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What do American presidents do when they leave office? Oval Office;
Many and several, one would say, since here there is no trampled.
Most people write best-selling books. The numbers here are scary. Bill Clinton, for example, earned $ 15 million from his autobiographical “My Life.”
George W. Bush raised $ 7 million for the first 1.5 million copies of Decision Points. As for the prolific Jimmy Carter, he has already published 14 books.
According to historian James Thurber, an expert on American presidents, the Obama He lives richly off the sales of his books alone.
Others secure particularly lucrative deals for lectures at universities or high-level advisory roles at institutions. In fact, when it comes to speeches, Bill Clinton is still king here.
When he left the White House in 2001, he was paid $ 125,000 by the Greater Washington Association of Executives for a speech. This is still the standard amount that is generally paid for a speech by a former president.
“I never had real money before I left the White House,” Clinton told CNN in 2010, “but since then I have done quite well.” How well;
By 2012, he had earned $ 75.6 million from lectures given at universities and private companies, according to assets his wife was forced to disclose. Hillary as Secretary of State of the United States.
Four years later, the Clintons had raised more than $ 235 million since leaving the White House.
According to a Washington Post revelation that year (2016), Clinton had earned $ 17.6 million as honorary chancellor of Laureate International Universities.
The Center for Public Integrity estimates that George W. Bush he has made more than $ 15 million from speeches alone since leaving Washington.
Speeches are still the heavy artillery on the income of former presidents. And sometimes the amount of your earnings even causes a scandal.
As it happened in 1989, when Ronald ReaganWhen he left the White House, he took $ 2 million for two speeches in Japan, the then pharmaceutical financial enemy of the United States.
Finally, he forced his successor, George W. Bush Sr., to comment with some indifference: “Everyone has to live in some way.”
Still others created non-profit organizations to continue the charitable work they did during his presidency.
The position of the former planetary leader is a jealous position and what the former president has to say later touches many and worries more.
Others continue to earn income from their work. A typical case here is the 27th President of the United States, William Taft (1909-1913), who after his term in the White House revived his judicial career and even became the 10th Chief Justice of the United States.
But here also Gerald Ford stands out, who after his presidency held countless authorized meetings corporate giants and was paid handsomely as a consultant.
However, after their tenure in the highest office in the country, do presidents work because they want to or because they have to?
How much does a sitting president earn?
Being president of the United States is a good paying job, $ 400,000 a year to be exact.
Presidential appropriations have even increased significantly over time. During the presidency Harry truman in 1949, the president earned $ 100,000 a year.
When Nixon became a White House resident in 1969, earnings rose to $ 200,000. It stayed at that number for 30 years, until Congress doubled its presidential allocation in 2001, when George W. Bush took the reins.
Of course, the president does not pay for anything. Ride the Presidential Limousine, Marine One, and Air Force One and lives in the most famous mansion in Washington.
Former Presidents Act of 1958
According to Former Presidents Act, an amendment passed in 1958, is not the least of the privileges White House residents enjoy when they leave Washington.
Former presidents are entitled to a lifetime pension and separate funds for travel, office rentals, medical care and personal expenses. But how much are these benefits?
The United States Department of the Treasury now pays a $ 200,000 annual life sentence to former President Jimmy Carter. Bill clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Donald Trump will also join the state program after his recent resignation from office.
If the former president dies before his wife, his widow is entitled to a total annual pension of $ 20,000, as well as various other benefits, be it financial aid or imperfections.
Even widows are entitled to lifetime protection from the Secret Service, as long as they don’t remarry.
Returning to the former presidents, they enjoy a series of privileges. The federal government is required to pay monthly for the offices they maintain and their equipment, the staff they employ, and the supplies they need.
The Government Services Administration even reimburses them for all expenses they incur related to their travel or work. Even the movement of him White House is insured free of charge.
But how much do they get for all this? There is no approved amount here, it has to do with the ex-president’s living expenses.
In 2010, for example, the Congressional Investigation Service found that Carter’s Atlanta office cost taxpayers $ 102,000 a year, while the annual fee for George W. Bush’s Houston office was $ 175,000.
As for Bill Clinton’s New York office in the expensive neighborhoods of Manhattan, it sucked up the state coffers for $ 516,000 a year. These are for rent only, since there are special funds for equipment, maintenance and personnel, also without setting a maximum amount.
It is worth mentioning the protection that former presidents enjoy, since economically it is one of the most expensive sums that are spent on them. Every former president has the right to federal protection for life Secret Service (USSS), both he and his wife and children (under 16 years of age).
By what figures does this amount rise? We will say it a little differently. In 1985, 11 years after resigning the presidency of the United States, Richard Nixon decided to give up his right to lifetime protection from the Secret Service.
The reason was obvious, he wanted the state not to waste so much money on him. He could pay for the bodyguards on his own, as he’d said, he didn’t need their protection to be a burden to the taxpayer.
Then people learned that the Secret Service detachment that accompanied them day and night cost $ 3 million a year.
Nixon remains the only former president to deny free state protection. Even more surprising, his wife, Pat, did the same a year before him.
THE Nixon the only saint was not, of course. The fact that he decided to resign after the Watergate scandal was not out of frankness. But only so as not to lose the privileges of the former president.
He knew that if his referral to the Senate was successful, he would not be entitled to any benefits. The 1958 law is clear here, if the president is removed from office by resignation, then he does not get one in terms of financial gain.
Nixon, however, managed to resign before being fired, and the Justice Department ruled that he was still entitled to the privileges that former presidents enjoyed. He remains the only president of the United States who has resigned.
As for Clinton’s adventure with his own reference, his privileges as a former president were not threatened because he was acquitted during his presidential persecution.
The “photographic” design
But there was also a president who, while gathering his things from the Oval Office, realized that he was literally the ace. So poor that he had to take out a loan to survive this transitional period.
He was Harry Truman in 1953. He was about to make a living by earning a meager $ 112.56 a month in the military, as he would not be serving in the highest office to earn money.
The 33rd President of U.SA truly honest and upright man, he was determined not to redeem his role in the White House. According to biographer David McCullough, he turned down any job offer.
The Miami real estate giant gave him “no less than $ 100,000” for a seat on its board. Truman said “no” even to gifts like that new Toyota.
“I could not make any deal, however respectable, that would lead to the commercialization of the prestige and dignity that emanate from the presidency,” Truman himself would later write.
So he returned to Missouri to live with his wife at his mother-in-law’s house. He taught at universities from time to time and continued to turn down any job offer or well-paid consultant position. And so he struggled economically.
In fact, during his presidency he had passed a law for life. pension to parliamentarians and senior judges, except that the federal pay package did not include presidents.
At one point, he made a lucrative deal for a two-volume book he wrote (published in 1955 and 1956) and made $ 670,000, but had to return 2/3 in taxes. He calculated that he had $ 37,000 left when he paid his assistants.
In 1957 he told his politician and good friend John McCormack: “If I did not have property to sell that my brother and sister inherited from our mother, I would be living on social benefits.” But this sale has not made me financially ashamed. ” .
Harry Truman couldn’t even answer the letters he received with the bag, because he didn’t have money for so many stamps. Everyone knew the difficult economic situation in which the former president of the United States lived.
And next year Congress passed the Past Presidents Act, awarding him $ 25,000 in annual compensation. We now know that Dwight Eisenhower, the president who ratified the bill, had Truman in mind and the difficulties he experienced after his term in the White House.
The only other former president alive in 1958 was Herbert Hoover, who also received state compensation when he clearly didn’t need it.
He would later say that he accepted it just so as not to embarrass Truman …
