The President's Salary

[firefox28]

Only 400,000 a year I believe. Granted he has luxuries like Air Force One,the White House, Camp David et etc. I hear he only pays for his food. What else does he pay for? Is that amount enough?

[serrano2008]

1. He's already a multi-millionaire so I think he'll be ok.

[mucifer]

2. yeah he's made a bunch of money off his books.

[uponit7771]

29. He's STILL not payed what the job is worth IMHO, CEO's who screw up get pa

...paid more.

[Jackeens]

3. It's incredibly low by international standards - even the Irish PM earns more!

[TBF]

4. Are you joking? n/t

[ejpoeta]

5. he paid for a swingset for the kids. i am not so concerned about how much he makes

or what he has to pay for. My concern is how a president approaches the job and what it means to be president. Bush seemed to think it meant he was king or something. Bush seemed to think it meant he could make rules up as he went along. Obama seems to think that he is in someone else's house. He seems to think that as president he is trying to fix someone else's big mess. He is trying to make things more transparent for the public. And he asks us all to call him on things when he is wrong. Works for me.

[Rebubula]

6. Yeah..

...that is enough.

1st...he does not pay for anything - except the schooling of his kids.

2nd...he gets that salary for the rest of his life PLUS a security detail, limos, private airplanes and the greatest healthcare benefits anyone could have.

3rd...he is already wealthy and will make 10s of millions more doing speeches and writing books after his 2nd Term.

No President will ever be poor after office.

[babylonsister]

7. First, yes, he does pay for stuff, like food they like for themselves,

school for their children, etc.

Some links in here might help:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/726988.html

[rvablue]

14. You're wrong.

#1 The President and his family pay for food, schooling, clothes among a lot of other indcidentals, like the swingset they bought for their kids.

#2 Presidents after Clinton will not get a lifelong security detail -- and that includes limos, private airplanes --- from Bush on it is limited to TEN YEARS after they leave office.

#3 President Obama will make money after he leaves office, just like the Bushes and Clinton. But like Clinton and Carter and unlike the corportist Bushes, he will probally make some really important and signifigant contributions to society.

[Hippo_Tron]

15. I don't think they pay for their meals prepared by the white house chefs

I'm sure if they go out to dinner they pay.

[Parker CA]

20. There was an article on here awhile back, and the Presidential family pays for all of their own food

except state dinners and WH sponsored events. The article specifically mentioned that the sticker shock is the same for each family when they first move in. Basically dining 4 star for all of their meals takes some serious cash.

[Hippo_Tron]

22. Well as I recall Bush had the chefs make him kraft singles on bunny bread

So I'm sure they didn't run up a huge food bill on his account.

[rvablue]

30. They pay for the food that the chef prepares for them for their daily meals

and if it is not state business.

That is not my opinion. It is a fact.

[TTUBatfan2008]

19. Regarding your second point...

I had no idea that the salary was for life. That's crazy. Regarding the security detail, Clinton is the last one to receive it for life. Starting with Bush, it is limited to 10 years after the end of his term in office. These two things should be reversed. The salary should end as soon as they leave office and the security detail should continue for life.

[onenote]

26. the president does NOT receive the same salary for life

I don't know where you got that idea or if you just pulled it out of your ass.

The President's pension is not equal to the president's salary. Its equal to the salary of a cabinet secretary, currently around $190,000 or slightly less than half of his salary as president.

In the interest of completeness, I should add that former president's also receive additional benefits in the form of travel and office expenses up to certain limits. A full discussion of the pension and benefits accorded former presidents can be found here:

http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/98-249.pdf

[Name removed]

8. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Bonobo]

9. I love the smell of F-A-I-L in the morning. Smells like...victory. nt

[Solomon]

36. Jesus Christ on a cracker, only because it's Obama

would people focus in on this kind of shit. My God, people even open doors for this black man.

[CJCRANE]

10. Is it enough for what?

What is it he can't afford on that salary?

$400,000 seems like plenty to me.

[Marrah_G]

12. psttttttttttttt

The OP is just trying to stir things up.

[CreekDog]

17. the First Lady is working for free

and working damned hard I might add.

[phleshdef]

11. Who cares? He has no control over it.

[firedupdem]

13. He deserves more than that to clean up all the bullshit your

buddies left.

[avaistheone1]

18. If Obama is in it for the money, he is the wrong person for the job.

Obama is making almost twice what any previous U.S. president made for the job, and 10 times what the average American takes home in pay. Plus President Obama has plenty of perks.

I think Congress, the Senate and the President should make the wage the average American takes home, then they would better understand what kind of economic climate we have to deal with on a daily basis. I think we would enjoy much better governance in that case, and the people of the United States would enjoy a much higher standard of living.

[TTUBatfan2008]

21. Actually...

when you adjust Nixon's salary for inflation, it's the equivalent of more than $1 million per year. The cost of living was much lower back then than it is now, so $200,000 was a crapload of money back then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_the_united_states#Salary

Look at the chart.

[avaistheone1]

27. Which makes my point that the average American who makes

one/tenth of what the President makes is the one who is really suffering not the President. Imagine the damage inflation does to the average Joe who only makes a small fraction of what the President makes.

It is alot easier to make it on $400,000 a year, and have all your basic necessity taken care of for you, have servants, and have incredible perks Versus living on $40,000 a year and your damn lucky if you have health insurance.

[TTUBatfan2008]

28. Well of course it is...

though Presidents also make some of the most important decisions. The cost of living for them is literally in the stress. Look at how much Clinton and Bush both aged while in office. It's not as cushy of a situation as you make it out to be. Anything that takes years off of your life due to stress is not my idea of a cushy job.

[avaistheone1]

32. It is not a cushy job being your average working Cathy either. The stress is even higher.

Twenty years ago, journalist John Tierney (whose politics skew libertarian rather than redistributionist) found a much more effective way to compare the stress experienced by America's haves and have-nots. In a classic piece for the New York Times Magazine ("Wired for Stress"), Tierney reported that scientists at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center's cardiovascular center had hooked up two people in high-stress jobs to a device that measured their blood pressure every 15 minutes. One was a 48-year-old Caucasian named Gianni Fidanza who worked on Park Avenue as a stockbroker. The other was a 34-year-old African-American single mother named Cathy Collins who worked at New York Hospital as a clerical aide.

By mere happenstance, the day chosen to record for posterity Fidanza's varying blood pressure was Oct. 19, 1987 ("Black Monday"). On that day, the stock market set a record for the largest one-day percentage decline: The Dow fell 508 points, or 22 percent. In all likelihood, it was the most stressful day Fidanza ever experienced in his working life. The day chosen to record Collins' blood pressure, meanwhile, was "a perfectly ordinary Wednesday." Yet during their respective workdays, the increase in blood pressure experienced by Fidanza as he watched the stock market crash matched that experienced by Collins as she went about her daily chores. And while Fidanza's blood pressure dropped back to normal once he got home, Collins' rose 10 percent after she returned home and started tending to her two children.

What did Collins experience at work that could match Fidanza's Black Monday stress? Tierney, who followed Collins around that day, recorded a typical stress-inducing moment:

At 10:26 A.M., she was standing, the phone cradled on her shoulder, and contending with the following:
* One patient at her desk, waiting to talk to her.
* One secretary with a question about another patient's chart.
* Two lighted buttons on her telephone, indicating incoming calls, and one buzzing intercom.
* Two forms on her desk, which she was filling out as she punched back and forth between phone calls.
* A three-inch-thick stack of paperwork in her ''In'' box, above which she had taped a sign, ''Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.''
* Her boss, who had just emerged from his office with a sheet of paper and said, ''Cathy, I need this Xeroxed right away, please.''

At that moment, a beep sounded, the machine at her waist started drawing in air, and the cuff on her arm tightened. The monitor showed her pulse, which had been 71, to be 82; her blood pressure was 116/72. (Researchers don't agree which of these three numbers is the best indicator of stress, but the one that has traditionally received the most attention is the diastolic blood pressure—the second figure given, in this case, 72—which is used to diagnose hypertension. It measures pressure in the arteries between heart beats; the other reading, the systolic pressure, here 116, measures peak pressure while the heart is pumping.) Collins's diastolic pressure had risen 26 percent, an even greater percentage change than Fidanza had registered that first hour of Black Monday. And, as it turned out, this wasn't even the biggest surge of the day for Cathy Collins.

There is no reason to believe that American working-class life has become more easeful since Tierney published this article in May 1988. Nor am I aware that respective health outcomes for rich and poor—surely a reasonable measure of stress—have altered since I cited Britain's Whitehall Study, a medical survey of British civil servants, in this column in 1999. That study (mentioned in Helen Epstein's excellent 1998 essay in the New York Review of Books "Life and Death on the Social Ladder") found death rates to be lower for civil servants in the highest ranks even when smoking and cholesterol were taken into account. As Epstein put it, "Simply being a senior assistant statistician, rather than chief statistician, increased one's risk of having a fatal heart attack nearly twofold, even if one led an apparently salubrious life."

It's easy to imagine that "It is now the rich who are the most stressed out" is what readers of the Times op-ed page want to hear. But that doesn't make it true.

http://www.slate.com/id/2199100/pagenum/all/#p2

[TTUBatfan2008]

33. Hey, I consider myself average...

$45k per year. But I get to goof off on the weekends. The POTUS doesn't. In fact he never gets a break, not even during the evenings except for sleep. It's a 24-hour, 365 day job. Not many "average" workers can say that.

[avaistheone1]

34. Cathy's job at home is 24/7 too that the President doesn't have.

She doesn't have the vacations the President does. She doesn't get to retreat to Camp David. She doesn't have transportation at here beck and call. She doesn't have staff to delegate various tasks and decision to. She doesn't have servants to take care of her every whim either. But she does have to worry about having enough money just to make ends meet, keeping her job, affording decent health care, maintaining some kind of shelter, sending her children to college, and possibly having some kind of decent retirement. The President does have any of these worries.

[TTUBatfan2008]

35. My motto regarding kids is...

"If you can't afford 'em, don't have 'em." Which is why I am trying to avoid kids as much as possible. I'm too selfish to put that kind of extra burden of responsibility on myself. Granted, I'm only 23 and I'm sure many 23-year olds have had that philosophy only to end up with a house full of kids. Life happens and ya never know where it will take you, I suppose. But I'm still trying my best to avoid it.

[firedupdem]

25. Of course he isn't in it for the money. He could make more money

than that in the Private sector using his smarts and intelligence. I don't trust the OP's reason for asking about it. That is why I answered the way I did. When did other Presidents get grilled about "perks" etc?

[rvablue]

31. You must be kidding, right? Yeah, that's it. President Obama ran for office to make money.

GIVE. ME. A. BREAK.

[ecstatic]

37. +1

400,000 is a lot of money. But Bank of America and AIG execs get paid more...and for what?

[Hippo_Tron]

16. It's fine, he will make millions doing speeches after he's out of office

$400,000 is a lot when you don't have to pay rent, groceries, utilities, or transportation.

[TTUBatfan2008]

24. Actually, he DOES have to pay for groceries...

The only time he doesn't is when it's a state dinner.

[WonderGrunion]

23. Wouldn't it be great if it was merit based?

Then * wouldn't have received a dime from the public. Although paying Pres. Obama might become really expensive.

[Zavulon]

38. Is it enough? Depends on who's in office.

The asshole who had the job for the eight years before Obama was grossly overpaid.