In 1807, just two years before Thomas Jefferson left office as our nation’s third president, he wrote this in a letter to Count Jules Diodati: “I have the consolation of having added nothing to my private fortune during my public service, and of retiring with hands as clean as they are empty.”

Who among today’s political class can say the same thing?

That’s a rhetorical question, of course. Graft in government isn’t a new thing; crony capitalism has been around as long as capitalism itself, and politicians have been enriching themselves at taxpayer expense since before we rendered to Caesar what was Caesar’s. But still. Today’s political class has raised profiting from public service to an art form.

Take Georgia’s shadow governor, soft-core porn novelist, and permanent celebrity-politician Stacey Abrams, for example. As Just the News reports, Abrams enriched her net worth more 2,800% in just three years, according to a Government Accountability Institute study:

In 2018, Abrams reported a net worth of just $109,000 in her personal financial disclosure ahead of her failed 2018 gubernatorial bid in Georgia. Now, as she heads into the 2022 gubernatorial race, Abrams’ campaign filings show her net worth is more than $3.17 million after making more than $6 million in book advances, speaking deals, and growing corporate investments like NowAccount.

According to the Speaking Booking Agency, the race-baiting perennial gubernatorial candidate — the same one who chased Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game out of Atlanta last year and thereby cost Georgia some $100 million — commands between $50,000 and $100,000 for a single speaking gig.

Nice “work” if you can get it.

“Now Abrams’ novels may be great, and her speeches riveting,” writes PJ Media’s Robert Spencer, “but this kind of money, and far more, is all too commonly given to public officials. The Obamas got a staggering $65 million book deal in 2017, which both Barack and Michelle would have to sell well over a million books to make back for the publisher. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen made $7.2 million in speaking fees in 2019 and 2020.”

Were Abrams’s fundraising prowess limited to bilking woke, white-guilty corporations of lucrative speaking fees, that’d be one thing. But one of the firms associated with NowAccount, a financial technology company Abrams cofounded in 2010, was called — we kid you not — Happy Faces Personnel Group, and Happy Faces was the staffing firm hired to scan and count ballots in Atlanta’s Fulton County on election night in 2020.

Naturally, makes us wonder: There weren’t any allegations of voting anomalies in swing-state Georgia during the presidential election, nor during the state’s two special run-off Senate elections in January of 2021, were there? Naw.

So not only is Abrams getting rich off the taxpayer dime, she’s also playing a vital role in who gets elected to office.

Happy Faces indeed.

Abrams isn’t the first, and she won’t be the last, but she’s currently Exhibit A for the sleazy, self-enriching political class. As Spencer concludes, “Public service in America isn’t public service anymore; it’s a place at the public trough. For the sake of our future as a free republic, that must end.”