On Friday, Talking Points Memo published a story about an associate business professor at Rutgers named Susan Feinberg. She was sitting near Paul Ryan at a fancy-schmancy French restaurant on Capitol Hill called Bistro Bis, and she didn’t like what he had on his table:
When she saw the label on the bottle of Jayer-Gilles 2004 Echezeaux Grand Cru Ryan’s table had ordered, she quickly looked it up on the wine list and saw that it sold for an eye-popping $350, the most expensive wine in the house along with one other with the same pricetag.
Feinberg, an economist by training, was even more appalled when the table ordered a second bottle. She quickly did the math and figured out that the $700 in wine the trio consumed over the course of 90 minutes amounted to more than the entire weekly income of a couple making minimum wage.
“We were just stunned,” said Feinberg, who e-mailed TPM about her encounter later the same evening. “I was an economist so I started doing the envelope calculations and quickly figured out that those two bottles of wine was more than two-income working family making minimum wage earned in a week…”
After ending their meal and paying the check, Feinberg decided to give Ryan a piece of her mind. She approached the table and asked Ryan “how he could live with himself” sipping expensive wine while advocating for cuts to programs for seniors and the poor. Some verbal jousting between Feinberg and the other two men ensued. One of the two men said he had ordered the wine, was drinking it and paying for it. In hearing how much the wine cost, Ryan said only: “Is that how much it was?” …
TPM caught up with Ryan after a vote outside of the Speaker’s lobby. In further explaining his side of the story, Ryan said he only had one glass of wine out of the two bottles but decided when it came time to pay the bill that he should pay for one of the bottles of wine out of an abundance of caution. He even produced the receipt for the meal, which you can view here.
That’s right: a busybody had some expensive wine at a restaurant and saw somebody she didn’t like having wine that was even more expensive, so she lurched over to his table and started berating him for his order. Then, because she thought it made him look bad, she decided to go to the press with it. Well, to TPM, at least.
But she has a point: If Paul Ryan wants people to be able to keep as much of their own money as possible, how dare he spend his own money as he likes, on stuff that’s legal to buy, even if somebody who doesn’t like him sees him do so?
There are several lessons to be learned here:
- In addition to the aeronautics industry — private jets! — obviously the winemaking industry is another one that shouldn’t produce jobs.
- Rich people spending their own money is bad, because they’re not giving that money to the government for programs that don’t work.
- It’s okay for a good person (Feinberg) to go to the same expensive restaurant as a bad person (Ryan), because she didn’t order the wrong thing.
Does Feinberg regret making a federal case out of Paul Ryan’s dinner order? Ask Byron York:
On Saturday, I sent Feinberg an email asking a few questions about the incident and about her unhappiness with Ryan. First, the photo she snapped of Ryan and two men sitting a few tables away appeared to be taken from her own table, and on that table was a bottle of wine. (Feinberg told TPM that she and her husband had shared a “bottle of great wine.”) A check of the Bistro Bis wine list — in much the way that Feinberg did at the restaurant — shows that the wine was a Thierry et Pascale Matrot 2005 Meursault, which is $80 per bottle at Bistro Bis. Was that, in fact, Feinberg’s bottle of wine?
I asked Feinberg, an economist, what price constituted outrageous in her mind. Would she have been as upset if Ryan’s wine were $150 a bottle? Or $100 a bottle? Or perhaps $80 a bottle, like her own — which is, after all, more than a day’s labor for a worker making the minimum wage.
If the problem was not just the wine’s cost, then what other factors were involved in Feinberg’s anger? Was it because she thought Rep. Ryan was a hypocrite for drinking expensive wine while recommending reduced spending on Medicare and Medicaid? Was it because she believed Rep. Ryan was corrupt for drinking with two men she suspected were lobbyists? And finally, did Feinberg believe she behaved appropriately in the matter? Would it be appropriate for a conservative who felt strongly about, say, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, or Rep. Barney Frank, to do something similar to them under similar circumstances?
Feinberg’s response was brief: “I’m sorry. I have no comment on this.”
It’s a bit late for that. Sounds like she’d prefer if we respected her privacy. Funny how that works, isn’t it?