Social media is abuzz after the New York Times published a misleading piece about the cost of U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s housing and furnishings. “Nikki Haley’s View of New York Is Priceless. Her Curtains? $52,701” the headline reads. The headline conveniently omitted the fact that the Obama administration ordered the curtains in 2016.
[Related: New York Times blames Nikki Haley for Obama-era spending decision on pricey curtains]
Nikki Haley’s View of New York Is Priceless. Her Curtains? $52,701. https://t.co/Y8k6QXeQhs
— Gardiner Harris (@GardinerHarris) September 14, 2018
The larger implication is that Democrats (or anyone else) should care about government overspending of taxpayer dollars, particularly on frivolous items like curtains. After all, Haley is a Republican. (Again, dismissing the administration responsible for the purchase.) While overspending is a serious problem, Democrats don’t care about it too much more than Republicans do. It’s absurd for the mainstream media to pretend like they suddenly care about government bureaucracy wasting taxpayer dollars when Democratic administrations have been doing so the whole time.
In fact, the Obama administration has gone down in history as one of the most expensive, and his spending was just as frivolous and costly, if not more so. Yet the media don’t seem to report on that all too often.
As the Heartland Institute’s Justin Haskins reported in 2016, “By the time Obama leaves office in January, he’ll have nearly doubled the already massive national debt, adding nearly $10 trillion since 2009. Even more appalling, this figure means Obama will have added almost as much national debt as every other president and Congress before him—combined.” The piece continued with a depressing look at Obama’s spending while president. “Despite the trillions of dollars in government spending pumped into the economy every year under Obama, America has never once enjoyed an annual GDP growth rate at 3 percent or higher, making Obama the least successful president—at least when it comes to economics—in modern history.”
The Washington Times reported in 2017: “In its three major fiscal categories, the budget is worse off at Mr. Obama’s departure from office. In 2008, federal spending was 20.2 percent of GDP; in 2016, 20.9 percent. In 2008, federal revenues were 17.1 percent of GDP; in 2016, 17.8 percent. In 2008, the federal deficit was 3.1 percent; in 2016 despite higher revenue relative to a larger economy, it was 3.2 percent.”
Through FOIA requests, Judicial Watch discovered the Obama administration spent $114 million on “personal” travel alone. “Among the big-ticket trips were two family vacations during the weekend of February 14, 2014, that cost the Secret Service $272,192. That weekend, former first lady Michelle Obama went on an annual trip to Aspen with her daughters and shut down its airport; the total cost was $88,663.29. The same weekend, President Obama took a golfing trip to Palm Springs and met with King Abdullah II of Jordan, which rang in at $183,529.62.”
Remember when Michelle Obama racked up “$222,000 worth of expenses while she lodged at China’s swank Shangri-La Hotel in a 2-day stint in March 2014?” The Weekly Standard (a sister publication to the Washington Examiner) reported they booked 144 rooms for the occasion. Shangri-La much?
The Obama administration’s financial record keeping makes $50,000 in curtains, that Nikki Haley didn’t even purchase, look like a drop in the ocean of frivolous government expenditures in the last decade. It’s one thing for the media to hold Republicans and Democrats accountable to unnecessary spending (and they should), it’s another to ignore how much Obama wasted, and hold a Republican accountable instead of him.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
