Oprah Winfrey Makes $260 Million More Than You Do Every Year

This morning, we were sitting in our closet-sized apartment, eating a can of tuna fish for breakfast [Ed Note: It’s also lunch and dinner] bemoaning our lack of dental insurance and typing away on our 8 year-old computer (it works just fine, except it’s slow as hell and missing the “F” and “W” keys) while piggybacking off our neighbor’s wireless internet connection when suddenly we came across this article on Reuter’s about Oprah’s $260 million salary.

Oprah Winfrey, host and supervising producer of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” earns an estimated $260 million a year, according to a list in TV Guide magazine’s July 23 issue. Music producer Simon Cowell, the blunt and often contentious British judge of “American Idol,” placed a distant second to Winfrey, with $45 million for his role on the Fox network’s smash hit talent show and other projects.

Jeez, no wonder Oprah’s always smiling her ass off. We’d be happy, too, if we had our own hair and makeup team (or even just enough cash to buy some decent foundation from Sephora).

Seriously, how hard is it to earn the reputation of being generous when you’re making that kind of bank? If we had that kind of extra cash, we’d be throwing it around just about everywhere. “Thanks for the letter, mailman!” we’d exclaim, and toss him a perfunctory $1,000 bill. “The time? Why, it’s almost noon,” we’d reply, and count out twelve hundred dollars bills to emphasize our point.

Also, we’d be able to ride a jumbo jet to and from work every single day, furnish our apartment with seating options of the non-cardboard box variety, buy everyone in the whole damn world a copy of “The Secret” and still have enough left over to hire Jessica Simpson’s personal trainer and buy a penthouse apartment in the West Village that’s nearly half the size of our current Gramercy digs.

Sigh.

Oh, to dream…