By now Americans know that the Obama administration is not, as it claimed, the most transparent in history. Ongoing scandals such as Fast and Furious, IRS targeting, Obamacare, Benghazi, and NSA snooping explode that ludicrous notion. On the other hand, as author Robert Keith Gray explains in the Daily Caller, the Obama administration is breaking all records for expense, courtesy of American taxpayers.

Gray finds that the $1.4 billion spent on the Obama family last year includes the biggest staff in history, with “no mechanism for anyone’s objection if a president were to pay his chief of staff $5,000,000 a year.” He finds that Obama has, count ‘em, 469 senior staffers, with 226 bagging more than $100,000 a year and 77 at $172,000 a year. Gray also counts 42 “czars” the president has appointed, and they don’t work for minimum wage. The Obama family dog handler reportedly gets $102,000 a year. Nice work if you can get it.

The president himself, in addition to his salary, gets a $50,000 a year expense account, a $100,000 travel account, $19,000 entertainment budget, and an additional million for “unanticipated needs.” As Gray sees it, that includes using other people’s money to buy his own reelection. As Gray notes in his book Presidential Perks Gone Royal, it’s all in the regal style, but by the author’s accounting, Britain spends only $57.8 million a year on the royal family.

As Mel Brooks said, it’s good to be the king. The regal style fits an administration shrink-wrapped in statist superstition, and after six years still colonizing the nation with government waste, fraud, and abuse. As ever, the folks up there in Washington are looking out for number one. Taxpayers aren’t even number two.