Pie Eating Contest
One of the more surreal moments on recent TV came when Jay Leno interviewed Rush Limbaugh. In particular, this line:
LENO: I watch Wall Street, and I go, "Okay, you can make a million, or two million a year. Okay, you can make ten million a year." Eight hundred, $900 million, some of these people made, a billion dollars. At some point, I mean, how much pie can you possibly eat? I mean, where did it go? Somewhere it went wrong 'cause when I was a kid, Howard Hughes was the richest man in the world with $3.2 billion dollars. Now people have hundreds of billions of dollars, and other people have absolutely nothing.
Now there are a lot of things wrong with this statement economically, but that wasn't my first thought when I read it. (Yes, I read it, didn't see the show. I'd heard about this and checked it for myself.)
Sources claim Leno makes $30 to $40 million a year (perhaps more) for his NBC show alone. I don't begrudge him a penny, but is he really the right guy to be asking this? Is he aware that 99%+ of Americans make under $500,000 a year, and the vast majority make less than $100,000? Very few make as much money in their lives as he makes in a month or two. How much pie you eating, Jay?
posted by LAGuy @ 12:06 AM
5 Comments:
This is not the only clunky economic populism Jay has engaged in- He's broken up his largely unfunny monologues in the first 2 or 3 shows (I stopped watching after that) with uninspired (so it seemed) screeds against Wall Street bonuses, ("its our money, doggoneit!"-??) This reads like some sort of lame attempt to implement market research.
Letterman engages in the same sort of False Populism.
Over the past year or so, he's often ramped up to a monologue joke about the financial crisis by rhetorically asking his audience, "Does anybody have any money? I don't have any money. Where did it all go?"
I realize (I think, anyway) that part of the joke is that everybody knows Letterman makes a stout 8 figure salary, but I often get the sense he really wants viewers to think he's in the same economic boat as they are, "just one of the guys".
And it comes across as ridiculous and insulting.
Bonus Letterman Observation Along The Same Lines: Dave was also quick to joke/criticize about how George W. Bush would take too much vacation during his presidency. Meanwhile, Letterman works 4 days a week (while pretending to work 5) and goes on vacation more than any other late night talk show host (it must be up around a couple months every year now).
Say one thing, do another.
And get away with it.
It's true what they say: It's good to be king.
Todd
One difference, Letterman in his false populism (especially the Bernie Madoff stuff) tends to occasional funniness, not so Jay at least in this incarnation- looks like he is sleep walking through it
My favorite example of this--populism, hypocrisy, lack of awareness, whatever you want to call it--are the Hollywood films condemning greed where the star is making ten or twenty million dollars.
Sort of like Bill O'Reilly pretending to be an outsider.
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