Social symbolism counts: More on benefits for the former guy(s)

I realize I’m pretty much the only person “here” who really cares about this, but I want to address a response that my occasional writing on the Former Presidents Act often generates, which is something like, “The money spent on supporting their lifestyles is a rounding error in the federal budget, plus do we really want to see ex-presidents struggling financially or (less preposterously) doing ads for Bitcoin and reverse mortgages in order to handle the carrying costs of that third house in Palos Verdes?”

I think the following hypothetical argument shows why this response is so fundamentally wrongheaded:

“The idea that the authorities should be vigorously pursuing criminal investigations of Donald Trump overlooks that there are millions of serious crimes committed in the United States every year, the vast majority of which are not prosecuted let alone punished. Even a successful prosecution of Trump and his cronies for their many crimes wouldn’t amount to a rounding error in the national crime statistics.”

Now I suppose everybody recognizes why that’s a really ridiculous argument, which is why nobody as far as I know ever makes it, not even a Republican, although to be fair I haven’t actually checked. OK Ben Shapiro will probably make it if he hasn’t already.

But still.

The reason not to spend $150,000 every single month to pay office rent for ex-presidents, plus millions every year on various other emoluments is that it’s a totally unjustifiable set of expenses that send a horrible message to the public. That message is: If you are a Very Important Person you should get everything for free, even though you’re already making gigantic piles of money all the time, precisely because you’re a Very Important Person.

This is just one of the grossest manifestations of the New Gilded Age. It’s not enough for Mr. Big Time College Football Coach to have a $100 million contract: on top of that the university is going to pay for his car leases and the oil changes for those cars, plus he gets to use the university’s private jet for free, and so on and so on ad infinitum and nauseam.

Similarly, it’s not enough for our Very Above Average CEO to get paid an obscene salary plus lots of juicy stock options: he also gets a “free” apartment in the City, and “free” Super Bowl tickets, and free everything else, because again, the message sent by these arrangements is very clear: It’s wrong for Really Important people to pay for anything just because they can, because paying for things is for the plebes.

On top of all this, the REASON our ex-presidents get $400K a speech is solely because they’re ex-presidents. Would anybody pay a dime to hear an aging Bill Clinton cast his cornpone pearls if he was just Bill Clinton, ex-Arkansas AG or what have you? Obviously not. Why are we paying $612,000 per year for the rent on some palatial suite of offices in Manhattan for a guy who is worth $150 million, give or take? It’s utterly absurd.

I mean even Jimmy Carter, who has gone out of his way not to cash in on his presidential fame, and lives the life of a humble public servant, and all praise to him for doing that, is still worth many millions of dollars, although of course nothing like the vast piles of lucre that Clinton and Dubya and Obama have piled up. (This doesn’t touch on the hopefully unique current Very Special Episode of our program, in which an openly grifting criminal is busily stealing everything that’s not nailed down and some things that are).

The whole cult of celebrity in this country is disgusting, and it’s especially disgusting when applied to ex-presidents, who are simply former government bureaucrats, not faux royalty, leaving aside that royalty is itself a terrible institution that should have been eliminated long ago everywhere.

I’m fine with providing presidents government-paid security, because it’s a mixed up muddled up shook up world, but beyond that they should be on their own. Throwing them each a million bucks a year for the little extras is the kind of thing that anybody with even the slightest egalitarian inclinations ought to recognize as a bad practice, that should be eliminated.

And yes I know this isn’t as important as climate change or Russia invading Ukraine or the authenticity of banh mi sandwiches at Kenyon or was it Pomona. But we must all cultivate our organic fair trade gardens, or something.