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Banned
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Originally Posted by CinnamonGirl
Y'know, that got me thinking... what DOES a former president do? It's not like he can apply at the local diner or something.
Then again, I guess they have enough money that not working isn't a hude deal. 
And I won't be upset unless we get the results, and they aren't what I want....and that won't happen for another...what? 24 hours? |
An unemployed president has plenty of options to make money......
(And they accused Clinton of demeaning the office of the presidency....
it was sold before he was inaugurated!)
Quote:
Author: RussHicks
Discussion: Old Conservative's Take
Date: September 5, 2002 10:12 PM
Subject: Haynes Johnson
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385422598/qid%3D983159913/sr%3D1-1/ref%3Dsc%5Fb%5F1/104-2921973-3143901">Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History: America In the Reagan Years,(1991) pp.444-446:</a>
It was Congress that moved to redress the fiscal shortfall caused by the combination of huge tax cuts and defense increases by passing legislation raising new taxes, and it was Reagan who signed those tax increases year after year after year from 1982 through 1988. Of eighteen tax bills he signed as president, thirteen of them called for increases, facts that Reagan conveniently ignored in his public statements while blaming "big spenders" for creating the deficit.
In those closing days of his presidency Reagan returned to California for a last vacation,marking, as one of his biographers, Lou Cannon noted, the 458th day he had spent in California during his two terms as president. There the Reagans stayed for the first time in what would be their new home--a Bel Air mansion in the same neighborhood as such Hollywood stars as Zsa Zsa Gabor and Elizabeth Taylor.
Here, too, was reminder, for those who cared, that Reagan was leaving politics the way he entered it. The same wealthy Californians (among them Holmes Tuttle and Earle Jorgensen) who had purchased a private home for him to use as California's governor, later sold for a profit, had again pooled their money to purchase the Bel Air mansion and leased it to the Reagans. Thirty months before Reagan's second term was to end, eighteen of these Californians contributed a reported $156,000 apiece to buy the seventy-two-hundred-square-foot property, set on one and a quarter acres and overlooking Beverly Hills and all of the Los Angeles Basin. The price was $2.5 million. By inaugural day the land value alone had appreciated to more that $3 million, and the property itself was estimated to be worth more than $5 million. Reagan had also recently completed a multimillion-dollar book deal to write his memoirs and publish a collection of his speeches and was preparing to sign an exclusive agreement with a Washington lecture bureau. (At the same time Nancy Reagan signed a $2 million book contract and was retained by the same lecture bureau.) Reagan was to be paid an estimated $50,000 for each speech inside the United States (and double that overseas), making him the highest-paid speaker in the country. For only two speeches a month he could make more than $1 million a year. This, of course, was in addition to his presidential pension of $99,500 a year for life and his annual pension as a former governor of California of $30,800. In addition, he received Secret Service protection from forty full-time agents and other security at a cost to the government estimated at $10 million annually, more than double that of other living presidents. A suite of offices atop a new thirty-four-story office building twenty minutes from his home, commanding a view that extended from the Pacific Ocean to the towers of downtown Los Angeles, cost the government $173,000 a year to lease. From the government he also got use of a $1.25 million presidential transition fund for six months and $150,000 a year to pay staff.
All this provided more grist for his critics, who pointed out, not inaccurately, that when it came to cashing in on public service, Reagan, who more than any president in history railed against government benefits and spending, set the standard for all members of his administration. From Reaganomics to Reagobucks, one writer noted wryly.
On May 11, 1989, William Safire of the New York Times, commenting on published reports that the Fujisankei Communications Group of Japan had hired Reagan to make two speeches and attend ceremonies that fall, reported that Reagan's weekly fee was about two million dollars, more than he had earned during eight years as president. Safire also reported that Reagan's two jobs, as president and later master of ceremonies at the Japanese business event, were not unrelated. In 1983 Reagan had "favored the founder of the Fujisankei conglomerate by agreeing to an exclusive interview in one of his newspapers, and in 1988 brought him into the Oval Office to discuss the possibility of the visit that turned out to be so lucrative." he gave the lecture, and took the two-million-dollar fee, later that year.
<a href="http://www.suite101.com/discussion.cfm/8054/82606">http://www.suite101.com/discussion.cfm/8054/82606</a>
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