presidential blunders

How much of your salary do you spend on beer? Or maybe whiskey or wine? Apparently a lot, if you were the nation's first president. George Washington's annual salary was $25,000 when he took office in 1789. Controlling for inflation, as calculated by MeasuringWorth.com's online conversion tool, that would be worth $630,278 today. (As a comparison, Barack Obama's salary is only $400,000, though he also has an expense account of $50,000, a nontaxable travel allocation of $100,000, and $19,000 for entertainment.) According to Cormac O'Brien's Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents, Washington spent seven percent of his salary on alcohol, and "he even splurged on such luxuries as leopard-skin robes for his stable of matched horses." Let's see...in today's dollars, that means Washington spent $44,119 a year on alcohol. This shouldn't be a huge surprise, because Washington was one of colonial America's top whiskey producers. (Pictured is George Washington's life mask, cast by French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon in 1785.)