Recently thousands of Americans, including students from across the country who have been planning for months and raising their own money to pay for trips to Washington to tour the White House, have been left disappointed by the cancellation of the tours. The tours cost the federal government an estimated $2 million per year, and there’s just not enough money, says the spendiest-ever White House, because of the limitations imposed by federal government sequestration and budget cuts.
There’s more than enough money for other, more important things, though. President Barack Obama recently jetted off to play golf with Tiger Woods at a reported cost of $1 million. A state dinner at the White House in 2010, which included a performance by Beyonce in “a massive tent adorned with…hanging chandeliers” likewise cost nearly $1 million dollars. The Obamas’ annual health-care costs come to about $7 million, and they spend over $20 million annually on vacations.
Then there are the miscellaneous expenses. The federal government spends $2 billion – one thousand times the annual cost of the cancelled White House tours – in San Diego county alone, for such things as —
A…matching federal grant for interpretive dance called “Trolley Dances.”…$600,000 for “the promotion of physical activity in churchgoing Latinas.”… $550,000 for UCSD research into “safer sex intervention for male clients of female sex workers in Tijuana.”
Gotta close the White House to the public, though.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney:
“It is extremely unfortunate that we have a situation like the sequester that compels the kinds of tradeoffs and decisions that this represents.“
Don’t forget the star-studded 50th birthday bash for her highness…wait, I mean, Michelle Obama.
Americans ARE starting to put things together, slowly. White House tours: probably the smallest item on the budget.
Oh I forgot, they don’t use a budget….just a napkin.
Will the American public open their eyes to how they are being played? When the light goes on, then what?
Michelle Fields and Neil Cavuto on the jokes… not funny, now funny… 4 minutes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPt7w6iVW7Q&list=FLkNf8o-ad2osEl7JtS1_7XA&index=1
…or the $102,000 per year for the chief of staff to Obama’s dog.
I wouldn’t go to the white house, pretty sure I would be tempted to burn the place down like one of my ancestors did back in the war of 1812….it’s coded in my genetics.
This is why it is crucial for people to fight against any talk of tax increases. The left always portrays tax increases as this sophisticated compromise that will provide roads and hospitals and schools and fire trucks etc.etc.etc.
The problem for me, is that when you go through budgets with a fine tooth comb, you find all this tremendous waste, which tells me that the government just has too much money. If they were truly starving then they’d start liquidating the junk in order to fuel the important stuff.
A starving government is a good government. The government needs to be starving almost to the point of dysfunction, but not to the point of corruption.
$375,000 for three White House Caligraphers.
Tijuana is part of San Diego Country now? I thought it was the other way around? Or is that just when it comes to paying for stuff?
How could they possibly spend that much on health care — very strange.
Thomas Sowell:
Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency’s budget were cut, what would it do?
The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.
For either that more-slimey-than-a-greased-weasel-playing-twister Carney or his utterly shameless lying POS Boss @1600 Penn Ave to even fix their lips to insult our intelligence with the no-money-in-the-piggy-bank BS takes a Lake Superior-sized vessel full of unmitigated gall. But some of us already knew that “unmitigated gall” was their stock & trade well before Obama was first elected..
Welcome to the decline people..
(As if this is news..)
This could easily become a PR nightmare for King and Queen Obama, but the Republicans seems to have long ago forgotten how to take advantage of such opportunities.
As for the Obama’s, they have no shame whatsoever. America could have a second depression and they would continue to party away like nothing was wrong.
I am quite sure their attitude is “We got into the white man’s house, now we are going to milk it for everything we can”.
Sounds like Mugabe to me………
This could easily become a PR nightmare for King and Queen Obama, but the Republicans seems to have long ago forgotten how to take advantage of such opportunities.
As for the Obamas, they have no shame whatsoever. America could have a second depression and they would continue to party like nothing was wrong.
I am quite sure their attitude is “We got into the white man’s house, now we are going to milk it for everything we can”.
Sounds like Mugabe to me………
” I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.
Milton Friedman
Thomas Sowell wrote on this days ago:
 : http://goo.gl/X7xau
.
All the kids need to do is raise $500,000.00 a piece and they can buy their way into having access to Obama.
Apparently that is what it costs to buy access to the POS POTUS
Or Obama could just allocate 4 of his donor payoffs to funding the tours.
Fox News’ Eric Bolling, Sean Hannity Offer $90,000 to Keep White House Open to Tourists
Either way, Bolling is keeping his offer open, and sent out another message via Twitter Friday morning: “Hey JayCarney @pressec , you going to take me up on my offer to pay to open WhiteHouse? Let’s get the word out twitter #OpenTheWhiteHouse
Obama’s pettiness in this sequester is self-defeating. He can afford luxury for him but must grade school students to go without. This is the equivalent of a child holding his breath until he gets his way. That might have worked with his wealthy white grandparents but I don’t think many other people are buying it.
Calvin Coolidge was frugal and Herbert Hoover refused to take a salary. When, oh when, will Obama be a father to his men and pay his “fair share”?
Considering that Obama has never worked a day in his life, its not unlike a alcoholic inheriting a fully stocked bar. Never mind running the business, just stay drunk with all the free booze. He will run out of booze someday, but for the next few years…who cares.
I suspect it’s not so much the money, but the “royalty” currently in the WH using it as an excuse to limit exposure to the unwashed peasants. I suspect that quite soon Obozo will have his “let them eat cake” moment and one only hopes there are enough patriots left in the US to deal with this appropriately.
What kind of medical care is Obozo getting that costs $7 million/year? Is that bribery money to his former physicians to not let on that he’s HIV+ or some similar medical diagnosis? Obozo, when he falls, will make Nixon’s exit from power seem like no big deal.
What do you expect from the Community Organizer Of The United States. He has Dennis Rodman as his Secretary of State, the Fresh Prince of BelAir as his chief fundraiser, and numerous other idiots whom he has chosen to surround himself with.
My prediction is that the White House will never again be open to the public under this president. This suites him just fine keeping the little people outside where they belong.
The Republicans are part of the problem, not the solution. They don’t want spending cut, either.
I don’t know about anyone else, but if this is pain, I’m not feeling it. I do believe it is time to cut a for-real five percent or so and see how it goes. So far we have only foregone some of the intended increase.
By all accounts the tours are rubbish anyway. Frankly the children have been done a service—they’d have been bored to tears. Actually, from my experience (yes, I’ve been a few times), the whole city is rubbish, Thomas Jefferson’s pipe-dream of re-building what he thought Republican Rome was like on the Potomac, resulting 200 years later in the bastard child of Pyongyang and Detroit. Ottawa is a paradise by comparison.
(Note that 24 Sussex cannot be visited at all. Who wants to see Pierre Trudeau’s swimming pool anyway?)
You want the kids to learn something on their school trip (and at a fraction of the cost of hauling them all over creation), take them to the local shooting range and have the staff give them a first lesson on how to handle a gun. The boys, if they’re like most boys, will think they’ve died and gone to heaven. As for the girls, you might save their lives.
(What? Obama is pennywise and pound-foolish? Sure what did you expect?)
Obama reminds me of the quintessential grifter (AKA con artist)
Recently watched the classic 1964 movie “Elmer Gantry” – the similarities are striking.
Two. Million. Dollars.
Now we know. Whenever reformers try to identify wasteful spending, they find a wasteful program and publicize it. The question, however, is always: how big does a program have to be to make a difference, to be newsworthy. Neither the public, the media or even the congressmen have time to chase after every dollar that might be saved.
So, how big does a program have to be before it is worth scrutinizing? Two million dollars per year.