Clemson economics professor Bruce Yandle reflects here on VP Joe Biden’s recent extravagant trip to London and Paris. I like his approach to comparing the cost to the lifetime earnings of an ordinary American. Even better, I think, would be to calculate how many typical American workers had to labor all year to pay the taxes necessary to cover Biden’s pricey trip.
We might also be so impertinent as to ask just how that trip made anyone in America better off.
Some reporters have taken to pestering White House officials about the high cost of Obama and Biden’s trips. The responses have been classic dodges, such as trying to change the subject to the president’s professed concern over the economy and saying that high government spending “is nothing unusual.” No, it is not unusual, but that is no justification.
Yandle mentions the Coolidge administration, during which the cost of the federal government actually declined. Couldn’t Obama and Biden make at least some effort at lowering their burden on the rest of us? Their Marie-Antoinette-like attitude is quite insufferable.