December 09, 2019
A very large portion of U.S. workers will earn more than $2 million. That’s not in a year, but in a working lifetime. That makes a huge difference.
Apparently that point is too subtle for the people who write headlines for the Washington Post. The headline of an article on Senator Warren’s income from consulting fees told readers, “Sen. Elizabeth Warren earned nearly $2 million consulting for corporations and financial firms, records show.”
As people who read the article would learn, this amount was earned over roughly twenty years, meaning that the average payments were in the neighborhood of $50,000 a year. While that is still a considerable chunk of change, it is common for a lawyer of Ms. Warren’s stature to earn millions of dollars a year. (I’m not saying that’s justified, it just happens to be the reality.)
In any case, there is a huge difference between earning $2 million in a single year or a short period of time and earning it over a long portion of a person’s career. The people who write headlines for major newspapers should understand this point.
Comments