Translation: you got nothin’. and how do you know that by her going to her new job that another person didn’t have to be hired to do it. Barring that, that the job was not a useful one. My advice? Relax. She won’t be nearly as bad a VP as you are imagining.
Is that right? A congressman or a senator has to pay for the travel to and from his home district or state. It seems that, at the least, there’d be an allowance for a certain number of flights per year, particularly for congressmen. Is that not the case?
Seriously, gonzo, what are you saying here? It sounds very much as though you either think 1) women of childbearing age shouldn’t be allowed to be Pres or VP, or 2) if they are allowed, and they get pregnant, they should have an abortion. Do you really want to defend either of those positions?
I’m sorry. I misspoke. It looks like travel expenses to and from the home district are usually covered by the office allowance.
Calling it “horseshit” doesn’t make it go away. That’s no argument at all.
And the other stuff is irrelevant to this discussion.
You are correct - nothing will make this horseshit go away except if Obama wins the election. If he doesn’t, four years of it, minimum.
Sure it is. Fool me once…
Regards,
Shodan
The fact that the jet was sold for a loss can hardly be blamed on Palin - depreciation comes into play there. But you can hardly say the move didn’t save the state money - jets cost bundles just sitting at the airport, and more when they fly.
Factor in maintenance, fuel and personnel costs, and you’re talking about lots of money. In most cases, parking fees would apply as well. In the case of a government jet, that may be mitigated by using government facilities like National Guard bases to an extent, but they can’t be dodged all of the time.
Not to rain on anything else you said, but the bit about getting rid of the chef (Stefani Marnon) never happened. She was reassigned to cook for the state legislature.
Uh huh. You do know that canning a state employee without cause can be problematic, and the easiest way to handle the situation might be to find her another job elsewhere in the government and handle matters through attrition cuts, right?
If that is what happened (and I’m not saying it did, but that’s how I’d do it) it would be entirely fair to say you got rid of the personal chef at the governor’s mansion.
But it is not entirely fair to claim that by doing so, you were cutting spending.
If the cook was replacing personnel that were leaving the dining room at the legislature and weren’t replaced, you sure can. Note what I said about attrition cuts.
So do public roads. That’s a giant expense, but we think of free public roads as our God-given right, that the government should rightfully tax us for and provide.
A moment’s thought convinces me that this doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Professionals in Alaska generally are paid pretty well to compensate for the high cost of living - and by all accounts Marmon is a great chef. There is no way she is making $45,000 a year in salary.
Seems to me scaling back her services to the governor’s mansion saved money in a partial salary and salary to sous chefs and other kitchen staff.
No proof yet - but if the balance sheets come to light I’d be shocked if it were any other way.
Sure, we can come up with all kinds of imaginary expenses that went along with this chef, can’t we?
I guess it depends on how you look at it. For example, to justify the plane, it was being used for prisoner transport. After the plane was sold, the Guard transported prisoners. The office of the Comptroller did an analysis and found that the Governor’s jet was costing Alaskans $1674 per transfter, and after it was sold the cost per transfer dropped by close to a thousand dollars per.
Then there’s the depreciation she saved the state, and the maintenance costs, and the salaries of the pilots…
But no, she didn’t sell it ‘at a profit’. She sold it for market value ($300K under the black book value, which is about average thee days), and in so doing saved the state a pile of money.
It should also be noted that Palin did not charge for lodging fees when she was home - only travel expenses. Alaska’s a huge state. The distance from the Governor’s mansion in Juneau to her home in Wasilla is almost 600 miles. Her overall travel expenses are something like 80% lower than her predecessor’s.
Also, it should be pointed out that this is not really an optional thing for the Palins. They are not rich. Their total family income, including the Governor’s salary, is a little over $200K per year. In Alaska, that’s a good upper middle class salary, but it’s not wealthy. And they’ve only been making that for a couple of years. Before she became governor, she and her husband were doing commercial fishing in the summers and hunting game to make ends meet. She drives a Volkswagen.
That’s hard to determine one way or another. You have to take into account the use it had and the (for lack of the actual thing) the blue book value. If you buy a new car for 30k, use it for 3 years and the blue book is 12k, how much do you have to sell it for to make a “profit”? 31k? 12k + $1?
On preview it appears Sam Stone already addressed this.
Lie through her teeth about it. Repeatedly.
What, specifically, is the lie?
So. That means that the legislature didn’t have to hire someone else. Right?