This week, President Barack Obama took a break from his exhausting schedule of finger wagging and golfing to hobnob with Google execs in Silicon Valley.
And just how much did it cost to attend the gilded Democratic fundraiser which featured the POTUS in all his lecturing glory?
A cool $30,400 per head.
Chump change, no doubt, for most of the adoring VCs, corporate lackeys and socialites that crowded the lavish home of high-ranking Google exec Marissa Mayer.
According to Byron York of the Washington Examiner, Obama spoke briefly and had nothing but praise for the Internet search giant.
He also commented on the Great Recession plaguing the United States of America, claiming that:
“My task over the last two years hasn’t just been to stop the [terrible] bleeding.
“[No], my task has also been to try to figure out how do we address some of the structural problems in the economy that have prevented more Googles from being created…”
Unsurprisingly, Obama refrained from commenting on Google’s controversial practice of income shifting techniques that allows the Mountain View-based company to avoid paying taxes on most of its foreign profits.
Indeed, a recent Bloomberg News report estimated that Google moved $3.1 billion of its income to Bermuda and other low-tax havens in recent years, thereby reducing its overseas tax rate to a paltry 2.4 percent.
Such income shifting is thought to have cost the US government as much as $60 billion in annual revenue.
Leaving the rest of us to pick up the slack, no doubt.
But hey, don’t you know? The more things change, the more they stay the same.
