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.
?The press has been so slow in picking up on this extraordinary increase in the president?s expenses,? Gray told TheDC.
?and also from the Daily Caller, Vern McKinley,?History suggests Obama is poised to win re-election?:
Historically, it has taken a recession in the two-year window before a presidential election for a challenger
to knock off a sitting president. Data on recessions from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) integrated with the relevant election results gives us the following summary of sitting presidents unceremoniously removed from office over the past century:
George H.W. Bush got the boot in 1992 after the recession of 1990-1991. Jimmy Carter got the boot in 1980 after the recession of early 1980. Gerald Ford got the boot in 1976 after the recession of 1973-1975. Herbert Hoover got the boot in 1932 after the recession that started in 1929 and ran to the election. William Howard Taft got the boot in 1912 after the recession of 1910-1912.
Going back even further, Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland were both removed from office after recessions in the two-year window before their elections. In fact, this formulation holds for every case of a deposed incumbent going back to the 1850s, which is as far back as NBER?s data goes.
However, the most recent recession ended more than three years ago, outside the two-year window. And since there are no definitive signs we are currently in a recession, the prospects look quite good for the president. Like re-election winners such as George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt before him ? other incumbents who saw downturns early in their first terms ? he is benefiting from a bounce-back late in his term. The inflection point between winners and losers appears to be around two years before re-election.
Republicans could argue that this has been a pitiful recovery and that it stacks up poorly against the Reagan-era recovery of the early 1980s, which followed a similarly deep recession with unemployment peaking in the double digits. That is all true, but foremost in most people?s memories is not the Reagan recovery of 30 years ago but the recession that started under Bush in late 2007 and which consumed the last presidential campaign in 2008.
The reality that the current weak economy looks good in comparison only emphasizes the deep hole of late 2008. Bush left office in the midst of a financialcollapse, panic-induced bailouts and deep debt used to finance, among other things, unpaid-for wars.
[...]
Based on the historical record, and despite all arguments against the performance of Obamanomics, it looks like the recovery has been strong enough to give the president four more years.
The millions of people who can?t find jobs ? many of whom who have left the voter rolls entirely ? could not be readily found to comment on the economic turnaround, mostly because none of them exist inside Mr McKinley?s collector?s edition Obama 2012 rose colored glasses.
Good lord, but we are screwed.
Source: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=43858
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