The Latest Insanity, Disgraces, And Misbehavior From Our Political Class

Although I have been on the road and away from home the past two weeks, the insanity, disgraces, and misbehavior that is our political class continued unabated. It is difficult to keep up with their antics while traveling, there are so many of them. It is unbelievable that we allow these types of people and their actions to go on. Their actions are rarely conducive to problem solving and their lack of focus and ability often makes bad situations worse.

The first step in treating an illness is identifying the symptoms and causes. Thus, in no particular order, I bring you the latest maladies from the American political class:

- A May 25, 2011 Associated Press article reported that former North Carolina Senator and Presidential hopeful John Edwards will likely be indicted on criminal charges in the next few days by the Justice Department. This is a result of a two year investigation of whether Mr. Edwards illegally used campaign money from his political backers to cover up an extra martial affair. This affair took place while Edwards' wife was battling cancer and resulted in an out of wedlock child.

This affair has been disgraceful all along and now might turn criminal with jail time if the charges are proven in court against a man that was reasonably close to being named the Democratic party candidate for President. How is it that our political processes allowed this to almost happen?

- I recently came across a short blurb from the April 15, 2011 issue of The Week magazine that I have verified from other sources. It appears that President Obama had accepted an award in April for supporting government transparency, a major campaign goal of his. However, the presentation was done in secret in a private ceremony from which reporters and the public were barred from. Tough to figure this one out, quite insane. You campaign for government transparency, you get an award for government transparency, and then you  receive the award in secrecy. Go figure. I cannot provide anymore details because...it is a secret.

- A report published on May 24, 2011 on the Huffington Post reviewed the analysis and report done by four university researchers that tracked and analyzed the investments made by members of Congress over the past sixteen years. The researchers examined over 16,000 stock transactions made by various members of Congress during this time. Their findings included the following:

• House Of Representatives members enjoyed "significant positive abnormal returns," with their stock trades beating the general market performance by six percent annually.
• A similar study done on Senators by the same group of researchers five years ago found that the Senators' stock trading outperformed the market by 10%.
• The researchers found these measures to be "economically large and statistically significant."
• Democratic politicians do better at beating the market performance than Republicans by a wide margin.
• Newer members of Congress do better than more senior members of Congress, possibly because they need the money more and are willing to take the risk while as more senior members have already made their money from insider trading.

The researchers concluded that since members of Congress often have insider insights to legislation that may or may not influence the market and the stock price of companies in that market, they often have advantage of what a piece of legislation might influence and could possibly be using this unique position of power for personal gain.

Members Of Congress are not required to divest any stock holdings when the assume office, they can freely trade stocks while in office, and they do not have to disqualify themselves from voting on legislation that they may have a stock interest in. Attempts to reign these types of investment abuses have always been blocked. Thus, if you or I indulge in insider trading, we go to jail. If the political class indulges in insider trading, they just get higher stock investment returns than the rest of us outside of the political class. Disgraceful

- A New York Post report earlier this week reported that President Obama's political campaign personnel are digging into New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's background for scandal, dirt, and other information that the Obama campaign could use later on if Christie is a Presidential opponent.

Two problems with this scenario. First, Christie is adamant that he is not running for President and will continue to serve out at least his first term as New Jersey governor. Thus, why is the Obama operation so worried, do they fear him that much more as a political opponent than those Republicans that have already declared their intent to run? Maybe Christie should run if Obama is so concerned about what Christie brings to the Presidential table.

Second, and this is the big concern and disgrace, this feels like Richard Nixon and his slimy dirty tricks campaign all over again. For once, could our political class please run a campaign based on ideas, ideals, and plans and not mud, dirt, and hollow campaign themes?

 Is Obama that scared of 2012 that he needs to send out his minions to dig up dirt on someone who is not even running for the office? Insane. How about worrying about problems and issues in a campaign, the press will dig up whatever dirt there is to dig up. A disgraceful, Richard Nixon-like operation if there ever was one.

- Speaking of insanity, a recent article by Arthur Laffer of the Wall street Journal was summarized in the April 29, 2011 issue of The Week magazine. Mr. Laffer's analysis showed how inefficient our current tax system is:

• For every dollar an average taxpayer pays in Federal income taxes, an additional $.30 is spent on conforming to the ever growing tax code requirements.
• This jungle of tax regulations results in the country spending $431 billion annually just to stay in compliance with the tax code. Theoretically, reducing this burden by 50% would annually put about $1,800 back into every American household's pocketbook.
• The insanity of our tax code causes individuals and companies to take extra effort and make changes to how the run their business in order to comply and optimize their tax burden, efforts that might be better spent actually growing their businesses and thus, growing the economy.

Thus, our tax processes are expensive from a monetary perspective and distracting from a business operations perspective, a double dose of insanity. The complexity of the tax code also promotes misbehavior by those individuals and companies that try to leverage  the complexity of the system for their own benefit to the detriment of the rest of us.

- Several weeks ago, four U.S. Senators wrote a joint letter to Apple, Blackberry, and other smart phone manufacturers, strongly suggesting that these companies no longer provide apps for their smartphone users that identify likely police drunk driving checkpoints. At that time, we blogged that this really was a waste of political time, that the rising national debt, two foreign wars, failing public schools, leaky borders, and other major issues were more worthy of attention than a smartphone application or two.

Well, talk about insanity. A USA Today article from last week reported that sales of these apps have doubled since the Senators intervened. Seems that many smartphone users did not know about these apps until the Senators raised this minor issue, resulting in the exact opposite behavior the Senators desired. If the Senators could not foresee the likely unintended consequences actions of this relatively straightforward issue, do you really think that they understand the unintended consequences of the 2,000 page healthcare reform bill they passed? Not a chance.

- An April 29, 2011 article in The Week magazine reported on a U.S. Senate report that reviewed the causes of the Great Recession. The report concluded that just about everyone involved was to blame for the financial meltdown including mortgage banks, investment firms, ratings agencies, and Federal regulators. Of particular disgraceful behavior was the Federal Office Of Thrift Supervision. This Federal agency allowed Washington Mutual to become the largest bank to ever fail in the country's history even though it had cited the bank for over 500 "serious deficiencies" over a five year period.

The main disgrace in this area, as pointed in the report, is that a needed criminal investigation was never undertaken. I believe that very few of the main characters in the guilty entities above ever suffered jail time, fines, or the loss of jobs, both inside and outside of government. Thus, misbehavior without any consequences, a sure formula for crisis.

- If the city government of San Francisco is like most other U.S. governing bodies, I would assume they have a lot on their plate. Given the dire economic circumstances of the state government in California, I would bet that the San Francisco local government is facing revenue shortfalls, high government employee pension and health care costs, reduction of city government services, ineffective schools, etc. Serious, serious challenges.

However, according to an Associated Press May 18, 2011 article, the local government has worked on and has cleared a voter referendum proposal that would outlaw the circumcision of male children within the borders of San Francisco. They have nothing better to do on the ruling body than work on this issue, assuming it is an issue, while budgets and schools continue to suffer. The article points out that this proposal could easily be viewed as an intrusion to the personal and religious life of families and more importantly, if passed, it's implementation would almost immediately be delayed for years while court cases were heard.

Thus, why do it now? Wouldn't the sane thing be to work on some of the dire immediate threats to its citizens and not worry about overreaching government intrusion into our lives that would take years and years to implement, assuming it passed AND survived court cases? Insane from a logic perspective, a disgrace from a liberty perspective, and serious misbehavior when other, more pressing issues exist.

- Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Enough said relative to insanity, disgrace, and misbehavior.

There you have it. A small sampling of the types of people continually elected to office.  Wouldn't it be nice to occasionally talk about sanity, honor, and integrity when it comes to our politicians rather than the exact opposite? Not going to happen until we change our political processes including the implementation of term limits, the removal of institutional money from election campaigns, and we start demanding sanity, honor, and integrity from those that are supposed to be serving us, not themselves.





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