Our Threatened Freedom

Do Our Ex-Presidents Cost Too Much

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 95-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 095

Dictation Name: Vol. H - Part 04 - Do Our Ex-Presidents Cost Too Much

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Do our ex-presidents cost too much? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

One of the very substantial drains on tax-payers is paying for ex-legislators and bureaucrats. This includes the high price of ex-presidents. Each ex-president receives an annual pension of 69,630 dollars. This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. For the first 30 months after leaving office, the ex-president is entitled to an office staff with an aggregate salary ceiling of 150,000 per year. After the 30 months, this drops to 96,000 per year. On top of this, the taxpayer pays for office facilities. Nixon’s office in Manhattan cost 66,000 a year. Ford’s in Palm Springs California cost 54,573 dollars a year. Carter’s in Atlanta cost about 340,000, and Carter also rents an office in his mother’s home in Plains Georgia for 250 dollars a month. Add to this, for all these men various decorating costs, moving costs, office supplies, newspapers and periodicals, office plants and watering and fertilizing services for the plants in Ford’s offices, as well as cable television, and no postage costs. This list does not cover all items. Of course the men get Secret Service protection as well. Then the presidential libraries, housing their papers and other items, costs, according to Inquiry Magazine, about twelve and a half million dollars per year. The cost of the Secret Service protection is about eight and a half million dollars per year. So we are talking about a large staff of men. All this does not compare to the cost of the presidency, which rises with each man.

Our presidents now live better than royalty ever lived. The visible cost of the White House for 1982 is twenty-six million dollars. But vast amounts are, and have been, charged off to national events and a variety of other accounts, as Bill Gulley, in ‘Breaking Cover’ made clear. So great and hidden is the cost of our new royalty that Clark Norton in Inquiry says, and I quote, “Perhaps most disturbing of all is the simple fact that while the cost of the presidency is grown to staggering proportions, no one has the foggiest idea of the total expenditures.” Unquote.

Promises of economy are a joke. Carter promised to cut the White House staff and practice economy. He did cut the official staff by nearly 30%, but he transferred over 70 employees to another agency, while continuing to use them and others, so that his actual staff was 30% larger than Ford’s. All our presidents have played games like this with us, and for this we reward them handsomely. Of course, it is Congress that does the rewarding, and why not? What president will object when Congress gives itself like benefits, when that president knows he will get more of the same?

In other words, government is less and less of, by, and for the people, but of, by and for the bureaucracy and the politicians. They get the benefits and we get the bill. There is some justice to all this, whether we are Republicans or Democrats, this is what we keep voting for. Most people are only trying to get in line for their share of the handout. In the process, our form of government and our freedom are suffering badly.

This has been R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.