White House Has Poor Manners for Rich Folks

If you receive an invitation for lunch or dinner at the White House, you might want to think twice before accepting the invitation.

White House Makes CEOs Pay for Lunch

Four of the most powerful business leaders in America arrived at the White House one day last month for lunch with President Barack Obama, sitting down in his private dining room just steps from the Oval Office.

But even for powerful CEOs, there’s no such thing as a free lunch: White House staffers collected credit card numbers for each executive and carefully billed them for the cost of the meal with the president.

The White House defended the unusual move as a way to avoid conflicts of interest. But the Bush administration didn’t charge presidential guests for meals, one former official said, and at least one etiquette expert found the whole thing unseemly – suggesting it was a serious breach of protocol.

“I’m sure they have their political reasons for doing that, but I think it’s not what quote, hospitality, unquote is all about,” said Letitia Baldrige, who headed Jacqueline Kennedy’s White House staff in the early 1960s. “We’ve got to relax about this. To have people to the White House and worry about the price of things is laughable.”

“I don’t know what the menu was, but I’m sure it wasn’t braised pheasant,” she said.

The sad thing about this story is that many people will say, "Yeah, get those rich bastards! Charge 'em double! Let 'em know what's coming; we're gonna strip away their ill gotten gains!"

Which means that this story is exactly what President Obama and his evil Progressive henchmen want you to read, because they are counting on ramping up envy among people of different economic ranks -- class envy -- in order to build support for their agenda.

Of course, if we tax the rich and bill them double for their meals, who will pay the bulk of the taxes once they become poor like the rest of us? New numbers out today show that the top one percent of earners in America now pay 40.4 percent of the income taxes. (And this with the lower tax rates brought to you by the wicked George W. Bush and a Republican Congress.)

Once the rich are poor, the federal government will still have a big appetite for money, and it will turn to the middle class and the poor to make up for the loss of revenue.

That itching and twitching you feel is the target being painted 0n your back by the progressive leaders in Washington.

No free lunch, indeed.

*** ODD EXTRANEOUS OBSERVATION ***

I just noticed this is Post No. 1600. And it won't cost you a penny more.