Amatuer Hour In D.C., Part 1 - Four More Wasteful, Failed Political Class Efforts

If a private company had been around for over two hundred years, we would probably hold it in pretty high regard. For any human institution to exist that long means that the institution is flexible, creative, efficient, and well managed. If not, they would not have been around so long.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the political class in this country that runs our government at all levels. Although our governments have also been around for over two hundred years, it is highly doubtful that many of us would describe any level of U.S. government as flexible, creative, efficient, and well managed. If they were in the private sector, they would have disappeared long ago. Some days one has to step back and wonder: our politicians have been at this government thing for a long, long time, you think and hope that they had gotten some of the kinks worked out long ago and could do at least some things efficiently and effectively.

But, alas, that does not seem to be the case. Thus, this post will start off a series of posts that, unfortunately, all come to the conclusion that it is really amateur hour in Washington and in city halls and state capitals around the country. It is hard to find things that any of these entities do well and cost effectively. This should not be the case, these government institutions have been around forever, but it looks like they are still managed by the amateurs from our political class, that learn, or not learn, as they go along. As a result, our wealth, our time, our safety and most importantly, our freedoms, erode over time as the amateurs muddle through problem after problem, really never solving any of them.

Consider:

- An Associated Press article from January 15, 2011 reported that the Federal government was going to scrap the high tech fence that it tried to build along the U.S./Mexican border to stem the flow of illegal aliens into this country. Some highlights/lowlights of this effort include:

• About a billion dollars of taxpayer money has already been spent on the fence with virtually no success in stemming the flood of illegal immigrants.
• Only 53 miles of the fence were completed which means the Federal government spent about $19 million per mile of completed fence. Atrocious.
• At this rate, if the Federal government had continued and fenced the entire length of the border with Mexico, just the construction cost would have been almost $40 billion, not a really efficient solution to the problem.
• Senator Joe Lieberman, the chairman of the Senate committee responsible for Homeland Security, was quoted in the article as saying the decision to ditch the fence "ends a long troubled program that spent far too much of the tapxayers' money for the results  it delivered." Gee, Senator, maybe you should have thought through the problem a little more to begin with, maybe about a billion dollars ago.
• Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told members of Congress that an"independent, quantitative, science-based review made clear" that the fence "cannot meet its original objective of providing a single integrated border security technology solution." As with Senator Lieberman, maybe Homeland Security should have done a "science-based" study BEFORE you spent a billion dollars.
• Problems with this high tech, virtual fence included the fact that the radar used had trouble telling the difference between vegetation and people in windy weather, cameras moved too slowly, and satellite communications were too slow. All of these technical problems should have been measurable and quantified prior to spending a billion dollars.

Amateur hour. If the political class cannot even build a simple fence, can really expect them to operate heavy machinery like health care reform, education reform, etc.?

- A very sad article from the Associated Press was reported on January 16, 2011. It covered the horrendous financial shape that the city of Camden, New Jersey finds itself in. Camden is a long time city on the banks of the Delaware river, sitting opposite Philadelphia. It should have a lot going for it including easy access to a major metro area, waterfront property for business development and shipping, it once had a thriving industrial base, and it is also close to the state capital of Trenton. However, the AP reported that:

• The city may have to lay off 383 city employees which is about 25% of the entire city payroll in a desperate attempt to fix its budget deficit.
• The layoffs would cut the police force in half and the fire department by one third.
• These police force cuts would be happening in a city with the second most dangerous rating in the country, with a violent crime rate five times the national average.
• The city also has high rates of drug dealing, prostitution, and many other violent crimes.
• Three out of Camden's last seven mayors have been convicted for corruption.
• The Camden schools are partially under state control due to nonperformance.
• Although the state has given the city about $175 million for city upgrades and to expand the state aquarium, a hospital, and a unit of the state university, nothing has helped revitalize any aspect of the town. In other words, $175 million wasted.
• More than half of is operating budget comes from the state government, which itself is under heavy financial strain and is likely to reduce that support going forward.

What a waste and disaster. Talk about mismanagement. Too much overhead, not enough foresight to plan ahead, total dependence on outside agencies to exist. Sounds like General Motors and Chrysler a few years ago. And this is a place that has the geographic advantages listed above but has been so mismanaged by the political class that it has dug itself a hole that it may never get out of. One would have thought that politicians would have had some sense of how to run a city government after all of these years. Amateur hour.

- More disturbing news from the Associated Press on January 17, 2011. An AP article reported that former Presidential candidate and North Carolina Senator John Edwards is under intense Federal investigation to determine if he knew that some of  his campaign funds were used to cover up his extra marital affair and out of wedlock child and whether other financial practices violate campaign laws. A Federal grand jury is going through records and testimony to determine if and what laws were broken.

Apparently this is not a causal investigation since it has been going on for over two years by the U.S. attorney in Raleigh. The article lists out an extensive and interrelated web of campaign practices, finances, and political organizations.

Now, let's be very clear that no indictments or accusations have been made, Mr., Edwards needs to be considered innocent until proven guilt. However, the facts are the facts and even if there were no campaign finance laws broken, we know that he did have an extra marital affair and a baby out of wedlock, all, by the way, while his wife battled cancer. Seems like we go through something like this on a constant basis, from Spitzer to Ensign to MacGreevey to Sanford to Clinton to many others. Political class members that would rather do the easy and fun stuff, have an affair, than do the hard important stuff, run an efficient and effective government operation. Amateur hour.

- One final example of amateur hour and this comes from an Associate Press report from September 22, 2010. The article reported on an interview that Zeituni Onyango gave to WBZ-TV in Boston. Highlights of the interview include the following:

• Onyango came to the United States from Kenya in 2000 and was denied asylum by an immigration judge in 2004.
• She stayed in the country illegally, living in Boston public housing where she still receives $700 per month in disability benefits despite having never contributed into the system.
• She had no trepidations about accepting government assistance despite being here illegally (she has since been granted asylum) for at least four years, given her following quote: "You people who preach Jesus Christ, almighty God, and the rest of it, you are here to help people, help the poor, help other countries and help women. That's what the United States is supposed to do." Talk about having outlandish and outsized, obnoxious entitlement expectations.

Any number of amateur hour, incompetent government operations in this case:

1. Why did it take so long to determine her asylum status, four years? Hasn't the Federal government being doing this kind of work for centuries, Ellis Island comes to mind, which seems to have been doing things much more efficiently and quicker without the modern technology of today.
2. Once it was determined she could not stay, why was she not deported immediately?
3. How in the word did she get public housing assistance and $700 a month without working a day for this country in her life? Unemployed Americans will eventually lose their unemployment benefits, Social Security is going bankrupt, Medicare is going bankrupt but we hand out $700 a month to people like Onyango?

Oh, by the way, Zeituni Onyango is President Obama's aunt. Takes a little luster off of the President's image that he would allow his relative to live in public housing, given the success and wealth he has generated from his book sales and other sources. Also, wouldn't it have been a grand gesture if he took care of his aunt's living needs and not wasted $700 a month of the taxpayer's wealth to do so?

Amateur hour here in so many ways. Inability to efficiently process asylum seekers, inability to actually deport someone who was refused asylum, inability to truly help American citizens in their time of need while diverting resources to illegal aliens, and the inability of a national political leader to take care of his own family member and relieve the care from the government's strained resources. Disgraceful.

Several steps would help alleviate some of this amateur hour and waste from our political class:

• Step 34 would increase accountability for politicians sitting on Congressional committees that do not do their jobs and execute their responsibilities by yanking them off of those committees and replacing them with people who will be successful in executing those committee responsibilities. For example, those politicians responsible for an efficient asylum process and those that had anything do to with the billion dollar fence failure on the Mexican border would be kicked off these committees who oversee these government efforts.
• Step 39 would impose term limits on all politicians. Many of the situations we are currently in such as the Camden mess and the Edwards-type scandals all had to do with incompetent politicians either staying too long or the taint of campaign funds being misused. We need to get back to the concept of citizen politicians, not career politicians.
• Step 1 would reduce the Federal government by 10% a year for five years. A critical component of that effort is a ground up, zero based approach at looking at every function and every department in the Federal government to check its operational effectiveness and efficiency, replacing and/or eliminating personnel and functions that do not adequately serve the taxpayers. This effort would include tightening up fraud enforcement and eligibility requirements so that American citizens are served, not the world's citizens are served.

The time for amateur hour should be over by now. the Federal government has been around for over two centuries, the people that run it should have gotten most of it right by now. The fact that they have not indicates that a new approach and the steps above need to be implemented so that two hundred years from now some other American is still not lamenting the amateur hour status of our political class.


Our 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 the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment