From The Daily Caller:
Taxpayers spent $1.4 billion dollars on everything from staffing,
housing, flying and entertaining President Obama and his family last
year, according to the author of a new book on taxpayer-funded
presidential perks.
In comparison, British taxpayers spent just $57.8 million on the royal family.
Author Robert Keith Gray writes in “Presidential Perks Gone Royal”
that Obama isn’t the only president to have taken advantage of the
expensive trappings of his office. But the amount of money spent on the
first family, he argues, has risen tremendously under the Obama
administration and needs to be reined in.
Gray told The Daily Caller that the $1.4 billion spent on the Obama
family last year is the “total cost of the presidency,” factoring the
cost of the “biggest staff in history at the highest wages ever,” a 50
percent increase in the numbers of appointed czars and an Air Force One
“running with the frequency of a scheduled air line.”
“The most concerning thing, I think, is the use of taxpayer funds to
actually abet his re-election,” Gray, who worked in the Eisenhower
administration and for other Republican presidents, said in an interview
with TheDC on Wednesday....
In the book, Gray admits Americans want their president to be safe
and comfortable but argues the system should be reformed to stop the
amount of unquestioned perks given to the president.
“There is no mechanism for anyone’s objection if a president were to
pay his chief of staff $5,000,000 a year,” he told TheDC. “And nothing
but a president’s conscience can dissuade him from buying his own
reelection with use of some public money.”
Aside from a salary, the president gets a $50,000 a year expense
account, a $100,000 travel account, $19,000 entertainment budget and an
additional million for “unanticipated needs,” he notes.
The president has a full-time movie projectionist in the White House theater:
Projectionists sleep at the White House and are there 24 hours a day in
case anyone needs to see a movie. “Compared to the 450 times President
Carter used the movie theater in his four years in the White House, the
average American citizen, according to industry statistics, goes out to
see a movie slightly less than five times a year,” Gray writes....
The president’s family’s gets certain travel and security expenses paid while vacationing:
“First Lady Michelle Obama drew flack from the media and irate citizens
when it was disclosed that, not counting Saturdays and Sundays, she
spent 42 days on vacation — within the span of one year.”
The president’s dog gets its own high-paid staffer:
“Bo made the news when he and his handler were flown to join the
president on vacation in Maine,” Gray wrote about the Obama family dog.
“It has been reported that the first family’s dog handler was paid
$102,000, last year.”
There is no justification to be spending $1,400,000,000 on the Obama family and his aides. Can you imagine if Mitt Romney or George Bush spent this much money and what the liberals would be saying? They would be demanding Romney and Bush fly coach and donate the savings to the poor.
Yes, being president does bring perks and some are justified, even if abused. For instance, George Bush would sometimes have Air Force 1 fly over a political rally on it's way to it's landing, to impress the faithful, so if Obama did, it's ok by me.
But to spend $102,000 on a dog handler, for 1 stinking dog? Hell, make the Secret Service or Joe Biden pick up the poop Bo lays down- Biden doesn't do much any ways. Heck, Biden can run the movie projector as well. It doesn't take that many brain cells to run a movie projector.
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