What can you buy for $1.4 billion a year?
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.
Perspective: $1.4 billion is equal to spending seven times Mitt Romney's entire net-worth every year. If Romney had to pay for Barack and Michelle's lifestyle this year, he would have been bankrupt by the third week in February.
Now, can we please get back to talking about the evil, freeloading rich, who didn’t build anything?
I am amazed more people don't catch on to this. How many vacations has he been on? When he travels, it's often out of the country. Yet, people still seem to think he's the best thing since wonder bread.
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