'You start to be an entitled a**hole': Vance counts private jet and grocery-free life among VP perks

Americans may be reeling from a cost-of-living crisis due to pressures such as the war in Iran and the Trump administration's tariff policies, but not Vice President J.D. Vance, who in a recent podcast recounted how his job comes with a range of perks. "My life is totally transformed. I don't go to the grocery store anymore. People go to the grocery store for me. I don't have to cook anymore because I've got an army of people. My life is so weird. I fly around on a 757, no more TSA lines for the kids and me," he told 'The Way I Heard It' host Mike Rowe.

Vance, who is on a promotional tour for his new book, 'Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith', joined Rowe to discuss the memoir about his recent conversion to Catholicism. His remarks during the freewheeling interview were in response to Rowe's question about what his grandparents — who raised him in deep poverty in Ohio, as recounted in his best-selling book "Hillbilly Elegy," to which the new book serves as a sequel — would think about his success today.

The 41-year-old then acknowledged that he and his late grandmother, Bonnie Vance, would be worried about the dangers of entitlement. "It can become a thing if you internalize it; you start to be an entitled a**hole. I think that's the thing that Mamaw (as he affectionately called her) would insist: don't become entitled. Recognize it's cool. It's a blessing. Obviously, it comes along with duties and responsibilities, but she would be very proud of me," he concluded.

Despite the hedging, his comments have not gone down well on social media, with users criticizing the clip as it made the rounds. "He's bragging about this while working Americans are struggling to pay bills and put food on their own table because of this administration's cruelty and incompetence. He's either a d*mba*s, an a**hole, or both," one user wrote on X, while another commented that Vance was bragging like a "teenager."

As America's second-in-command, Vance draws a base official salary of $235,100 per year, which does not include the perks of being in the upper echelons of government. That's not all — he disclosed earning as much as $7.4 million last year from book royalties, investments and his venture-capital firm, according to his financial disclosure report. With these figures, it's understandable why observers online may be taking his comments with a pinch of salt.

In their view, he is unlikely to register the insensitivity of his comments at a time when Americans believe the high cost of living is the most important financial problem facing their families, according to a Gallup poll in April. Inflation, too, reached a three-year high in May, with the annual rate at 4.2%, up from 3.8% in April, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. All in all, the poll pointed out that Americans' financial outlook remained poor.