With all the sequester mirrors and smoke coming out of the White House, along with mournful hand-wringing because so many needed programs will suffer, I found a link to an interesting double-standard story by Keith Koffler of White House Dossier via Drudge.
It seems that Vice President Biden flies home to Wilmington, Delaware most weekends although he has an exclusive government-provided residence in Washington.
He “acknowledged the flights during recent remarks to the National Association of Attorneys General, noting that the sequester would force him to temporarily alter his expensive habit and use the train instead.”
According to reports, “he generally uses Air Force Two to get to Wilmington, a military version of the Boeing 757-200, costing about $8,800 per hour to fly.”
The distance is only about a hundred miles, “but it’s safe to assume that between flying time and the time spent on the takeoff would amount to a round-trip cost to taxpayers of about $13,200 each time."
The article concludes as follows: “Biden has family in Delaware and reportedly also likes to golf at an exclusive club there. But in an era of soaring debt, he had been making a choice to spend thousands of taxpayers dollars to accommodate a personal predilection.”
I mention this subject because it comes right on the heels of yesterday’s complaints by Debbie Wasserman Schultz that the “Sequester’s nearly starving staffers.”
Now, when I read this stuff and think back to the concept of government as applied by the nation’s founders, I find it very hard to grasp how incredibly abusive of tax-paying citizens today’s politicians are. Because in the beginning, national governance was taken on as an unpaid personal responsibility and honor, and all of the founders had other businesses or endeavors from which they earned all their income, covering the costs of office-holding themselves.
But, to me, what’s far worse is that these folks in and around public-office today are not only abusively costly, the vast, vast majority of them do incredibly horrible jobs to boot. However, they’re almost impossible to terminate or dislodge regardless after election or appointment.
So, I think the time’s certainly come where if the costs these people generate are so dramatically different than what was originally planned, the process of job-performance evaluation should be adjusted too. And in that way, folks like Biden and Wasserman Schultz who completely disregard fiscal prudence, can be relieved of duty at once due to misappropriation of taxpayer’s funds which in time will greatly help to get budgets back to where they should be.
That’s it for today folks.
Adios
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