Michael Hiltzik: Clarence Thomas and the bottomless self-pity of the upper classes
Articles asking us to feel sympathy for families barely scraping by on healthy six-figure incomes may be staples of the financial press, but it's rare that they come packaged as real-world case studies attached to flesh-and-blood individuals.
But that's what happened just before Christmas, when law professor Steven Calabresi defended Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' shadowy financial relationships with a passel of conservative billionaires by explaining that Thomas simply was trying to avoid the difficulty of surviving on his government salary of $285,400 a year.
"If Congress had adjusted for inflation the salary that Supreme Court justices made in 1969 at the end of the Warren Court, Justice Thomas would be being paid $500,000 a year," , "and he would not need to rely as much as he has on gifts from wealthy friends."
