People keep sending me links to this, so I’ll make a short post about it.<\/p>\n
In the hubbub surrounding the Obama inauguration, there’ve been all sorts of incredulous press pieces discussing the supposed outrageousness of the costs of this inauguration compared to others. I’ve personally heard this reported on the BBC world service, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. In these
\nreports, the cost of the Obama inauguration is generally reported as
\nbetween 150 and 160 million dollars. When they provide a contrast, they talk about how Bush’s second inauguration cost $40 million.<\/p>\n
The problem is, this is a metric error. They’re comparing apples to orchards.<\/p>\n
When they cite the Bush inauguration cost as $40 million, they’re talking The Obama figure of $150-$160 million includes<\/em> everything – police, security, setup, and cleanup.<\/p>\n A fair comparison? If you exclude the security costs, Bush’s second Yet another fake controversy brought to you by the supposedly liberal-biased media.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" People keep sending me links to this, so I’ll make a short post about it. In the hubbub surrounding the Obama inauguration, there’ve been all sorts of incredulous press pieces discussing the supposed outrageousness of the costs of this inauguration compared to others. I’ve personally heard this reported on the BBC world service, CNN, Fox, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-bQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nabout the cost of the inauguration parties – that is, the cost of the festivities themselves. That cost does not<\/em> include security. It does
\nnot include the cost of paying police to shut down the city streets. It doesn’t include the cost of cleaning up after the crowds. It’s just<\/em>
\nthe cost of the parties.<\/p>\n
\ninauguration cost $42 million; Obama’s is expected to cost around $45 million. If you include<\/em> the security costs, Bush’s second inauguration
\ncost somewhere around $155 million. (The exact figures are still not public
\nknowledge; Bush and company treated it as a “national security matter” which
\ndid not need to be disclosed.)<\/p>\n