Unfortunately, the rate of the idiocy and insanity has been accelerating over the past several months. I do not know if that is because it is an election year or the quality of our political class continues to deteriorate. Regardless of the cause, it will again take us two posts in this blog, today and tomorrow, to cover all of the latest insanity.
As you read through the latest insanity, take a moment to realize what our current political processes and current politicians have done to this country. We are on the edge of national bankruptcy. Our politicians spend time, money, and resources on very bad priorities. The major issues of our times, failing public schools, a lost war on drugs, leaky borders, escalating health care costs, etc., never get resolved and continue to fester and worsen. The political discourse is venomous, divisive, and mean spirited, encouraged by incumbent politicians in order to "energize their base" to protect their incumbencies.
Keep all of these things in mind as you read the following and ask yourself: are we really going in a positive direction as a country as determined by our current politicians? I think you will agree that this is a false statement.
Let's start with latest insanity as documented in the latest editions of Reason magazine:
- In New York City, Marilyn Louie had successfully operated her newsstand in the same Chinatown location for the past 35 years. Being business for 35 years would indicate that she ran a successful business that served a consumer need in the marketplace. However, city officials, the field force of the political class, determined that the newsstand is THREE INCHES too close to the building it has faced for 35 years and as a result, has to be torn down.
How insane is this? For 35 years the three inch violation obviously had no detrimental effects on any other business of customer. Ms. Louie was a successful businesswoman and a net positive contributor to society. But for three inches, the work of a lifetime is destroyed by the government for no reason. One would have hoped that the city's officials would worry about the many other problems in a city as large as NYC rather than hassle a citizen for no reason. But hope is very often too much to expect from our political class.
- Staying in New York City, the second example of insanity makes you start wondering if the city has too many employees on its payroll with too little to do. NYC resident Raymond Johnson was given a $100 citation from a city worker because, gasp, Mr. Johnson had put out his garbage 33 minutes before the 4:00 pm time he was supposed to.
According to the article, Mr. Johnson was not the only local resident in Queens to be so cited. Apparently, NYC's Sanitation Department has a full time person/people who make sure that this egregious act of garbage putting out is not abused. Maybe a better solution is to go a little lighter on the time frame and get rid of the expense of the enforcement personnel of what is an arbitrary rule.
- Readers of this blog know that we consider President Obama's $830 billion economic stimulus program to have been a disastrous waste of money. It was spent on foolish projects and programs that benefited only incumbent politicians, it was spent to repair infrastructure of which only half of the repairs were needed according to following analyses by independent sources, and was allocated to a slew of domestic alternative energy companies that have either gone bankrupt or are still not viable businesses.
Even the administration indirectly admitted the stimulus program did not work. The President declared that if his stimulus program was not passed, unemployment could go as high as 8%. The stimulus was passed and implemented and unemployment went significantly higher than 8% and has not yet returned to 8%.
Now, according to Reason magazine, professor and economist Valerie Ramery has conclusive and comprehensive proof that the program was a waste of $830 billion, or the equivalent of about $7,200 for every U.S. household. Ms. Ramery did an extensive review of everyone else's analyses of the stimulus and analyzed Federal government spending patterns since World War II.
Her conclusion? "An increase in government spending never leads to a significant rise in private spending. In fact, in most cases, it leads to a significant fall [in private spending]." She concluded, based on her work, that the so-called multiplier effect, how much each dollar of government spending results in additional economic activity, was in all likelihood less than 1 for Obama's stimulus.
In other words, for every $1 the Federal government spent, less than $1 in economic activity was created, resulted in a contraction in the economy and an expansion in government debt. Great strategy, spend more for less economic growth while increasing our now $15 TRILLION debt without much affecting the unemployment rate. How much more insane and idiotic can you get?
- Seems like even those that work within the Jabba the Hutt-like Federal government, overweight, parasitic, and ineffective, have problems with the disaster our political landscape has become. U.S. Senator Tom Colburn, speaking to reporters about not voting on a payroll tax cut unless its fully paid for: "I can show you $350 billion worth of waste or fraud in our present Federal government, and we don't have the gonads to stand up and find some of that to pay for this."
That was one of the more colorful descriptions of how much money our Federal government and politicians waste every year, Mr. Senator! The insanity is why don't the five hundred of so people in Congress grow a set and actually do their job to go after the $350 billion lost to waste and criminal fraud every year?
- If you like the Senator's colorful description of ineptness in Washington, you will love some recent words from Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense: "I've been in [Congressional] hearings for the last three days. S***, I think I should get some kind of award going through that c***, I need a new combat badge going to Capitol Hill."
Mr. Panetta used the full words that I have "*"ed out above. We would agree with him, a lot of s*** and c*** goes on in Washington, some of it to the tune of wasting $350 billion a year, according to Senator Coburn, but nothing ever gets done to take out the s*** and c*** from the process.
- At a time when we should be making it as simple as possible for businesses to grow, be profitable, and hire more workers, given our high unemployment rate, the Federal government has taken just the opposite approach, generating many more regulations, all of which make it tougher to operate a business in this country.
According to an article in the Reason magazine from, April, 2012, new Federal regulations have added almost $40 billion to the cost of the economy since Obama became President. This is equivalent to almost $400 for every American family. The White House Office Of Information and Regulatory Affairs reports that 2010 alone broke records with $26.5 billion in new costs.
And it is likely to get worse since there are 144 major new regulations already in the pipeline that have not yet hit, according to Federal regulators. The average annual number of new regulations from 2001 through 2006 was 70 regulations a year, less than half of what the Obama administration is turning out. Rather make it easy for businesses to do business, this administration wants to make it harder. No wonder our unemployment rate stays at insanely high levels.
But Reason magazine is not the only source of political class insanity. Consider some recent instances of insanity from The Week magazine:
- Last month Vice President Joe Biden's office released a schedule of the VP's appearances, showing him visiting Providence, Road Island. Is this another indictment of our failing public education system when the Vice President's office does not know how to spell a state's name or an indictment of the incompetence in Washington that they allow the press release to go out without proofreading it first? Can you imagine the uproar from the Left if Bush or Cheney's office had done the same thing?
- The Week reported in its April 20, 2012 issue that the Brazilian government is worried about the growing obesity problem in that country since nearly half of all Brazilians are now overweight or obese. In just the past five years the rate of being overweight and obesity has grown from 43% to 49%.
The government is increasing its efforts to encourage people to eat healthier and exercise more, the public health strategies this country should be undertaking to decrease our high health costs rather than rolling out a doomed Obama Care program. Why is the Brazilian government undertaking these public health initiatives? According to a spokesperson for the Health Ministry: "Now is the time to act [on obesity] to ensure we don't reach the levels of countries like the United States."
Guess that makes it official. We are now the world's poster child for obesity and our political class would rather address the problem with a new, costly, and likely failure of a bureaucracy called Obama Care rather than take the simpler, saner route of identifying and addressing the public health root causes of our high health care problems.
- In the past ten years, there have been 4,428 changes to the Federal tax code, This comes out to more than one change per day over a ten year period. As a result of the tax code's insanity and complexity, Americans now spend a total of 7.64 billion hours a year working on tax-related issues and paperwork.
To put this number in perspective, 7.64 billion hours is more than twice the number of hours spent every year by elementary school teachers in every school in the country. Imagine how much smarter and better our kids' education would be if we could divert billions of hours away from filling out tax forms and put it towards educating our kids?
What type of insanity makes us spend twice as much time and resources complying with the incredibly complex, cumbersome, confusing, and ineffective tax code the political class has bestowed on us than teaching elementary school kids? One way to eliminate this idiocy was laid out in the following post:
http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/02/united-states-of-purple-fixing-our.html
It is not hard to do if you have some politicians with some common sense and a little courage, as the above link points out. 7.64 billion hours is the epitome of insanity.
- One last piece of political class insanity today that comes from a Business Week article in the April 9, 2012 issue and is related to this issue of tax code insanity. Joel Stein, the writer of the article, "Taxation With Lots of Representation," took all of his tax information and had his incomes tax return competed by four different sources:
- Tax Slayer - a computer based tax return software program which cost Stein $30.
- H&R Block which charged him $400 to complete his tax returns.
- Halbreich Accounting and Tax Services in Staten Island which charged him $400 to complete his returns.
- RBZ in Los Angeles which charged him $1,200 to complete his tax returns.
What were the end results? Taxslayer calculated that Stein would get a refund of $119,554 form the Feds and the state of California, H&R Block calculated that he would OWE a total of $2,387 to the Feds and the state, Halbreich estimated he would get total refund of $479, and RBZ estimated he would owe a total of $4,544 to the Feds and California. Four different approaches, all using the exact same information, four radically different answers.
You know the tax code is insanely complex and ridiculously confusing when the potential "correct" tax return calculations range from a refund to $119,554 to owing $4,544. In other words, depending on which tax calculation you use, you are either going to owe some money or go to jail for gross misfiling of your tax return.
This is the world we live in today, thanks to our political class. Unduly confusing, complex, inefficient, ineffective, and just plain stupid. And guess what? We are only half way through the idiocy that rains down us on every day from Washington and state capitals around the country. The second half of this month's political class insanity will be coming your way tomorrow.
We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, "The United States Of Purple," at:
http://www.unitedstatesofpurple.com/
The United States of Purple is a new grass roots approach to filling the office of President of The United States by focusing on the restoration of freedom in the United States, focusing on problem solving skills and results vs. personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just one United States Of America under the banner of Purple.
The United States Of Purple's website also provides you the formal opportunity to sign a petition to begin the process of implementing a Constitutional amendment to impose fixed term limits on all Federally elected politicians. Only by turning out the existing political class can we have a chance of addressing and finally resolving the major issues of or times.
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/
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