If he really is for change, then why not make it low key and say that during this hard economic times we must use the money Lead by example, yeah, when Bush said go out and spend your money, people got upset. Yet, people didn't seem to bothered when $175 M (some of it from taxpayer's) being spent on pomp and pageantry.
The thing is, the money was already spent. Other than the last minute guests to make it personal to Obama, rather than McCain, this has probably been well in the planning stages for at least a year, if not more. By saying it should've been smaller, you're basically saying that they should've known that the economy would be worse than shit in the beginning of the planning, and should've planned the inauguration accordingly so that the new president, whoever that would be, would look better. I'd be saying the same thing if McCain had won, or Hillary for that matter.
The tax money that was needed for this was already spoken for when the budget was decided more than a year ago. Making it a cheaper ceremony would've been an empty gesture as the money had already been spent. I guarantee that with the huge bureaucracy in the government, not just in the department that takes care of the inauguration, but also in the budgetry department, it would've taken years to get that money back and into a more fruitful endeavor, millions of dollars wouldn't have been gotten back, and there would've been less organization to the inauguration and therefore more cost in the end.
It's like a massive version of a big fancy wedding. The planning starts well ahead of time, deposits are paid, etc etc. If you decide to suddenly make it a small wedding just before the date (
and two months before something this huge would've been just before the date, that's for sure), you don't get the deposits back, it'll take forever for you to get the actual money that you paid back - probably not in enough time to use them to pay for the scaled down version - you end up with a last minute horror show that leaves everyone confused and can be a logistical nightmare, and you probably end up spending more money that you would've if you had just stuck to your original plan. And that's just a wedding.
Talk about something like an inauguration and you've got thousands of people who've got to be paid who've been working on various projects for many months, if not more than a year. The projects they've been working on have to have the materials paid for, even if they're not going to be used anymore, plus they've got to be put into storage, which also costs money. You've got congressmen and women and senators who need to be told that they don't get to request tickets to give for the first time, because you need to sell them to keep costs low. That amps up the need for security since you're essentially selling the close-up tickets to the highest bidder, whoever that may be. Plus the members of congress and the senate probably had their tickets requested and the holders vetted well ahead of time, so you've got a few thousand people who you've wasted money getting background checks on, and on top of that, they've probably already booked posh hotel rooms and plane tickets, which they will now cancel at the last minute thus losing their deposits, and causing a rather big inconvenience to the hotels and airlines - after all, all the rooms sell out, but these are top dollar customers and it's bit harder to sell first class airline tickets and hotel suites. So now you have to pay extra money to do background checks on the new people who've bought tickets, and since you have to do it in such a short period of time, you also have to amp up security just in case - yet another cost.
Basically, if you wanted it to be a less costly inauguration, you should've asked for it two years ago, at minumum. Changing the plans at the last minute is simply raising the cost, not lowering them, and you're ending up with a nightmarish logistical situation that will raise the cost of security even more, and still leave openings and issues with that.
Steve could explain it a lot better than I could, and I'll try to get him to, but I'll say simply this.
Trying, at the last minute, to change the inauguration ceremony plans is not only impractical, but it would cost more and security would be less. Plus it would make the new President seem completely incompetent because the inauguration would be even more of a nightmare than it already was for people trying to get to it and take part, which would've lowered peoples confidence which would've caused more worry about the economy which would've led the markets to get even worse and the economy to perhaps even go a bit lower.
We all remember the effect 9/11 had on the economy. Imagine what it would do if on the first day of his presidency, it seems like we would have to deal with 4 more years of an incompetent president.
It's a nice thought, but from a cost perspective and a social study perspective, and I'm sure from a lot of other perscpectives, doing a last minute change like that simply would be a disaster.