Tattle: Royals are cutting back
WHEN RICH people save, they put off buying a third car. When poor people save, they put off buying lunch.
WHEN RICH people save, they put off buying a third car. When poor people save, they put off buying lunch.
And royalty?
According to the Associated Press, Belgium's King Albert II said yesterday that he'll use part of his "salary" to help pay for the upkeep on his properties, making him the latest European royal whose largesse is being minimized by Europe's economic woes.
In a rare public statement on his finances, King Albert said he wanted to freeze his $13.8 million salary, using his automatic 2012 salary inflation adjustment (approx. 3 percent) to help pay property maintenance costs normally borne by the government.
Must be tough when your COLA is about $400,000.
In Spain, where the euro crisis is especially fierce, the royal palace was assigned a piddling annual budget of $11 million by parliament last year. That was a budget cut of some 5 percent.
Salaries for palace employees, including the king, were cut by up to 15 percent. We're guessing the king felt the cuts less than the gardener.
Official accounts showed that British taxpayers spent $49.5 million supporting the monarchy in 2011, 5.3 percent less than the previous year. Much of the saving came from cutting the maintenance bill of royal residences from $23.8 million to $18.4 million.
Queen Elizabeth must be parsing out the toilet paper in Buckingham Palace's 78 bathrooms.
Even in the relatively prosperous Netherlands, the royals are tightening their belts.
The budget for Queen Beatrix, Crown Prince Willem Alexander and his wife, Princess Maxima, was cut in 2011 by $537,000 to $49.9 million, according to the Royal House website.
Most of the savings came in the form of cuts to the royals' private travel expenses. Also, Queen B chipped in $207,466 from her own pocket (a/k/a money she'd previously been paid by her people) for work on her yacht.
Rapping about the baby
Via rap, Jay-Z has confirmed the birth of "the most beautiful girl in the world."
The song "Glory" made its debut on his social website Life and Times yesterday - two days after wife Beyonce gave birth to Blue Ivy.
Lines include "You're my child of a child from Destiny's Child."
Jay-Z even revealed that Beyonce had a miscarriage at one point.
"Last time the miscarriage was so tragic/We was afraid you'd disappear/But nah baby you magic."
A baby's cries end the song.
* Not everyone's happy about the arrival of baby Blue.
TMZ.com reports that mothers at the breast-feeding class in Lenox Hill Hospital in New York are not pumping the milk of human kindness.
Mothers reportedly are feeling "neglected" by the hospital staff and pondering a lawsuit.
NYDailyNews.com says that Bey and Jay dropped $1.3 mil to seal off a private wing of the hospital.