“The author also asserts that Truman was rich when he left office but he doesn’t show that Truman had anything other than the $50,000. Does $50,000 alone make your rich back then?”
Go back to the source article:
“Every aspect of this narrative is false. My research into Truman’s private financial files, which became available with the release of his widow Bess Truman’s personal papers, reveals the following:
• When Truman left the White House, he had, according to his own (far too conservative) estimate, a net worth that would be equivalent to $6.6 million in simple inflation-adjusted terms.
• By his own accounting, Truman’s wealth increased by the 2021 equivalent of another $3.7 million when Congress passed the Former Presidents Act five and a half years after he left office.
• Contrary to his claims, Truman made a fortune from his memoirs, and from other writing and speaking engagements, in the years immediately after he left the presidency.
• Truman’s repeated insistence that only his inheritance and subsequent sale of the family farm were keeping him from financial distress was false in several ways. For one thing, Truman had already become a very wealthy man several years before he sold that land. For another, Truman did not actually inherit any of the land: He bought it, in no small part, with money that he had misappropriated from the federal government. He then sold it a few years later at an enormous profit....
...Exactly how much richer he became is revealed by another document in Bess Truman’s files: an accounting that Truman made of his assets in January 1959, five months after the passage of the Former Presidents Act. This accounting includes a detailed breakdown of the former president’s holdings, which by this time included a diversified portfolio of stocks and even an ownership share in the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams franchise, whose part-owner was his longtime friend Edwin Pauley.
All told, Truman calculated his net worth to be $1,046,788.86. Six years after leaving the presidency, he was a millionaire — and at a time when this term still retained its pre-inflationary grandeur. A person in 2021 would have to have a net worth of approximately $74 million to be as rich as Truman was in 1959, relative to the other Americans of his time.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/the-truman-show.html?utm_source=pocket_mylist
Read the whole article. Truman pocketed government funds not intended for personal use, tax free.
Agreed. Actually after I went back and clicked on the underlying article, I got the answers to my questions, and posted that as a comment. The editing of the LA Times article is atrocious.
But then I went back and read the full txt of the law and it’s clear to me that the $50,000 was intended to operate like a per diem where they give it to you because you are expected to have expenses, but they don’t require you to provide receipts and also if you spend less you keep the balance.
Have a look yourself and if you disagree I’ll be happy to explain my reasoning:
https://uscode.house.gov/statviewer.htm?volume=63&page=4#