Saturday, November 10, 2007

You Paid $100k for Pictures of Your Fearless Government Leaders

Housing is imploding, the dollar is imploding, the economy is imploding, and US federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Alphonso Jackson ordered you to pay $100k to paint his portrait and the portraits of other HUD secretaries.

(Update 11/11/07: While Hurricane Katrina victims claim that their federal FEMA trailers are poisoning them with toxic levels of carcinogenic formaldehyde, HUD is busy decorating its shiny new auditorium in Washington DC with $100k of paintings.)

Maybe people could afford their mortgages if they did not have to pay $100k for pictures of their dear leaders.

I suppose we could disband HUD and consider the resulting tax savings as a "bailout" for taxpayers.

Let Jackson keep his portrait as his severance package.

Update: Alphonso Jackson update: HUD Secretary Jackson Steps Down amid Probe (3/31/08) by Libby Lewis

See also:
You Owe 9 Trillion Dollars
Political Humor: Ron Paul, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Seeing that every Federal Department has portraits of their former Cabinet secretaries and the Department of State includes their former Deputy Secretaries, why is it a problem with you for Secretary Jackson to have what has been afforded to other Cabinet departments? Unequal treatment based on what?? Of course, Jackson is a Black American, I guess it's okay for all the others, just not him. As has been reported, the $100,000 fee was for 5 portraits(4 former HUD Secretaries and Jackson). All of the portraits will hang in the new HUD auditorium, you see HUD never had an auditorium unlike other federal departments. HUD had a tradition of painting portraits of their leaders up until Secretary Pierce(1988) By the way, the Environmental Protection Agency just had 11 paintings done of all of the former administrators and the current administrator of EPA at a cost of approx.$300,000.

J at IHB and HFF said...

Hello. Both my post and the linked Washington Post (WP) article mentioned that the money was for several secretaries (even my title was plural and WP specifically named Jack Kemp, etc.). Thank you for the EPA information to strengthen my point about the problem of wasteful government spending.