Obama claims he has helped many people with Other People's Money. Has he ever helped anyone with his own?

Harvey: Thanks for the response. Now, instead of a non sequitur, would you care to answer the question? You are saying that paying into they system constitutes helping others? That you have no further duty to your fellow man than to pay your taxes? That's interesting, because the Left also claims that your tax money is not your own money, that it belongs to the government. And they also claim that using legal loopholes to avoid paying taxes is somehow immoral. It can't be immoral if your tax money is your own money. So you can't have it both ways: your tax money is either your own money (in which case, the government has no claim on it) or it's the government's money (in which case, you can't claim that you are helping anyone by handing it over).

Your citation to the book has nothing to do with the question, but thanks for polluting YA with an advertisement.

Wow, white. Is that the best you can do? You have no idea how anyone on YA spends their lives, but based on your answers on here, I can see you are not capable of cognitive thought and cohesive argument. How sad for you.

Got Lost: the only relevant part of your answer was your one sentence: "I guess you are asking if The President has ever donated time or money to any charities, and I guess he probably has."

You admit that this is a "guess." If proffering a guess constitutes "educating" me, then you must be a product of government schooling!

c_kayak_fun: good answer. Thanks for the numbers and citation; that's what I was looking for.

However, if your high school civics classes taught you that Congress alone approves and allocates federal expenditures, then you are both living in the 19th century. The distinction between the executive and legislative branches has been increasingly blurred since before the second world war.

Take your own AIG example. (We can argue the actual merits of that bailout some other time.) Do you think this was administered by Congress? This was executed by the Treasury Department and the Fed. Did Congress specifically allocate $85 Billion for the AIG bailout? Nope. The claim was that they already had the authority under Section 13-3 of the Federal Reserve Act.

If you have the attention span, you can read that section here: http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/section1...

So if you had taken more than just high school civics (as I have), then you would not have made such a naive st

c_kayak_fun: again, good response. To be clear, I did not imply that the President somehow controls the Fed (other than to appoint and dismiss its chairman, essentially at will). However, the Treasury Department is a part of the Executive Branch. And the bailout would not have taken place without its blessing. My only point was that Congress had little if anything to do with allocating the $85 Billion specifically to the AIG bailout. I merely pointed out this fact in response to your assertion that Congress oversees Federal expenditures.

As for my "agenda," I admit that the question was politically charged. But really it was less a point about Obama and more a point about OPM vs true charity. Again, you were the only person who even attempted to answer the actual question. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

c_kayak_fun: A final quibble. I think the blurred lines between executive powers and congressional powers had begun long before the Lyndon Johnson years. You need only look at some of the provisions of the New Deal to see the expansion of Presidential powers under FDR. In fact, his successor, Harry Truman, had to be reined in by the Supreme Court when he overstepped his bounds in trying to nationalize the steel industry without Congressional approval. This was 1952, long before Johnson took power. (See YOUNGSTOWN SHEET & TUBE CO. ET AL. v. SAWYER, 343 U.S. 579.)