The Obama's are having a wonderful time taking advantage of the perks of the presidency. Months back, their "date" in New York cost the taxpayers about $250,000. Recently, and I don't know why, they had their dog flown in a separate jet to a vacation spot in Maine.
Michelle Obama's trip to Spain with forty of her "girlfriends" is stacking up to cost the taxpayers about half a million.
It's not just the Obama's who are bleeding the taxpayers, though. It's at every level of government, and not necessarily even in government.
In Milwaukee, the teachers' union is battling to have Viagra reinstated as one of the benefits in their already-solid-gold health care plan, paid for by the taxpayers, of course.
The Chevy Volt is subsidized by taxpayers. It has a sticker price of $41,000 but, if you remove the amount of subsidized money in the car, its real cost is closer to $100K.
The irony of the Volt subsidies is that the car is marketed to "hipsters," those younger urban people who make more than the average worker. Thus the taxpayer who can't afford a Volt is paying to make it affordable to those with higher incomes.
This isn't anything new, though. Taxpayers have already been paying the mortgages of those who overspent. We've helped pay for the new cars of others while we wring every last mile out of our own used cars.
Nothing I'm saying here is new. It's just galling me tonight that our president, his wife and their hangers-on are living like Donald Trump while lecturing us on our own spending and energy usage, and while they push through legislation that picks our pockets and slips our money to those who either don't need it or deserve it, or both.
That two-faced ambulance chaser John Edwards talked incessantly about "two Americas". Tonight I'm thinking more in terms of "A Tale of Two Cities".