As always, Reason magazine is a fantastic resource for those interested in freedom and liberty, providing insightful and in-depth analyses relative to the great issues of our times and our continual erosion of freedom.
The first three situations are from the August issue of Reason magazine:
- The state of Florida is working on legislation so that people working in 20 occupations would no longer have to get a license from the state of Florida. One of those occupations is interior decorating. However, during the legislative discussion of the issue, the interior design lobby testified that the state "regulations are necessary to protect public safety." Huh? Without government regulation of the interior decorating industry, we could be in danger?
It gets better. A professor, testifying on behalf of the Miami Dade College's School of Architecture and Interior Design, told a legislative committee that by removing the licensing requirement what "you're basically doing is contributing to 88,000 deaths every year." However, the state attorney general investigated the claim and concluded that having an unregulated interior design industry would not endanger the public.
The good news: the Florida political class is finally doing something to downsize the unnecessary bureaucracy of government. The bad news is that these kinds of taxpayer waste probably exist everywhere across the country, wasting taxpayer money and slowing down commerce. Government bureaucrats overseeing private sector activities that need no oversight. Better to let interior decorators and other such non-lethal industries police themselves, let the free market decide who is a worthwhile company to do business with, and bank the savings of taxpayer money.
- A little bit of hypocrisy from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. As many of you know, Congressman Paul Ryan has put forth a coherent approach to getting out of control Medicare spending under control. It would involve allowing Americans under the age of 55 to get a tax deduction for buying health care insurance vouchers as a replacement for Medicare. The strategy is that if someone has control and responsibility for their health care expenses under this voucher program, they will be much more cost efficient than the government's totally inefficient Medicare bureaucracy.
This is necessary since Medicare costs are already over $500 billion a year and are likely to rise to over a TRILLION dollars a year within three to four years. Something has to be done to get Medicare spending under control and Ryan's plan is the best alternative to Medicare's current trend towards financial suicide.
However, the Secretary obviously has no understanding of the situation, given her recent quote that appeared in Reason: "If you run out of the government voucher and then run out of your own money, you're left to scrape together charity care, go without care, die sooner."
Talk about demagoguery. Ms. Sebelius takes a swipe at Ryan's plan as if there is nothing wrong with Medicare. The same thing is going to happen to Sebelius' beloved Medicare as usual, we cannot afford to keep the program intact as it is. Thus, the hypocrisy. She blasts Ryan's plan without giving an viable alternative, and status quo is not a viable alternative. It will eventually break the country financially and people will die sooner anyway.
- We have often discussed how bad the financials are for all levels of government in California. Some of the reasons include the reality that some California lifeguards earn over $200,000 a year in wages and the AVERAGE employee salary for San Francisco's local train system is $114,000. Now Reason magazine provides another reason that California is so bad off.
The California city of Montebello is in serious financial trouble. The city desperately needs a bridge loan in order to not default on a $126 million bond debt due at the end of 2011. It's general budget is only $46 million. It gave it's own redevelopment agency $17 million that is unlikely to be paid back. The state controller ordered an investigation because of poor financial record keeping.
What was one of the first issues the investigation found? The city apparently had given a politically connected real estate developer $1 million in 1999 to fund the development of a Latin-themed chain of restaurants in the Montebello area. The chain of restaurants never materialized and the developer just ended up opening an Applebee's instead.
Why taxpayer money, $1 million, was given to a private firm to build some restaurants defies explanation. The bigger question is how many other handouts did the Monetebello political class give out over the years that have not yet been identified but still continue to contribute to the city's financial distress.
- The Week magazine reported in its July 1, 2011 issue that even though dishonored ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner was in Congress for 14 years and sponsored 191 legislative bills, none of the 191 bills ever became law. This comes out to an average of over one bill a month over 14 years without one success.
In any other line of business, going 0 for 191 probably gets you fired. In politics, this level of failure gets you elected seven times. Any wonder why we are in such dire straits in this country? Being unsuccessful in politics has no bearing on whether you get elected...and elected... and elected...
- A few days ago we talked about the uncaring and incompetence that continues to emulate out of the TSA, the government agency responsible for insuring our airline safety. That post covered the incident where TSA employees made a cancer stricken, 95 year old grandmother get out of her wheel chair and adult diaper before allowing her to get to her flight. Pathetic government intrusion.
But at least the TSA kept us safe from the 95 year old, cancer stricken, grandmother terror cells. However, a CNN report from June 30, 2011 reported that a U.S. citizen from Nigeria somehow got through TSA security checkpoints and got onto a New York to Los Angeles commercial airline flight without a valid boarding pass and was not listed on the flight's manifest. Not only did he complete the flight but he was able to walk away from the landing in LA even though the flight crew was suspicious.
However, police finally arrested him when he tried to fraudulently get onto another commercial flight bound from LA to Atlanta. They found that he was in possession of ten bogus boarding passes. He was lucky: he was a male, was not 95 years old (he is 24), and not in a wheel chair. Otherwise, TSA would have been all over him on that first flight. Feel safe now?
- Several weeks ago, the St. Petersburg Time carried an article that covered a Congressional trip to Iraq. During the trip, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher suggested to Iraqi authorities that at some point in time, Iraq pay back some of the expenses the United States incurred overthrowing Saddam Hussein and allowing the current set of Iraqi politicians to have their current government positions. The Congressman did not say the payments had to start immediately. He just suggested that at some point in the the unspecified future, once Iraq was stable, that some form of payments be made.
The Iraqi government immediately responded that "Iraq would pay not a cent." Thanks for nothing. The mere suggestion of maybe paying us for freeing the Iraqi citizens from one of the worst despots of our time gets this kind of rebuke. Plus, it also resulted in the Iraqi government asking the Congressional delegation to leave the country immediately. Maybe the Congressional delegation should have taken our 50,000 troops with them when they left so that the American taxpayer "would not pay a cent" more supporting this TRILLION dollar disaster any more.
As always, you cannot make up this stuff when it comes to the political class. Unfortunately, their antics and insanity are not made up. They are real: real money wasted, real troops killed without gratitude, taxpayer money given away, a TSA that cannot keep undocumented people off of planes. It seems to never end. And next month, it will happen all over again.
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.loathemygovernment.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment.com
No comments:
Post a Comment