His salary for one year does not even cover the costs of airfaire and security for his lavish vacations.
That may or may not be true; I am not privy to his financial status nor do I particularly care to be. But I am pretty sure he could easily afford "lavish" vacations on Martha's Vineyard on the proceeds from his book alone.
The cost of security is irrelevant. The Secret Service is required, by law, to provide protection to the President and which is completely funded by us. Where the President is doesn't matter so the costs of security are out of consideration. As for airfare, one of the perks of the job is that he gets to travel around in Air Force One, Marine One and fancy limousines. The cost of this transportation is through the roof, and I won't debate that. There is a policy in place that requires the President to reimburse the United States for non-political trips, but it only represents a fraction of the cost. See
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS21835.pdf for details.
To be clear, I agree that it's
tone-deaf of him to take a vacation when the country is in trouble. I just find it kind of ironic that you choose to single him out and happily pretend that this sort of thing is something unprecedented and that it represents a new low. And that's
bullshit. He's not the first President to spend too much time gallivanting about when the country was in a difficult spot, and he won't be the last either. Come 2016, someone else will be doing exactly the same thing.
Out of curiosity, I checked against George W. Bush (for no reason, other than the fact that he was Obama's immediate predecessor and statistics were readily available on Google); He spent a total of 1,020 days on "vacation" in Texas and Maine. That's close to 3 years out of 8: a whopping 37.5% of his time. Were you equally outraged then?
By the way, you will notice that I put vacation in quotes. That's because the President, whether he's (D) or (R) is never truly on vacation, regardless of where he is, physically.
