(no subject)

[windelina]

The Washington Post reports that the Bush administration, which is raising $40 million in private funds for the most expensive inauguration in history next week, wants the District of Columbia, for the first time in history, to pay all of its own expenses -- estimated at more than $17 million. In order to do so, the district will be required to divert $11.9 million from federal homeland security funding earmarked for hospitals, firefighting equipment and transit command centers.

The city's costs include $8.8 million in overtime pay for police officers, $2.7 million to pay officers being sent from around the nation to help with the event, $3 million to construct reviewing stands and $2.5 million to place the entire city infrastructure on emergency status. More than 100 square blocks of the city will be closed to vehicular traffic for this first post-9/11 inauguration.

For all previous inaugurations, Congress has made a direct appropriation to the perennially cash-strapped city to cover most or all of its costs. Boston and New York also each got $50 million from the federal government to cover costs associated with last year's party conventions, although those are private events while the inauguration is an official celebration.

Critics from many quarters have asked whether it is even appropriate to have an extravagant, boisterous inauguration, given that soldiers are dying daily in Iraq and hundreds of thousands are still suffering the catastrophic effects of the South Asia tsunami.

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I am so not surprised.

Remember: Bush originally offered 15 million to tsunami aid - less than HALF of what his inauguration will cost. I think we know where his priorities are.

Comments

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

You're taking what I said farther than what I meant.
Am I? I read your post two, maybe three times and went through a couple of drafts before posting my reply. I was trying to avoid hyperbole but apparently didn't avoid it enough.

Yeah, it's DHS money, but if it hasn't been spent yet, why all the sudden outrage that it's being spent on one particular aspect of security (Presidential) as opposed to being spent on, say, bioterror defense gear? I'd think if it was that damn important to Washingtonians, they would have leaned on the City Council and the Mayor to spend it by now.

Sure, it's more expensive than previous inaugurations. But you're confusing the money spent on the inauguration party itself (which is all privately contributed and not paid for with taxes) with the money being spent on security. And that money is coming from the Feds to begin with - it's just making a pit stop in the city treasury before going into the pockets of the police and other security agencies. As I said in a reply to birdfigment's comment, this is a tempest in a teapot.

Yeah, they could do the inauguration a lot cheaper. We could all do things a lot cheaper. Your allusions to body armor and tsunami aid are complete (and inaccurate) non-sequiturs that don't really have anything to do with the inauguration at all. As for being "shamed" into increasing aid, ISTR that we were first off the blocks to offer aid, and those carrier groups were there faster than anyone else's help...come to think of it, I think we're still waiting for the UN to stop holding meetings and tooling around in their SUVs. As for being stingy, we look pretty good compared to some of our European "allies". Including, I am ashamed to say, Spain.

I hope you're wrong about Kid getting dropped. His recent hit summarizes the way a lot of us feel about foreign policy these days. "Ain't nothin' but a cowboy, baby..." :)