An India-based report quoting an anonymous source contends taxpayers will be on the hook for $200 million a day. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. — along with Fox News, the Drudge Report, radio talk-show hosts and hundreds of conservative bloggers and forward-to-all-your-friends e-mails — picked up the story and ran with it.
Among the dubious claims: Obama will be accompanied by 3,000 guests, 34 warships (including an aircraft carrier) and 40 planes, including two Marine One helicopters that will be dismantled, flown overseas and reconstructed there to fly the president and his family around India. The Obamas reportedly booked the entire Taj Mahal Palace hotel for their entourage.
Tea-party darling Bachmann, asked on CNN where she came up with the $200 million-a-day number, attributed the figure to unnamed press reports.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell disputed the military-hardware claim.
"I will take the liberty this time of dismissing as absolutely absurd this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the Navy ... in support of the president's trip to Asia," Morrell said Thursday at a Pentagon briefing. "That's just comical. Nothing close to that is being done."
White House spokesman Amy Brundage also said the $200 million figure has "no basis in reality" and is "wildly inflated." In the tradition of past administrations, the White House declined to provide cost estimates.
However, a rare glimpse of the cost of foreign travel by a U.S. president came from a 1999 General Accounting Office report on trips by President Clinton in 1998. It estimated the total cost of a March 22-April 2 visit to Africa as at least $42.8 million, $10.5 million for an April 16-20 visit to Chile and $18.8 million for a June 25-July 3 trip to China, excluding Secret Service expenses.
(source:nwsource.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment