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.
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.
“The press has been so slow in picking up
on this extraordinary increase in the president’s expenses,” Gray told TheDC. (RELATED: Five shocking truths
about Michelle Obama)
Specifically, Gray said taxpayer dollars
are subsidizing Obama’s re-election effort when he uses Air Force One to jet
across the country campaigning.
When the trip is deemed political, it’s
customary for the president to pay the equivalent of a first class commercial
ticket for certain passengers. But Gray says that hardly covers the taxpayer
cost of flying the president and his staffers around on Air Force One.
“When the United States’ billion-dollar
air armada is being used politically, is it fair to taxpayers that we only be
reimbursed by the president’s campaign committee for the value of one
first-class commercial ticket for each passenger who is deemed aboard ‘for
political purposes?’” Gray asks in the book.
“And is that bargain-price advantage fair
to those opposing an incumbent president?” (SEE ALSO: Millions of taxpayer
dollars used for Disney World conference)
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.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/26/taxpayers-spent-1-4-billion-on-obama-family-last-year-perks-questioned-in-new-book/#ixzz284DSWjHO
