About the Author
Richard Cochrane is trained in chemistry and metallurgy but is far more interested and practiced as a political and fund raising consultant, writer and amateur historian. He grew up in a Navy family and with his two younger brothers carried on its 500+ year tradition of naval service to Great Britain and the USA then enjoyed a career with one of the largest advertising and public relations agencies working with numerous Fortune 500 companies and many of America's premier educational institutions. He maintains friendships and acquaintanceships around the world. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.
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August 15th, 2008 •
Richard Cochrane
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A president’s pension currently is $191,300 per year, until he is 80 years old.
Assuming the next president lives to age 80. Sen. McCain would receive ZERO pension as he would reach 80 at the end of two terms as president. Sen. Obama would be retired for 26 years after two terms and would receive $4,973,800 in pension.
Therefore it would certainly make economic sense to elect McCain in November.
Comment by Gos on 26 September 2008:
How to save 699.995 billion
It’s really very simple: Quit electing Republicans to the White House, and keep them in Congress where they belong.
The recent collapse of Washington Mutual is the single largest bank failure in US history. The previous record was set in 1984, on Ronald Reagan’s watch.
There’s a reason that banks tend to fail under Republican presidents, and you don’t have to be Alan Greenspan to figure out why.
I know that there are a lot of Christian conservatives who will read my comment, so I hope that the rest of you won’t mind if I dumb this down just a little bit for their benefit.
Follow my logic here: The banking industry deals in huge sums of money. Huge sums of money tend to attract crooks. One of the duties of government is to protect honest citizens against crooks.
Banking regulations are passed by Congress, but they are enforced by the Executive Branch (ie the President.) This gives the Executive a great deal of leeway in enforcement priorities. Republican presidents tend to relax enforcement in the banking industry (not to mention the energy, insurance, and the financial industries in general.)
This abdication of enforcement of banking regulations by Republican presidents allows bankers to be the foxes guarding the henhouse, and as you might imagine, the chickens tend to mysteriously disappear, until there are none left.
Then, the Federal Government is forced to step in and bail out the industry — this time to the tune of $700 billion — on behalf of the chickens’ owners, who will starve if they are not replaced.
$700,000,000,000 - $4,973,800 = $699,995,026,200
I’ll pay the five million, if it’ll save me the trillion that the next bailout will cost.
Cochrane’s comment is spoken like a true conservative: $5 million in Presidential pensions is too much of a burden for the American taxpayer to bear, but $700 billion to bail out a bunch of crooked bankers who’re holding the entire world’s economy for ransom (not to mention $80 billion a year for an illegal war,) is nothing more than God in His Infinite Wisdom created big government for.
I wish Ayn Rand were alive today to see every one of her predictions from “Atlas Shrugged” coming true, and to see that it’s not the bleeding-heart liberals who are doing it, but the very neoconservatives who are her intellectual descendants, and they’re not doing it on behalf of the incompetent poor and their crooked self-appointed defenders, but on behalf of the incompetent (and often crooked) wealthy. I bet she’s rolling over in her grave as we speak.
— Gos