Taxpayers spent $1.4 billion on Obama family last year, perks questioned in new book

[Stephanie]

come on now, why should we complain?

It takes money to take care of a King and Queen

Could be worse. Could be like financing the Royal Family of England that does nothing for the country except exist.

well, that's about how I see the Obama's. They have no problems shoving 17 day Hawaiian vacations in our face, while the rest of us are struggling

 

[velvtacheeze]

Conservative whining about the spending on the First Family after 2009 has no creditably, and actually seems kinda racist. So you can stfu now.

 

[TakeAStepBack]

The Daily Caller? Isn't that a right wing site? (Yes)
Now for an objective look at this new thing that the right wing decided might be good to rile up the ever loyal goose-steppers who can be counted on to not check up facts.
===========================================

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.”
Gray doesn’t say where he came up with this number, but one presumes it comes from the Federal Budget. It’s a lot of money, of course, and it’s caused no small degree of outrage on conservative blogs. There’s just one problem, Gray’s assertion that costs associated with the Presidency have “tremendously” increased since Obama took office simply isn’t true.

To establish that, we need only look at a paper produced by the Brookings Institution’s Bradley Patterson [PDF] in which, in one chapter, he lays out the question of what it costs to run the White House. The first point Patterson notes is that this isn’t an easy question to answer:

What are the annual dollar costs, for a typical year, of operating the modern presidency—of running the White House, the whole White House? One of the reasons that question has never been answered (and perhaps never even asked) is because the pathway to the answer is so complicated. One may start with the tab “White House Office” in the annual congressional budget submission of the Executive Office of the President, but that is only an initial fraction. In addition, twenty-two other budget accounts, thirteen of them in other departments, or parts of departments, pay the expenses, and the salaries, of men and women who are in fact members of the White House staff family. Not only are those costs scattered through those twenty-two other budgets, but in at least nine of them the dollars are not in any fashion identified as White House. Realistic estimates have to be made.
Patterson attempted to do that for the Fiscal Year 2008 budget and came up with a figure of $1,592,875,254. This does not include classified outlays for things such as Air Force One. One assumes that the figured that Gray came up with also omits these classified figures. The first thing that jumps out, of course, is that the cost that Patterson came up with for Fiscal Year 2008, when Bush was President, is more than the figure that Gray provides. Since we don’t know exactly how Gray calculated his figures, we can’t say that this ends the debate since he could have left off items that Patterson included, which would be odd since he seems to have started out with the assumption that the President dramatically increased the cost of the Presidency. Nonetheless, it seems rather obvious from comparing these two figures that the assertion that the costs to the taxpayer associated with the Presidency have increased “tremendously” under President Obama are, quite simply, wrong.
For more: The Presidency Costs Taxpayers A Lot, But That’s Not Obama’s Fault

Nothing is ever Obama's fault. One really could conclude based on his fervent sycophants that the man is the next coming of Jesus. Let me know if anyone catches him walking on water.

 

[TakeAStepBack]

Conservative whining about the spending on the First Family after 2009 has no creditably, and actually seems kinda racist. So you can stfu now.

Wow! Bad grammar, bad spelling and a racist card all in two lines. That has to be a record of some type.

 

[Soggy in NOLA]

come on now, why should we complain?

It takes money to take care of a King and Queen

Could be worse. Could be like financing the Royal Family of England that does nothing for the country except exist.

Actually, the Brits pay far less for the Royal Family... they Royal Family is massively wealthy and pay for most of it themselves.

 

[auditor0007]

The Daily Caller? Isn't that a right wing site? (Yes)
Now for an objective look at this new thing that the right wing decided might be good to rile up the ever loyal goose-steppers who can be counted on to not check up facts.
===========================================

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.”
Gray doesn’t say where he came up with this number, but one presumes it comes from the Federal Budget. It’s a lot of money, of course, and it’s caused no small degree of outrage on conservative blogs. There’s just one problem, Gray’s assertion that costs associated with the Presidency have “tremendously” increased since Obama took office simply isn’t true.

To establish that, we need only look at a paper produced by the Brookings Institution’s Bradley Patterson [PDF] in which, in one chapter, he lays out the question of what it costs to run the White House. The first point Patterson notes is that this isn’t an easy question to answer:

What are the annual dollar costs, for a typical year, of operating the modern presidency—of running the White House, the whole White House? One of the reasons that question has never been answered (and perhaps never even asked) is because the pathway to the answer is so complicated. One may start with the tab “White House Office” in the annual congressional budget submission of the Executive Office of the President, but that is only an initial fraction. In addition, twenty-two other budget accounts, thirteen of them in other departments, or parts of departments, pay the expenses, and the salaries, of men and women who are in fact members of the White House staff family. Not only are those costs scattered through those twenty-two other budgets, but in at least nine of them the dollars are not in any fashion identified as White House. Realistic estimates have to be made.
Patterson attempted to do that for the Fiscal Year 2008 budget and came up with a figure of $1,592,875,254. This does not include classified outlays for things such as Air Force One. One assumes that the figured that Gray came up with also omits these classified figures. The first thing that jumps out, of course, is that the cost that Patterson came up with for Fiscal Year 2008, when Bush was President, is more than the figure that Gray provides. Since we don’t know exactly how Gray calculated his figures, we can’t say that this ends the debate since he could have left off items that Patterson included, which would be odd since he seems to have started out with the assumption that the President dramatically increased the cost of the Presidency. Nonetheless, it seems rather obvious from comparing these two figures that the assertion that the costs to the taxpayer associated with the Presidency have increased “tremendously” under President Obama are, quite simply, wrong.
For more: The Presidency Costs Taxpayers A Lot, But That’s Not Obama’s Fault

It's just more of the right wing trying to rile up the uneducated voters out there. Intelligent people are getting fed up with this BS political posturing which serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever other than to make Republicans and Conservatives look very stupid.