Brace yourself, taxpayers: Trump's plutocracy doesn't come cheap
Brace yourself, taxpayers: Trump’s plutocracy doesn’t come cheap
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Trump and Melania Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)
How many Americans does it take to keep President Trump and his family in the lifestyle to which they are accustomed? Well, think of it this way. The Post this week had a scoop on the Secret Service requesting an additional $60 million in its next budget: $27 million to protect the president’s wife and son in their three-floor penthouse at Trump Tower in New York, where they live instead of the White House, and $33 million for additional travel costs. The average family of four in the United States pays about $4,000 a year in federal income taxes. That means the entire tax bill for 15,000 families for the year will go toward these additional protection measures for Trump. And the Secret Service is just a slice of the overall expense. Figure in costs incurred by authorities in Florida and New York, the Pentagon and others, and costs related to the Trump sons’ international business trips, and we’re well over $100 million a year.
That’s the annual federal income-tax bill for some 25,000 American families. Each trip Trump takes to his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, where he has gone most weekends since his inauguration, is estimated to cost taxpayers in excess of $3 million. And an unknown chunk of the taxpayers’ money subsidizes Trump businesses in the form of rent, restaurant bills and publicity. In April, Trump will host Chinese leader Xi Jinping at what Trump dubs the “Southern White House,” which is a Trump property where the initiation fee has doubled to $200,000 since Trump won the presidency. The taxpayer subsidization of Trump’s rich-and-famous lifestyle is but one of the bait-and-switch maneuvers by Trump, who said during the campaign that “I would rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done.” The man ran as a populist and is governing as a plutocrat.
The now-withdrawn House GOP health-care bill, pushed by Trump, would be a huge transfer of wealth to the rich from the poor and middle class. The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center calculates that while low-income Americans would take a hit under this plan, the average family earning more than $200,000 could be $5,640 better off. White, working-class communities that supported Trump would be disproportionately hurt. Under revisions to the bill last this week, 24 million people would still lose health-care coverage but wealthy Americans would get even more of a tax break, the Congressional Budget Office said.
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Plutocracy doesn’t come cheap, in ways big and small. Tillerson, the secretary of state, kicked the press corps off his plane, which means taxpayers will probably pick up tens of thousands of dollars in travel costs that had been paid by media organizations. (The administration said Tillerson flew on a smaller plane to save money, but the military 737 he took is often used by officials traveling with reporters.) A budget-conscious president would spend weekends at Camp David rather than hopping on Air Force One, at about $200,000 an hour, to Palm Beach, Fla. The Post’s Philip Bump estimated spending on Trump’s travel and protection, if it continues at current rates, at $526 million for his presidency. This dwarfs what was spent by Trump’s predecessors, even though Trump in 2012 tweeted that Obama’s “vacation is costing taxpayers millions of dollars — unbelievable!”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-plutocracy-doesnt-come-cheap/2017/03/24/9a1f79d8-10a5-11e7-ab07-07d9f521f6b5_story.html?utm_term=.dbe34625dd24
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