Taxpayers foot bill for Hastings’ $25k Lexus
by Michael C. Bender | May 30th, 2009
U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Miramar, topped this story in the Wall Street Journal today detailing how members of Congress spend their office expense accounts.
Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings spent $24,730 in taxpayer money last year to lease a 2008 luxury Lexus hybrid sedan. Ohio Rep. Michael Turner expensed a $1,435 digital camera. Eni Faleomavaega, the House delegate from American Samoa, bought two 46-inch Sony TVs.
The expenditures were legal, properly accounted for and drawn from allowances the U.S. government grants to lawmakers. Equipment purchased with office expense accounts must be returned to the House or the federal General Services Administration when a lawmaker leaves office.
But as British politicians come under widening scorn for spending public money on everything from candy bars to moat-dredging, an examination of U.S. lawmakers’ expense claims shows Washington’s elected officials have also used public funds for eye-catching purchases.
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May 30th, 2009 at 11:39 am
No surprise from Alcee. He is a criminal and the idiots that put this crook back into office deserve getting screwed by him.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
WHAT WOULD YOU EXPECT FROM AN IMPEACHED FEDERAL JUDGE.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Here we go agin, whitey going after Alcee. Why is it that always black people are singled out? Racism is alive and well even thou we have a black man as president.
Alcee desirves every thing that makes him more comfertable so he can do his job. He travils a lot from his D.C. office to the people in his district.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
It’s not that “whitey” is going after an African-American again, it’s that he is stealing from the American people. He believes that he can get all the things he wants and doesn’t want to pay for it out of his pockets. Like some of the political figures in Washington,they all forget that we sent them to represent us with the hopes they will do the best job for us. I am a Puerto Rican-American male trying to make more than 25 hours a week from my job and then I read something like this.
May 30th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
A good question to ask about this article is how come when the Republicans’ were in control we didn’t read articles like these. Only now that Democrats are in control do we have columnists like this one get a sudden sense of frugality and accountability. Can we say, “Sour grapes” maybe?
May 30th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
actually, i don’t have a beef so much with him renting a car (as long as it was for business purposes), but the cost. He could have rented a car at Avis @ $60 a day for the whole year and spent less! Though the money spent on TVs and digital cameras were less, I wonder about what business reasons they can be used for. You can fall into any Best Buy and get a pretty decent digital camera for under $500.
May 30th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Yeah great. Meanwhile I’m driving a 16yo car and struggling to come up with the 700 a month rent for the room that I rent while a$$holes like this guy waste my tax money on his own personal luxuries. God isn’t government great? We need to take back what is ours and stop giving away our hard earned money to loosers like this guy.
May 30th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Snakes don’t change their spots and Alcee is one big SNAKE. Black white brown it doesn’t matter crookiticians are and always will be crookiticians until they go to jail. Get off the racial thing Lamont there are more white crooks than blacks in politics. Check out all the latest Palm Beach county crooks.
May 30th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Over 2 Grand a month to lease a car?????? Hmmm who owns the dealership he leased from? Yeah like he drives from DC to Florida.
May 30th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
The dems have so corrupted the vote that they are guaranteed to stay in office as long as they desire. The worst of it is these socalled journalist are more than happy to do their bidding for them.
So you had better get back to work because their going to tax you on things that you didn’t even know existed.
If the citizen wasn’t so ignorant and greedy it prolly wouldn’t be like this!
May 30th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
He was a corrupt judge and impeached how would his character change ?
May 30th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Wow – pretty incredible anyone would call the race card on this one. White, black, red, green, yellow – there are reasonable expenditures of taxpayer dollars and then there are things like this waste.
To be clear, it sounds like the $24K represented lease payments – not the cost of purchasing the car. That’s $2,000 / month for a LEASE. There are no Lexus sedans that cost $24K, so the $2,000 / mo. must have been to lease a Lexus LS 600h? – the most expensive car they make (over $100K). I don’t know if that’s what he did but $24K in a year for LEASE payments???!!!
Also, at least one of the other people mentioned in the article is a Republican (Turner), so I’m not sure why anyone would suggest “sour grapes” if they actually reviewed the facts and understood this was YOUR money they spent. The article was clearly connected to what happened in England recently.
Spending like this is a disgrace – they should buy their own cars and pay their own expenses like the rest of us! Give them nothing to spend and that will be easy to enforce. Everyone should have the same resources, including staff and other things they need to run their offices (all of which should be paid DIRECTLY by the government like when we go to work), resulting in minimal need for discretionary spending. Allowing them to EACH have a budget of $2MM – $3MM / year to spend how they want is absurd and asking for abuse.
Read the WSJ article and you should understand see why many of these expenditures are wastes of taxpayer dollars and why the system is ripe for corruption.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
People voted for Mr. Hastings after he impeached as a federal judge. Video was shown of him with recreational drugs/COCAINE and a prostitute. You pay for monkeys you get monkeys!
May 30th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
People don’t pay attention to what many of these politicians do, so when it comes down to the vote, many don’t know their record. Anyone that thinks this article is racially motivated needs to wake up. At least it was a hybrid!
May 30th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
All about the ‘bling’.
By the way, I’m calling ‘bs’ on ‘Lamont’.
While I’m sure there are plenty of African Americans who might give Hastings a pass on this because of his race, the ‘whitey’post, with its purposely misspelled words and cheesy reference to a Sanford & Son charecter, smacks to me of some hangin’ gut redneck Limbaugh wannabe looking to stir up a racial s–tstorm.
Lamont? Thats the best you can do? Even ‘Tawana’ would have been more for real.
June 1st, 2009 at 1:21 pm
[...] noted over the weekend, U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Miramar, was the first example cited by The Wall Street Journal in an [...]