Billionaire Commerce Secretary and ‘serial liar' Wilbur Ross told CNBC he doesn't understand why federal workers who aren't getting paychecks might need to go to food banks.
Said Ross: “Well, I know they are, and I don't really quite understand why. Because, as I mentioned before, the obligations that they would undertake, say borrowing from a bank or a credit union, are, in effect, federally guaranteed. So the thirty days of pay that some people will be out, there's really no reason why they shouldn't be able to get a loan against it.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped Ross: “What do they have? They have Wilbur Ross saying he doesn't understand why oh, when he was asked about people going to food lines and pantries and the rest, he says, he doesn't understand why they have to do that. I don't know, is this the ‘Let them eat cake' type of attitude? Or ‘call your father for money'? Or ‘this is character building for you'? ‘It's all going to end up very well just as long as you don't get your paychecks?'”
An explosive report in Forbes magazine in 2017 revealed that Ross lied to them about his billionaire status and the magazine has removed him from its list of richest Americans.
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Just a year ago, Forbes listed Ross' net worth at $2.9 billion and included him in the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans by net worth. The new report says Ross had just under $700 million in assets. It cited financial-disclosure forms filed by Ross after being nominated for his Commerce secretary.
After Forbes learned about this, the magazine said, it wanted to remove Ross from the Forbes 400. Ross protested, according to the report, telling the magazine it wasn't taking into account some trusts created for his family, which add “more than $2 billion” to his net worth and which he did not have to disclose in federal filings.
But the magazine said that after “one month of digging,” it is confident that the more than $2 billion never existed. It said it removed him when it updated its list of richest Americans last month.
