The buck stops here…unless it’s thirty-one thousand bucks, in which case my wife did it.
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It doesn’t matter if it was a good deal or not, he was only allowed to spend something like 7K for his office and he more than doubled that, and continues to lie about it.
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As someone who buys and sells stuff privately, some of it going for thousands of $, this is exactly the accepted mindset to weasel out of a purchase agreement.
I cannot even begin to tell you how many times guys have backed out of a deal with the excuse of “My wife won’t let me buy it”.
Blaming “the wife” is just S.O.P. and hey wattcha gonna do, amirite?
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Let’s not forget he also allegedly demoted an employee who tried to point out that limit.
Not when you’re a freakin’ US Cabinet member, it isn’t.
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And Carson is the guy responsible for housing and urban development, and he’s cooking the books to buy himself nice furniture. What could go wrong?
Might i also add that the department is facing significant budget cuts and they’ve gone ahead and spent 160k on lounge furniture for their offices
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Something, something… Murphy’s Law…
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Lose-lose scenario.
Yes. Yes you are. That is an insane amount of money for a dining table and some chairs, more so when it is public money.
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You may not be the only one, but can I borrow some money?
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Lock her up!
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What I love is that while his fellow cabinet members are being scolded for taking over a million dollars’ worth of private flights, buying a $43k phone booth, or getting $140k office doors installed, Ben Carson might end up getting sacked for a dining room set that he says he didn’t want anyway. He’s even utterly inept at being corrupt.
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Drain the swamp!
Nice furniture is expensive, especially furniture that needs to perform in a commercial or office space. It has to be way more durable than your dining room table, and probably more grand than your dining room table too.
I want public money to be spent wisely but I also have an expectation that a cabinet member’s office is going to maintain a certain level of style and sophistication. $5000 wouldn’t be enough.
Way more durable? For something that won’t get used most days, let lone every day, in all likelihood? Why a public official needs a dining set in their office is questionable, but perhaps allowable, but I bet it won’t get used as frequently as a domestic daily-used table and chairs. If it is, then a question about who’s eating so often at public expense might be in order. (And let’s not confuse style, quality and rip-off ‘bling’.)
But clearly your standards and expectations for public officials are different to mine. Let’s leave it at that.
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Why, exactly?
O_O
They are supposed to be servants of the public. They are not “royalty who should be shrouded in finery.”
You do realize that’s almost exactly the wording allegedly used to deride the staffer who claims to have been demoted over this expenditure, right?
Long story short; taxpayer money could and SHOULD be used to pay for things the masses actually and desperately need, like affordable health care, or better bridges and roads; not on material luxuries for officials to use during their time in office.
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If a multimillionaire cabinet member wants furniture that is more expensive than the budget allotted for that purpose allows then he can go ahead and buy it his damn self.
I’m a public college employee. When I decided my office could use a mini-fridge this year I didn’t buy the fanciest one I could find and stick the taxpayers with the bill, I bought a used one off of Craigslist for 50 bucks and paid it out of my own pocket.
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That’s Honorable Carson to you, buddy!
IOW, “women, am I right?”
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I’m surprised no one has posted a link to this yet, because Mr. Bumble used the exact same excuse in Oliver Twist.
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30k is roughly double what you would need to pay to get a top quality formal dining set (including the couple storage cabinet things they wanted) that would last many many years (basically forever if something unfortunate doesn’t happen).
The last 15k is keeping up with the 1%-er joneses, rather than actually making the stuff much better.
So, yea, its expensive, but 30k is… well… for the kind of people who can just blow an extra $10k or $20k and let their designer have their way rather than think about it for a few more minutes. People like neurosurgeons.
Quite possibly $5000 is enough to repair/partially replace the existing stuff.
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