Ben Carsons HUD spend $31,000 on new dining set while finalizing cuts on the poor

He is Risen 72 said:

And? We are in power now; perhaps it is time for a little payback for the disastrous Obama years. If the poor really WANT to stop being poor, they will. As long as they choose to get free government handouts, why should they even try and better themselves?

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I never heard such nonsense in my life. The poor don't get so much money. That they are comfortable. And many poor people I know. Are no longer on welfare, food stamps. Or anything the government helped them with. Thankfully many of these poor people can get schooling. Because of the government. And better themselves.

Jeffwhosoever said:

How much do you think an executive should spend on office furniture to replace stuff that is decades old and no longer maintainable?

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I could do it for a lot less.

Jeffwhosoever said:

How much do you think an executive should spend on office furniture to replace stuff that is decades old and no longer maintainable?

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You have IKEA there right?

So, I just bought a "new" (to me) dining room set and... $30k is WAY more inside the bounds of "reasonable" than I realized before. We got ours off craigslist (for < 1/10 that), but based on prices I was able to find, I imagine ours was in that $30k range when new (~30 years ago) and ours are pretty modest.

The same mfg has, in some of their fancier lines, china cabinets with MSRP's approaching $70k:
www.stenellaantiques.com

Frankly, I'm okay with somebody at the cabinet secretary level having nice furniture. It's the top level of our government. It should look the part.

I can't find the episode right now, but one of my NPR podcasts (probably Planet Money) had an episode about how Congress is considered something of a museum and, as such, has a whole high-end furniture shop in house to maintain all the fancy antique furniture in all the offices. They have one of the few remaining horse hair pullers in existence, so they can recycle the horse hair stuffing in the upholstery, and one of the craftsmen was talking about how his favorite project was making a custom conference table for (IIRC) Paul Ryan. Retail on all of that work would have been $tupid $$$$$$$$$. What he was describing could've run upwards of 6 figures.