Government Numbers - Not A Pretty Sight

I have been sitting on some recent government and political class numbers from a varied set of sources which cover several areas. The good news is tonight we can review them, the bad news is that they are not pretty.

• The big number bouncing around Washington from those that support the current version of health care reform (more on this disaster later this week) is that the current bill will reduce the deficit by $130 billion of 10 years. Supposedly, this estimate came from the objective Congressional Budget Office. I am not familiar with any government program that ever hit its numbers so I am highly suspect of the $130 billion in savings. Remember, just building the new visitor center in D.C. went over budget by almost 50%, as we covered in a previous post. However, for argument's sake let's say that the $130 billion is reasonable and will be attained. Given that the Federal government's deficit for November, 2009 alone was over $120 billion, these savings from health care reform would just barely cover one month's deficit spending.
• Oops, the Federal government deficit spending level in October, 2009 was over $170 billion so that the 10 year savings from this health care reform bill would come up over $40 billion short in covering the single month's deficit from October.
• In a previous post we documented the fact that the Obama administration officially estimates that the total Federal government deficit will grow by about $9 TRILLION over the next 10 years. Thus, the purported costs savings from this health care bill will reduce the incremental Obama deficit levels over the next 10 years by about 1.4%. That assumes that the $9 trillion is still a good estimate, not a good assumption based on the astronomical October and November deficits posted in 2009, and that the $130 billion in savings actually appears. In either case, the bigger issue is not if the health care bill savings will materialize but how the country is going to get the deficits under control since 1.4% is an optimistic number and a trivial number.
• Leaving health care, it has been widely reported the past few days that the Taliban in Afghanistan are now able to intercept the video feed from our Predator drones and can now see what the drones are seeing, robbing us of a potent military advantage. If the enemy knows what we are looking at, they can possibly take steps to minimize damage from the drones' missiles. Although this country has spent trillions of dollars on defense over the years, the Taliban have cracked the video stream with over the counter software and computer hardware. Even worse, the military has known about the vulnerability for about 10 years and did nothing to fix it, assuming the terrorists were not capable of this, and it will take 4 years or until 2014 to encrypt the video signals. Our chance of success in fighting the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan just took a big negative hit. Given the lax oversight by both the military brass and Congressional committees responsible for this debacle, many people should lose their jobs for this gross negligence and waste of time and money.
• Although Obama's satisfaction rating is now below 50% and trending down, he is a virtual superman vs. Congress. As discussed in a December 20, 2009 article by Dan Biaz of the Washington Post, the most recent NBC News-Wall Street opinion poll showed that only 7% of the respondents said that the performance of Congress was above average while 34% of the respondents said this version of Congress was one of the worst ever.

Large and depressing numbers. These examples do not even cover the amount of earmarks/pork barrel projects that the 2010 fiscal budget will contain, over 10,000, where the Federal government will spend money that either the states should spend themselves or money that should not be spent at all since it usually only benefits the incumbent's reelection chances. These numbers do not include the $100 billion a year we discussed in a post earlier this month that we waste by stationing tens of thousands U.S. troops around the world that fulfill no strategic, anti-terrorist, or worthy military role.

The good news is that the public may finally be getting it and finding that our problem lies not with our country but with the political class that runs it, as quantified by the NBC News poll. We have allowed very petty and short term thinking political people to determine the fate of the country and ourselves. "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" is a path and plan to change this situation. The numbers do not lie, we need to reverse these dangerous numbers by changing out the people who create them and do it soon before our number is up.

Visit our website at www.loathemygovernment.com to order an autographed copy of the book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government -Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom and Destroying The American Political Class" and to sign up for the cause. The book is also available online at Amazon and Barnes And Noble.

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