Great, what a downer. But it gets worse. There are plenty of other fine messes all levels of our political class have gotten us into that sometimes get crowded off of the front pages due to the above listed issues and unfortunately, the next election:
- The government has been involved in trying to make our skies safe for all of those that fly for decades. One would have thought that they would be pretty good at it by now. Not the case. In just the past few weeks, government employed air traffic controllers have been found asleep on duty several times when they should have been working to keep the flying public safe. A few days ago, a jet carrying the First Lady had to abort a landing when it came too close to another plane in the area. In the April 22, 2011 issue of The Week magazine, there was a short article describing an incident where a commuter jet clipped the wing of an Airbus 380. This happened at NYC's Kennedy airport, imagine the destruction on the ground if this was not just a clipping of a wing.
What a mess. Employees falling asleep, planes almost colliding, and these are the incidents that we know about. Last year an Associated Press article reported that the FAA did not know the owners or the physical locations of thousands of airplanes, airplanes that could have potential terrorist applications. After decades of involvement in air regulation, we should not be dealing with this mess today. The political class and the government it runs should know how to avoid these types of messes.
- The attention of the world relative to nuclear energy has rightfully been focused on the disaster in Japan. However, we have a nuclear mess brewing right here in the United States. The government has been involved in regulating the nuclear power industry since its birth decades ago. Unfortunately, much like mismanaging the air traffic above us, the government is having a serious time trying to manage the nuclear waste around us.
According to a detailed article in the April 15, 2011 issue of The Week magazine, the country really has no plan in place or one being contemplated on how to safely dispense with and store spent nuclear fuel rods from our stateside nuclear reactors. When uranium in the fuel rods is used up, the rods are usually placed in deep water pools, on the same site where the nuclear reactors are located. There water is circulated around them to cool them down. This cooling process usually takes about 10 years. However, they remain radioactive for about 10,000 years.
In the U.S., we have no plan to manage the increasingly large pile of spent fuel rods. The ponds where they current reside were built and designed to hold about one fourth of what they currently hold. The total volume of spent rods is about 72,000 tons. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission predicts that by 2015, there will be no more storage space on site for the rods and there is no plan to move them to a safe place and there is little space to dig more cooling ponds.
At one point, the nation was supposed send its spent rods to Yucca Mountain in Nevada. In fact, the political class has already forced utility users to finance $20 billion worth of construction at Yucca to hold the rods. However, politics intervened and Nevada Senator Harry Reid was able to block the use of Yucca for storage. The President has appointed a blue ribbon commission to develop alternative storage plans.
In the meantime, the terrorism concern is high including the threat that a suicide bomber could crash a plan into the pools, possibly damaging the cooling processes and exposing the rods. By spreading the spent rods around the country, the defense against such a terrorist attack is that much more difficult to prevent.
What a mess. Inviting terrorism targets, no plan for alleviating the tight storage, politics playing a major role, and no plan in sight. Even if the commission comes up with a plan, do we think that the political class has the know how and courage to execute the plan, given their general failings everywhere else?
- And you thought the Federal deficit was a mess? In a fine article by Veronique de Rugy in the April, 2011 issue of Reason magazine, the state government pension mess is a doozy also. Ms. de Rugy does an excellent job comparing the rigor and rules that private pension funds have to adhere to in order to guarantee solvency vs. the lax and silly assumptions that state government pension plans live by.
Rather than going into the details here, the essence of the analysis states that private pension funds conservatively estimate that their funds will grow about 3.5% a year while state government pension funds wildly estimate that their funds will grow 8% a year. When the economy tanks, like it has the past few years, the government pension funds get nowhere close to an 8% return. This puts them perilously close to default.
The added complication they have is that there is no law that requires state politicians to make regular, actuarially sound contributions to the plans. Thus, they can short change the plans for their other wasteful spending programs and hope that the plans can attain unattainable returns to make up the shortfall in contributions.
As a result of bad assumptions and political robbery, the pensions funds are going broke. The article points to an analysis that shows the state government pension funds in at least ten states will run out of money within the next nine years, with five of them running out of money within six years. When that happens, the state either has to cut back or eliminate pension payments or raise taxes in order to retain the promised payouts. And these tax increases would be a fine mess since according to an analysis done by the American Enterprise Institute, the unfunded liabilities of all state government pension systems is about $3 TRILLION. This comes out to about $60 billion per state.
In a state like New Jersey, which is forecasted to run out of pension money in 2018, this means every household in the state will have to pay the state pension plans about $20,000 each in order to keep them solvent and the benefits at promised levels. What a disaster, imagine what a hit those state economies will take as the government continues to suck more and more disposable income out of the local state economy to pay for a pension mess they helped to create. Imagine the resentment that will build up as state government retirees are blamed for the increasingly heavy tax burden for pensions and the lack of money for schools, roads, and other government functions.
It has to be obvious now that our election processes and the candidates and victors they produce are not working. Nothing ever gets solved, it just gets pushed out until panic sets in and ill advised and inefficient solutions, if that, are thrown against the wall. Several steps from "Love my Country, Loathe My Government" would help to change these broken election processes:
- Step 6 would allow only individual Americans to contribute to election campaigns, taking the evil of corporate, union, PAC and other organizational money out of the equation. Once those funding sources are removed, politicians might start acting for the good of the country and not the good of their campaign coffers.
- Step 34 would remove politicians from Congressional committees if those committees make a mess out of their responsibilities. For example, if the spent fuel issue is not resolved shortly, those members of Congress sitting on the respective nuclear committees need to be replaced.
- Step 39 would institute term limits for all Federal politicians. If you have been in Congress for over 20 years, a period of which no major issue was resolved, then you are part of the problem since the solution does not exist yet.
While this is all going on, the President is in California to do some campaigning and fund raising for his 2012 Presidential campaign. Congress is in recess for the next few weeks. And a short blurb in The Week from April 22, 2011 cited a Harvard University study that found that 27% of all Congressional press releases are solely intended to make members of the other party look bad, not to address any important problem.
No need to solve problems as long as we make our political competitors look worse than us, we will eventually get around to those spent fuel rods, those bad air traffic control problems, and imploding pensions plans. Unless, of course, it messes up our re-election campaign.
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 http://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.com
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