwise obscure politician from an obscure state who however might have a major say in determining which party controls the Senate.
Mind you, with turtle McConnell (or his equally vile likely successor) as leader it’s all rather academic.
He didn’t say he lived “in poverty”. He said he lived “below the poverty line”. Which is defined by a cash income, not by assets.
Eligibility for SNAP requires (a) net income below the Federal Poverty Line, and (b) assets less than $4250.
So his income may have been below the FPL, but he wasn’t living below it.
Sheehy lied. Or if you prefer, he made a grossly misleading statement. Whereas nothing the Guardian printed in its article is untrue.
Wanker: as Tim says, poverty is defined by income (and before transfers, but that’s a separate issue). Read it for yourself:
“If a family’s total money income is less than the applicable threshold, then that family and every individual in it are considered to be in poverty.”
from page 51 (pdf pagination) of Income and poverty in the United States: 2020, Current Population Reports, P60-273 (U.S. Census Bureau, September 2021)
Amazingly, nothig in that definition refers to wealth, or eligibility requirements for SNAP benefits in defining poverty – you are clutching at straws: the Guardian is conflating irrelevant issues, but well, that what they do, at least when it suits the narrative.
The same section says “[the thresholds] should be interpreted as a statistical yardstick rather than as a complete description of what people and families need to live”.
We all know that Sheehy was not in fact in poverty. And that nothing in the Guardian’s article is untrue.
Wanker: when you’re in a hole, stop digging.