FRIDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2017
Get Our Your Calculators, Class
At this morning’s meeting at the Conservative Agenda, Political Insiders were asking Beloved Whistleblower Publisher Charles Foster Kane what he thought about that Fox News Insider report that President Donald Trump is donating his third-quarter presidential salary to help the Department of Health and Human Services’ efforts to combat the opioid crisis.
“His decision to donate his salary is a tribute to his compassion, to his patriotism and his sense of duty to the American people,” acting HHS secretary Eric Hargan said during Thursday’s White House press briefing. Hargan said the money will be used in the planning and design of a large-scale public awareness campaign about the dangers of opioid addiction.
“The President’s salary is set by statute,” Kane explained, “so Trump can’t actually refuse to take it – just like George Washington, who reportedly tried to refuse a salary but got paid anyway, at $25,000 per year.”
So if Trump had opted to donate his salary to charity or return it to the Treasury, he wouldn’t have been the first President to do so. When John F. Kennedy was President, he donated his salary to charity, a practice he continued from his days serving in Congress. Herbert Hoover, a self-made millionaire, donated his salary to charity, too. And in 2013, Obama, who famously announced that he had just finished paying off his student loans a few years before he took office, magnanimously agreed to return 5% of his salary to the Treasury after the government shutdown affected the pay of federal workers.
In fact, Trump could be saving American Overtaxed-Payers more than his $400,000 paycheck, since the US Treasury doesn’t actually have the money to pay his salary, and Over-Taxed Payers would be paying interest on that money we’d have to borrow from China.
Plus, the Federal Government spent about $4.1 Trillion in 2016.
That was only about $11.2 Billion-per-day, which would equal more than 28,000 annual presidential paychecks. The Federal Government probably spends an amount equal to Trump’s $400,000 annual salary every three or four seconds.
Maybe that’s what Illinois Republican Senator Everett Dirksen meant when he said, “pretty soon you’re talking real money.