- According to a short article from www.bloomberg.com that was published in the October 15, 2010 issue of The Week magazine, in 2008 almost 3,000 U.S. households reporting income of $1 million or more claimed and received income from unemployment benefits. The amount claimed was over $18 million. Now in the big picture of government deficits, $18 million, unfortunately, is no big deal. But it is real taxpayer money that has been wasted. Unemployment insurance payments should be configured to help a struggling family over a rough spot in their financial lives when someone in that family has lost their job. Someone who has made over $1 million in income does not need that help. I would assume that in most of these cases, if someone made over $1 million in 2008, a bad economic year, they probably made a lot of money in the good economic years leading up to 2008. There is no way that they have hit a rough patch relative to the vast majority of the country. However, politicians have allowed this waste of taxpayer money to go on regardless of how stupid and wasteful it is.
- According to an October 12, 2010 New York Times article by David Brooks that appeared in the St. Petersburg Times, the city of Buffalo has as many public government workers today as it had in 1950 even though the city has lost half of its population since then. Combine this ridiculous situation with the fact that computers, cell phones, and other pieces of technology have made working much more efficient and productive since 1950, and you can see that Buffalo has lost far more than 50% in productivity from its government workers in the past 60 years. This lost of productivity has been allowed to happen by our political class that is too scared to cut waste since it might cost them a few votes, better to just stick the remaining Buffalo taxpayers with the bill of atrocious productivity losses.
- According to London Guardian article that was published in the The Week magazine's September 24, 2010 issue, the Untied States has slipped from second to fourth in the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index, now trailing Switzerland, Sweden, and Singapore. A competitive economy and marketplace help to create jobs and grow the wealth base of a country and as that slips, the ability to grow and enrich a country's citizens declines. The index measures such factors as infrastructure, education, health care, record of innovation and more. Is it just a coincidence that as our Federal government has gotten bigger and more wasteful that our competitive ability as a nation has slipped significantly? This larger government and political class has certainly not helped to fix our infrastructure, education process, and other competitive needs.
- Political situations around the world can be just as crazy as here. In an article reprint from the Daily Mail that appeared in the September 24, 2010 issue of The Week magazine, European Union political class safety actions might actually be killing people in Europe. According to the article, the European Union issued rules that prevent anyone from working in hospitals more than 48 hours a week. However, the reason that many medical professionals were working more than 48 hours a week was because they had to in order to handle the volume of sick people they were facing. By forcing work hour limits on these people, sick people are actually dying while waiting for help in hospitals. The article cites a British hospital experience where a man complaining of shortness of breath came to a hospital and was forced to wait more than five hours to see a doctor. Unfortunately, he died in the hospital before a doctor could see him. In another documented case, an elderly woman dropped dead in a British hospital because the hospital could only provide only one doctor to care for 100 patients, the other had to clock out at 48 hours. Talk about unintended consequences, by not understanding the underlying situation, the European political class is actually killing its citizens unnecessarily.
- According to an article in the October 15, 2010 issue of The Week magazine, New York City recently began changing out all of its 250,900 street signs, adjusting the type face from all upper case to upper AND lower case letters. The upper case type face has been use in the city for more than a hundred years. Why change now? Because the Federal Highway Adminstration says signs in which only the first letter of a word is capitalized are easier to read, enabling drivers to spend less looking at the street signs and more time looking at the road. This, in turn, should save lives. Now seriously, how many lives do we really think this will save? Most NYC residents already know where they are going the vast majority of the time and are unlikly to spend much time at all looking at new street signs. Visitors to New York City are most likely using some type of public transportation and have no need to read street signs. How many documented lives lost to street sign type face do the Feds have on record because a driver spent too much time looking at the type face of a street sig? Not only is a ludicrous waste of time, the cost for the changeout, according to the article, will be in excess of $27 million, taxpayer dollars that certainly could have been better spent on schools, infrastructure, and a plethora of other better uses. This is not the view of the City Transportaiton Commissioner who noted an additional benefit of the sign switch: " It's more polite. Writing in all caps means you are shouting." Makes you crazy, doesn't it, the waste, the bureaucracy, and the insanity justifying it all?
- According to an article that appeared in the October 9, 2010 issue of the St. Petersbug Times, Kenneth Feinberg and his law firm have been paid more than $2.5 million in just three and half months to administer the $20 billion fund set up by the government and BP to pay victims of the Gulf oil rig spill. For those of you who do not know Kenneth Feinberg, he is currently under employment in the Obama White House as one of Obama's czars. How can this not make you a) a crazy and b) not be a conflict of interest? Let's see, I am drawing a salary and benefits from the American taxpayer while I can still make money at my own law firm dealing with the Federal government. Obama pledged not to hire lobbyists when he came into office (a pledge that he has broken many times). How is this any different? Are you telling us that here was no other law firm in the country that could have handled this project? What a sweet deal for Feinberg, he can work both sides of the fence as insider government employee and an outside consultant getting money via a government agreement with BP.
- The Obama administration and Congress recently passed the Small Business Jobs Act which was a Hail Mary pass by the President to look like he was doing something, anything constructive relative to the high unemployment rate prior to the elections by incenting small businesses to hire. The feeling when this passed was that how good of an idea could it be if it took until now to come up with it? If it was such a great job producing piece of legislation, shouldn't it have been passed long ago? Well, it now appears that this is just what most expected to be, an economic dud and just a political ploy. According to an excellent analysis by Jill Priluck of www.Slate.com ,which was summarized in the October 8, 2010 issue of The Week magazine, the whole bill is likely to be just another multi-billion waste of taxpayer wealth. For example, only well established and thriving small businesses, businesses that are unlikely to need to hire a significant amount of new employees, will qualify for these loans under the strict requirements the legislation requires. Thus, those that qualify for the loans are the ones least likely to need a loan. Those companies that are most likely to hire many new employees are viewed as too risky by the bill. Brilliant. Also, the legislation provides tax credits to small businesses, credits that would hopefully be turned into new hires. However, tax credits apply only if a business is already profitable. Thus, we have the same problem. Only well established, profitable small businesses will qualify for the tax credit but are unlikely to hire new employees. It is the small businesses that have a high potential for growth who will hire but they do not qualify for the tax credits since they are still unprofitable. Apparently, you could not design a worse small business piece of legislation to attack the unemployment problems you want to attack than this ill conceived, stupid bill.
However, there is a way to start bringing sanity back to our world. It starts with the implementation of many steps outlined in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," steps that include imposing term limits on all politicians, stopping the gerrymandering of Congressional districts, requiring all politicians to take and pass a class on economic theory, and downsizing the federal government by 10% a year for five years. If this was done in Buffalo, you would finally have an affordable city government scaled to the current day population numbers. The same needs to be done at the federal government level, eliminating waste and some of the craziness and stupidity we have to live with today.
Finally we need to take the step of dumping every incumbent politician out of office in November. We need to use the strategy that a professional clown recently and successfully deployed in Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest state (The Week magazine, October 15, 2010. The clown actually won a seat in Congress using the campaign slogan: "It can't get any worse." Brilliant! The same applies to the United States in November. It can't get any worse, we live with crazy and inane political situations while real issues are never addressed and solved. Dump the clowns in November, how much worse could it get?
Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit these other sites for freedom:
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
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