On "Forbes Newsroom", Forbes reporter Kyle Khan-Mullins joins Brittany Lewis to discuss the history of presidential salaries.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Who was the highest and the lowest paid president, and why?
00:05We did go ahead and calculate this.
00:06We figured out the sort of the average salary that each president was awarded over the course
00:10of their term, adjusted for inflation.
00:13And the highest paid salary, the highest paid president by far in American history was William
00:17Howard Taft.
00:18He was only in office for four years, from 1909 to 1913.
00:23And he came into office just as the presidential salary was raised from $50,000 to $75,000
00:29That was worth over two and a half million dollars in today's money.
00:36So we're talking about a very, very well compensated president.
00:39That was his average salary over the course of his term.
00:43Of course, that didn't actually stick around for very long.
00:46His successor, Woodrow Wilson, who was in office from 1913 to 1921, ended up seeing
00:51the inflation adjusted value of his salary, which remember was staying flat at that $75,000,
00:57dropped by more than half by the end of his term because of inflation due to World War
01:01One and the end of World War One and then the Spanish flu and all sorts of stuff.
01:05So lots of inflation, lots of government spending, that kind of thing.
01:09And then the lowest paid president you also mentioned, that was actually Bill Clinton.
01:14He came into office after, you know, it had been decades since the presidential salary
01:18had been revised upwards to, you know, keep pace with inflation.
01:22And he came into office after several decades of fairly consistent low level to medium level
01:27inflation.
01:28And so his $200,000 salary was over the course of his term only paying him an average of
01:33about $350,000 a year, or excuse me, the lowest point it ever reached adjusted for inflation
01:39was about $350,000 in today's dollars.
01:42That's pretty low.
01:43And then, of course, it was bumped up for George W. Bush the next, you know, when he
01:47came into office.