Republicans Still At It

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We thought Anderson had cleared it all; debunked Michele Bachmann's myth that President Obama's trip to India on November 2010 was going to cost $200 millions A DAY! Anderson did one hell of a job figuring out where Michele Bachmann was totally "mistaken." Now read the article below from this morning...

A CHAIN LETTER is still making the rounds among the public with the false information still stating the $200 million a day myth.

That's the republican mantra: keep repeating the lies until the public believe them to be true -- if so many people are saying the same thing, for so long, it must be true. Obviously not when it comes from a fucking republican. Be aware out there!

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Fact Check: Did president’s trip to India cost as much per day as war?

But the e-mail going around started from a lawmaker's assertion.

Posted: March 6, 2011 - 12:16am


By Carole Fader

Many Times-Union readers want to know:

A recent e-mail said that President Barack Obama's visit to India cost taxpayers $200 million a day. A day! Could that be true?

Well, presidential trips are expensive, but not that expensive.

This chain e-mail has been circulating 'round the Internet and back since Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Matt Drudge and Glenn Beck gave air time to the claim. The publicity was kicked off when Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., made the statement in a CNN interview on Nov. 3, according to transcripts from the Anderson Cooper show:

"The president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day. He's taking 2,000 people with him. He will be renting out over 870 rooms in India. And these are five-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. ... we have never seen a trip at this level before, of this level of excess."

When Cooper asked Bachmann where she got that $200 million a day figure, she said that it came out in the media.

But, according to PolitiFact.com, a nonpartisan Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-finding project of the St. Petersburg Times that researched the cost, the number came from only one media source: the news agency Press Trust of India. It was an estimate attributed anonymously to "a top official of the Maharashtra Government privy to the arrangements for the high-profile visit," PolitiFact.com reported. Maharashtra is a state located in western India.

It is true that overseas travel by the president can be pricey.

PolitiFact.com quotes Kelley Gannon, who worked on the media advance team for George H.W. Bush and was director of media advance for George W. Bush, as saying, "You have to re-create a mini-White House."

Exact costs, though, are difficult to pin down. The government doesn't like to release the final figures since the bulk of the expense is for Secret Service security, FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com report.

The White House did respond to both fact-finding organizations in this case, saying that the numbers reported in the Press Trust of India "have no basis in reality."

McClatchy Newspapers quoted the Air Force in an Oct. 7, 2009, story as calculating that Air Force One, the presidential plane, costs $100,219 an hour to operate. Also accompanying the president are cargo planes, to fly in equipment, that cost almost $7,000 an hour, according to the Congressional Research Service. That adds up.

The McClatchy piece goes on to quote a March 27, 2000, Air Force Times story that said a trip to India and Pakistan by former president Bill Clinton "may be the most expensive such mission ever carried out by the Air Force." The article tagged the five-day operation, which required hundreds of aircraft missions, at $50 million. ABC News also reported that the trip cost $50 million.

PolitiFact.com and FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan fact-finding project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, quoted figures for previous trips by the Clinton administration as reported in a September 1999 U.S. Government Accountability Office analysis:

"Presidential travel to foreign destinations requires planning, coordination and logistical and personnel support. The estimated incremental costs of President Clinton's trips to Africa, Chile, and China were at least $42.8 million, $10.5 million, and $18.8 million, respectively. The largest of these costs consisted of operating expenses of the president's aircraft and other military passenger and cargo aircraft; travel expenses, including lodging for the travelers; and telecommunications, vehicle, and other equipment rentals. ..."

The still-classified cost of the Secret Service detail would add more expense, but even doubling or tripling those figures and adding an adjustment for inflation would not produce anything close to the figure given by the Indian news article for Obama's trip, FactCheck.org states.

Veteran reporter David Jackson, who has traveled on a number of foreign trips by presidents, wrote in USA Today that the $200 million a day figure is "wildly, wildly off the mark."

"I think you have to ask, 'How would they [Indian media] know how much any of this costs?'" asked Gannon. "We don't share that with officials from foreign governments. I'd question where they got that number from."

FactCheck.org points out one more thing to discredit the $200 million a day figure: the entire U.S. war effort in Afghanistan costs about $190 million per day, according to the Congressional Research Service.

It certainly wouldn't make sense that a presidential trip abroad would cost more than that.