fuck it... ill post mine
India on $200 Million a Day? Not!
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Critics of President Obama’s are abuzz with the charge that the American government will spend $200 million a day, or a total of $2 billion, to send the president on the 10-day mission to four countries that began today.
Except there is no evidence that it’s true.
Government officials said Friday that the rumored costs — which began from unnamed sources on a TV station Web site in India, the first stop on the president’s trip — are false.
In a posting on the White House blog, Dan Pfeiffer, the communications director, called it “a long trip from reality” and said the rumor so far overstates the amount actually to be spent that “it’s not even close to being true.”
That has not stopped some of Mr. Obama’s critics from repeating the rumor as fact. Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host, announced simply: “Two hundred million dollars a day this nation will spend on Obama’s trip to India.”
Fox News host Glenn Beck calculated the total 10-day cost as just “$2 billion,” adding, “We have 34 warships — have you seen this?”
In response, Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon spokesman, dismissed as “absolutely absurd this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the Navy — some 34 ships and an aircraft carrier — in support of the president’s trip to Asia.”
“That’s just comical,” he said. “Nothing close to that is being done.”
In fact, the $200 million-per-day figure would, according to factcheck.org, be higher than the daily cost of the entire Afghanistan war, which the Congressional Research Service puts at about $190 million per day.
That’s not to say that presidential trips are not costly. A General Accounting Office report calculated that President Clinton’s similar 12-day trip to Africa in 1998 cost $42.8 million, or about $3.6 million a day.
What does that include? The expense of operating Air Force One and the other aircraft, hotels and other travel expenses, telecommunications and the vehicles used in other countries. It does not, the G.A.O. report says, include Secret Service costs, which are classified.
But according to factcheck.org, the claims about costs from Mr. Obama’s critics are “highly doubtful” with no evidence to support them.
“The total cost including Secret Service protection would of course be somewhat higher, but even doubling or tripling those figures and adding in an adjustment for inflation would not produce anything close to the figure given by the Indian news article for Obama’s trip,” the group said.
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