Nick Gillespie, a leather-jacket-wearing 51-year-old libertarian with a remarkable head of hair, is attacking hapless New York Mayor Bill de Blasio as a rich “fat cat” in the Daily Beast, because de Blasio made $217,656 last year (not to mention $65,000 in rental income). All told, that’s five times the median household income in New York. De Blasio poses as a working class hero, Gillespie writes, but “to most of us, he’s a rich son of a bitch.”

“Most of us.” Yeah! To most of us working stiffs, folks like you and me and Reason.com editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie*, De Blasio’s income is exorbitant. He may as well live on a different planet from us—you know, regular folks like Gillespie. What a fraud! As Gillespie has noted before, it’s obnoxious when obviously wealthy people pose as regular joes. When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie tried to come off as not “wealthy” despite pulling in nearly $700,000 in 2013, Gillespie tore into him:

This doesn’t rise to the level of French aristocrats playing at being peasants before the Revolution, but it certainly is annoying and shows not just a tin ear but a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what most Americans take home, how hard they work (or think they work) and how they struggle to cover their month. Christie and other “wealthy” pols should never apologize for their money. But they also shouldn’t goof around with idiotic definitions of rich either.

Gillespie, according to the Reason Foundation’s most recent public tax returns, made $196,667 as a “vice president” in 2013. In 2012, he did slightly better, pulling in $205,807. That’s a scant $12,000 less than De Blasio’s “fat cat” 2014 salary. Those numbers almost certainly understate Gillespie’s full income: In 2012, he co-wrote a book, and he has been a regular freelancer for the Daily Beast going back at least to 2013, work for which he was presumably compensated.

But the number that Gillespie finds so galling—the one that is a five-time multiple of New York’s median income, the one that separates him from “us”—is the de Blasio family’s household income (de Blasio’s wife Chirlane McCray didn’t report any earnings for 2014). What is Gillespie’s household income? Well, first off, according to his Reason bio, he has two households: “Gillespie, the father of two sons, lives in Washington, D.C., and Oxford, Ohio.” He appears to be married to Katharine Gillespie, an associate professor of literature at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. A 2013 salary survey for Ohio colleges reported that the average associate professor salary at that school was $78,249. If Katharine Gillespie made the average salary, that would put the Gillespie’s 2013 household income at $275,000—just $7,000 shy of the de Blasio family’s “fat cat” take in 2014.

That’s four times the median income of Washington, D.C. And it’s a whopping nine times the median household income in Oxford, Ohio, where the Gillespie family figures as virtual royalty.

Gillespie did not respond to a call or emails.


*For the record, Bill de Blasio, Nick Gillespie, myself, and everyone else who earns multiples of the median household income where they live are indeed rich and should be described as such, even if they feel like they don’t have enough money and can barely pay their rent because they can’t manage their lives properly and have too many kids and make stupid life-choices like residing in exceedingly expensive cities.