Taxpayers spent $1.4 billion
on Obama family last year, perks questioned in new book
Published: 11:32 PM
09/26/2012
By Alex Pappas
FILE - In this June 27, 2012 file photo, President Barack Obama
and his wife, Michelle, arrive at the Congressional picnic on the South Lawn of
the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
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.
“The press has been so slow in picking up on
this extraordinary increase in the president’s expenses,” Gray told TheDC.
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?”
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.
Here is a sample of other pricey taxpayer funded
perks exclusively reserved for the president:
The president can to appoint high-paid staffers
without Senate confirmation:
Obama has 469 senior staffers and 226 are paid more than $100,000 a year,
according to the book. Seventy-seven
are paid as much as $172,000 per year. He also has appointed 43 “czars.”
The president can vacation for free at Camp
David: Gray writes that each
round trip made to Camp David costs the
taxpayers $25,350. It’s also estimated that the combined transportation and
personnel costs for a Camp David visit are $295,000 per night.
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.”
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