This tidbit from Time Magazine:
One of the less scintillating milestones of the 2012 election was marked by the General Services Administration, when Mitt Romney became the first candidate to take advantage of the Presidential Transition Act of 2010. The Act, spearheaded by former Sen. Ted Kaufman, provides resources for major candidates to start planning for their presidency long before Election Day. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, TIME acquired documents from the GSA that show the scope–and cost–of this unprecedented government-assisted transition.
In 2010, legislators said the main goal of the Act was to bolster national security by ensuring that candidates are prepared to take office, and that they don’t shy away from transition planning for fear that they’ll look presumptuous. To that end, the law stipulates that the federal government will provide certain resources to non-incumbent candidates after their nominating convention. The GSA says final costs are still being tabulated, but the initial estimated cost for Romney’s pre-transition phase is around $8.9 million.
Uhmmmmm. What transition? This sounds like the Boston Harbor fireworks Mitt never got to shoot off. At least he paid for those himself. So Mitt, take some of that 14% tax bracket money and pay back the taxpayers for your non-transition team costs.
Much more likely is that Romney will amend his 2011 tax return to take advantage of the charitable deductions he decided to voluntarily forego in order to keep his effective tax rate artificially high for purely political reasons. That would cost taxpayers several hundred thousand dollars.
n/t
It wouldn’t surprise me if the GOP tried to get the people to pay for those as a transition expense.
If not it seems perfectly legitimate that Romney took advantage of this and the law did exactly what it was designed to do.
All moochers think they are entitled to what they get!
I personally think that we should bill the Obama campaign, first for not using their time machine to know that there would not be a transition, and second for signing the bill, when they should have known, as far back as 2010, that there would be no transition.
Either that or we could impose a tax on stupid unencumbered-the-thought-process posts like this one on political blogs, which could solve the entire debt crisis at a blow.
Witty comment, CMD, but ouch.
are the extremely high fees the Romney campaign has charged members of the press for food and transportation.
… allow the name of ‘Romney’ to sink into a… ahem… richly deserved obscurity?? Why we gotta keep bringing him up? Let it go.
The name of Romney, now synonymous with the 2012 Republican defeat, has become music to my ears.
I’d be happy to see the blimp again. I think that the name can become a mantra as we work to elect another Democrat to the U. S. Senate.
…Mitt Romney didn’t really want to be President.
BTW, what is the rationale for transitions starting with nomination? I thought that was the whole point of having several weeks built in between election and inauguration.