The Weekly Screed (#577)

Dr. Flynn and the Obama family’s 
five-cent Hawaiian vacation
by David Benjamin

PARIS — My high-school friend John, who has relatives among the Paranoid Right, sends me the odd (well, they’re all odd) bulletin from the squirrely fringe, each delusion a cock-eyed delight. For example, while most of us were distracted by GOP primaries and Rush Limbaugh’s crush on Sandra Fluke, the Paranoid Right was focused far, far away — in Hawaii — on the First Family’s profligate holiday there.

A scoop in the Hawaii Reporter revealed that the Obamas’ 17-day Christmas jaunt would cost taxpayers $1.4 million. Within days, the Huffington Post had upped the estimate to more than $4 million. According to my math, however, when all the bills roll in, the tab could end up topping $5 million.

The poignant note in this scandal was an ad in the Panama City News Herald wherein William J. Flynn, M.D., lamented that $236,118 in federal taxes paid by him and his seven employees won’t nearly cover the Obamas’ frolic in Kailua. (By the way, I want to work at the Flynn Clinic. According to my math, those folks are earning an average of $150,000 a year. No wonder the co-pay for my Lipitor is $75!)

Unfortunately, Dr. Flynn and all us taxpayers have been bankrolling presidential breaks since Teddy Roosevelt headed for the Dakotas to bag Bigfoot, and LBJ invited the entire Senate to the banks of the Pedernales for one of his monthly steer barbecues.

Hence, most of the media saw the Hawaiian boondoggle as dog-bites-man. Only the Paranoid Right is squawking. The few liberals who’ve come to the president’s defense have tendentiously compared Obama to his predecessor. In eight years, President George W. Bush took 77 journeys to his “Western White House” in Crawford, Texas, costing us — just for planefare on Air Force One —somewhere in the vicinity of $70 million.

But comparing Obama’s Hawaiian goof-off to Dubya’s “working vacations” on the Crawford ranch, as the Paranoid Right would certainly argue, is apples and oranges. How much brush did Obama and his daughters clear in Kailua? How many fenceposts did they straighten? How many dogies did they git along?

Obama’s apologists also note that most of the cost of shlepping the family from D.C. to just about anywhere is a practical necessity. Ever since Lee Harvey Oswald (allegedly) put JFK’s brains in his crosshairs, presidents have been surrounded, wherever they travel, by excessive numbers of Secret Service agents — plus hundreds of local police on overtime and a fully-staffed ambulance idling 24 hours in the breezeway.

But let us not partake too deeply of liberal sophistry. The Paranoids are Right in contending that $5 million is too much for anybody’s vacation, especially when Dr. Flynn and his tiny staff down there in the Florida Panhandle have to pay for it.

However, here’s the real rub: Dr. Flynn and his staff — with their piddling $236,118 — aren’t alone in their agony. There are 45 million other Americans scraping together nickels and dimes to pay for that $5 million presidential frolic.

Moreover, when you start doing the math — which I did — it turns out that those 145,000,000 taxpayers aren’t actually footing the whole bill.

According to my admittedly ragged fiscal research, the U.S. budget for last year (including the Obamas’ year-end luxury-beachfront surf-o-rama) is about $3.36 trillion. But, according to the Tax Foundation (among others), only about 38 percent of the budget’s revenue consists of receipts from individual taxpayers like Doc Flynn. Moreover, to underwrite that lesser total ($1.28 trillion) — which is what politicians always call “hard-earned tax money” — each American, on average, pays a real federal tax rate of 20.7 percent.

Having scrounged up these numbers, I began to calculate furiously, relying on crack computational skills that kept me off the Honor Roll in high school ‘til I got past sophomore Geometry and didn’t have to take any more goddamn math!

Because I have no confidence in my ability to do any sort of arithmetic beyond baseball stats, I figured the Obama vacation three or four different ways. But all my results stayed in the same ballpark. No matter how I counted, the share paid by Doc Flynn and His Tax-Payin’ Seven — for Barack & Michelle & Malia & Sasha’s Excellent Adventure in Kailua — maxes out at 4.7 cents. No, not 4.7 cents each. This is for all of ‘em. Together. It represents 8/145,000,000th of 38 percent of national revenue, of .001488 percent (a $5 million Hawaiian vacation on Air Force One) of the U.S. budget.

By comparison, the Flynn Clinic paid, for example, $280.12 every year for waste (money that simply disappeared, apparently bought nothing and will never be seen again) during the Iraq War. Over ten years of the war, each of Dr. Flynn’s staff paid  $350.15 in blind, pristine, untraceable waste — enough for 59,600 presidential vacations in Hawaii.

One more comparison: Every time the Pentagon receives delivery of an F-35 fighter-jet, a $338-million airborne white elephant whose only combat action so far came against Bruce Willis in Live Free or Die Hard (Bruce shot it down), each Flynn Clinic taxpayer coughs up 88.6 cents, or $7.08 in total — or 150 vacations.

I understand that the partisans of the Paranoid Right would rather waste seven bucks on superfluous defense than pay 4.7 cents for Barack Obama to burnish his gorgeous tan in Kailua. I feel their pain. I believe the president feels it, too. So here’s a solution: Michelle Obama should tape a shiny new nickel to a greeting card and mail it to Panama City with a salutation something like, “Thanks loads to all you folks, for a swell time in Hawaii. Suggest you take this nickel and shove the buffalo up Dr. Flynn.”

As for everyone else who begrudges the leader of the free world 17 refreshing days 4,835 miles away from John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, you might ponder something Jon Stewart said recently on the Daily Show. He was referring to objections from the Paranoid Right about federal insurance plans that use tax money to cover family planning. But his sentiments also apply to the Obamas’ vacation.

“To the people who are upset about their hard-earned tax money going to things they don’t like: Well, welcome to the fucking club. Everyone pays for shit they don’t want all the time. Reimburse me for the Iraq war and oil subsidies. And diaphragms’ll be on me.”