The man who spent a lifetime slurping at the public trough as a career politician is spending his retirement the same way — and in spectacular fashion.
Former President Joe Biden, who served 35 years in the Senate, eight as vice president, and a dismal four as the nation’s chief executive, is coasting on an annual pension that totals more money than any of his predecessors, according to the New York Post.
And if Biden’s life history is any guide, precious little of the $417,000 a year he’s taking in in retirement — more than his annual salary in the White House — is going to help anyone not named “Biden.”
That’s because Biden, for all his well-documented preference for giving away American taxpayer money to causes he and his leftist Democratic Party consider worthwhile, has a record of being positively miserly when it comes to his own money.
Back in 2020, Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the conservative Cato Institute, published a look at Biden’s history of charitable giving, and the results were dismal. (The headline was “Biden: a Cheapskate Who Prefers to Tax Others Than Give His Own Money.” That sums it up pretty well.)
Bandow found that between 1998 and 2008 (the year Biden was elected vice president on a ticket with now-former President Barack Obama), Biden failed to crack even the 1 percent mark when it came to percentages of his income going to charity.
From 2009 to 2016, it was well below 2 percent of his income, with the exception of 2013, when it was 5 percent. It’s true that Biden’s charitable contributions jumped in 2017 and 2018, but as Bandow noted, that probably had more to do with Biden’s political ambitions than any change of heart when it comes to charity.
After President Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, even Biden had to know Democrats would be desperate to find someone who could legitimately challenge Trump in 2020. That individual was Biden — and a guy with a chintzy record of giving to charity had to make up for it somehow to be more appealing to middle America.
The fact that Trump very publicly donated his presidential salary no doubt upped the pressure. (Trump is doing the same in his second term.)
So, Biden lucked into the 2020 nomination in a year when American politics took place in a pandemic — when the even-then-declining Biden could hide in a basement and minimize public appearances without appearing cowardly, frail, or unwell to the American voter. (He was, in fact, all three, as the four ensuing years proved.)
And for that, he’s receiving a presidential pension. But he’s also receiving a pension from his years as vice president, as well as his decades in the Senate.
“Biden, who once described himself as ‘one of the poorest members’ of Congress, is able to collect the lucrative payouts by double-dipping in benefits established under the Former Presidents Act of 1958 as well as the Civil Service Retirement System for ex-senators,” the New York Post’s Victor Nava wrote.
“Annual pay in the CSRS pension plan is determined by a formula that takes into account Biden’s 44 years in the Senate and as vice president, as well as his three highest years of salary during that span.”
“Biden is making more in retirement than the current president gets,” National Taxpayer Union Foundation vice president Demian Brady told Nava for the report. “It’s a very unique situation, but even though it is unique, it is one that’s ripe for reform going forward.
“Congress ought to look at that to prevent such an extravagant pension amount in the future.”
In the meantime, Americans could fairly ask themselves what exactly they got out of Biden’s career of what government types like to call “public service.”
In Biden, they got a friend of racist segregationists who used his increasing powers in the Senate to do little good and a great deal of harm.
It was Biden’s Judiciary Committee — with its vicious, successful smearing of Ronald Reagan Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and equally vicious but unsuccessful smearing of George H.W. Bush nominee high court Clarence Thomas — that set the stage for the Supreme Court wars to come.
(Those wars that reached their nadir, hopefully, in the 2018 media-Democratic complex attacks on now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh — attacks that will be a stain on establishment media outlets for as long as they last.)
Biden’s vice presidential years were in devoted service to Barack Obama, a would-be dictator who substituted his “pen and phone” approach to the presidency for the one enshrined in the Constitution by the Founders.
And Biden’s own presidential years were a litany of failure and betrayal of the American people.
It was Biden who decided on the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
It was Biden who implemented years of open borders allowing millions into the country illegally, an abdication of responsibility that’s going to haunt the nation for generations.
It was Biden who stood impotently as Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed an invasion of Ukraine — an invasion Biden had tacitly accepted.
It was Biden who was worse than impotent when it came to Israel’s existential fight against the Hamas terrorist organization that attacked it on Oct. 7, 2023. Biden went from arguably pro-Israel immediately after the attack to being the prime spokesman for leftists who wanted Israel to stop its war on the killers responsible for the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
And all of it was of a piece with the man’s blighted career.
In 2014, former Secretary of State Robert Gates published a memoir of his years of service in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. He wrote memorably, as The Hill reported at the time, that Joe Biden had been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Regrettably, the decade that followed did nothing to challenge Gates’ conclusion.
Americans, for their sins, got the dubious honor of having Joe Biden as a major political figure in their government for half a century. Now, they have the even more dubious pleasure of paying him a pension for that “service.”
And considering the man’s family is essentially a caravan of no-account grifters sucking a living from the Biden name, it’s virtually certain every cent of it is going to the Biden brood, the charity closest to Joe Biden’s heart.
Democrats like Biden — from mega-millionaire like Nancy Pelosi to garden-variety multi-millionaires like Ilhan Omar — only throw around money like it doesn’t matter when it really doesn’t matter to them.
And that’s when it comes from the American taxpayer.
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