-By Warner Todd Huston
On Wednesday, April 3, President Obama announced he would be returning 5% of his paycheck to the federal treasury in a show of shared sacrifice with federal workers facing furloughs because of the sequester. The news came as he once again flew about the country pushing his anti-Second Amendment policies and only days after another lavish vacation indulged by the first family was in the news.
Morgan lambasted Obama’s attempt to spread the pain of austerity to his own household calling it a “pointless exercise” and despaired that the President wasn’t doing something more substantive.
Morgan railed saying, “if he gave up the vacations, which are costing the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars, it might have more impact than five percent of $400,000.”
But even here Morgan soft-pedaled the money the American people have spent on Obama’s many vacations.
Early in January a calculation of tax dollars spent on Obama vacations came to over 20 million tax dollars. But Keith Koffler estimated that the even the $20 million price tag for the first family’s lavish vacations was actually way too low because it didn’t take into account things like flying the President’s advance teams around the world to prepare Obama’s destination for his impending arrival.
Naturally in that same program Morgan also attacked Congress for not acceding to his demands that America relinquish its Second Amendment rights, a topic that is a near daily indulgence for Morgan.
Morgan’s ratings have been cratering for some time despite his oft-repeated high dudgeon on guns. Last month his ratings sunk to a new low finding only 87,000 viewers in the key 25-54 demographic.
For an interesting visual representation of what Obama’s big 4 percent salary cut looks like compared to what the American people spent on the President in just 2011 alone, Erik Soderstrom created a very revealing graphic.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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