1) According to a short blurb in the May 14, 2012 issue of Business Week magazine, in the first quarter of 1982, about 65% of all American homes were owned, not rented, in America. In the next thirty years, the American political class rolled out expensive program after expensive program to get that home ownership rate higher, regardless of the credit and debt risks.
Their actions resulted in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac needing close to $200 billion (and growing) worth of taxpayer wealth to bailout these government mortgage entities, massive bailouts of banks who lent the money to increase home ownership levels, and the Great Recession that devastated the economy and the lives of millions of American families.
According to the Business Week analysis, as of the first quarter of 2012, thirty years later, the home ownership rate in America is....65%. In other words, the decades' long effort of our political class to increase home ownership is right back to where it was in 1982. Unfortunately, in order to get nowhere in thirty years, trillions of dollars of taxpayer and home owner wealth was destroyed to get nowhere.
2) According to an article that appeared in Politico earlier this summer, although the Dodd-Frank financial reform law was passed over two years ago, only about 37% of the required regulations outlined in the law have actually been written by their deadlines. At this rate, it will take almost six years to write the regulations that support the intentions of the legislation.
In six years, the whole world of both finance and politics could change drastically, making one wonder why the law was even passed at all if its effects will not be felt for a very long time. In the real world, such incompetency would be dealt with by firing those for not doing their job in a timely manner. In Washington, this laxity and laziness is just business as usual.
3) A Wall Street Journal article that was summarized in the July 6, 2012 issue of The Week magazine reported that more than 3.5 million Americans, aged between 45 and 64, were unemployed as of the end of May, three years after the recession supposedly ended. The Journal called this reality “an unprecedented rate of long term unemployment rate for workers in their prime working years.” Thus, despite what our President might believe, the private sector is not doing “just fine” for this group of experienced American workers.
4) As I understand it, the Federal Reserve Board has been buying trillions of dollars worth of bank assets, via its so-called “quantitative easing” strategy, in order to get more cash into the hands of the banks who might then loan this new found cash to businesses and consumers to spur the economy. Besides being a fancy name for “printing money,” the strategy does not appear to be working.
According to an article in the August 27, 2012 issue of Business Week, these banks now have about $1.7 TRILLION more in deposits than they have out in loans. This gap is the largest it has been in two years and is continuing to get larger and larger as the banks take this new found cash and use it for their own investments rather than investing it in the economy.
Thus, the American taxpayer via the Federal Reserve, is pumping wealth into the banks in this country so that they can speculate and invest it for their bottom line and profits, not for the economy. As always, the taxpayer gets screwed, the banks get rich, and the politicians get more campaign cash for the reelection from the bankers.
5) Recall that the Federal government’s General Services Administration (GSA) was busted for spending $832,000 worth of taxpayer money on a self serving Las Vegas party for themselves. Fortunately, the wasteful spending was uncovered by the Inspector General, Congress got involved, and many of those responsible for the waste were fired.
However, according to a recent Associated Press report, it may be that many employees in the GSA did not get the message that illegal activities are not to be pursued. The article reported on an alleged scam where the GSA promised to give a Federal tax break to building contractors it might hire in exchange for the contractors writing a check, payable to the GSA, for 19% of the tax break’s value.
In many areas of the real world, this is called a kickback and is almost always illegal. It appears that GSA managers are trying to get their own GSA budgets augmented via this kickback scheme and bypassing, to some extent, the need to go before Congress and the regular government budget setting processes. Obviously, the American taxpayer loses here when any government bureaucrat can hand out tax breaks in order to enhance their own operating environment. Disgraceful.
6) According to some recent research from the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who consider themselves lower class has grown from about 25% of the population four years ago to just under one third of the population today. Since four years ago, we have supposedly been in an economic recovery mode for three of those four years, but the perception of lower class has grown by about 33%. So much for the private sector doing “just fine,” at least from a self perception perspective.
7) From a George Orwell “1984” perception, consider an article from the July 27, 2012 issue of The Week magazine. Apparently, the FDA was being operated so poorly and incompetently that many FDA employees were blowing the whistle on the bad behavior, informing Congressmen, lawyers, and other officials of what was actually going on within the FDA.
Rather than fix the problems, FDA management decided to go after the whistle blowers. According to the article, the FDA setup a surveillance program to find out who in their organization was snitching. Their program resulted in the capture of over 80,000 FDA employee emails in an attempt to root out the whistle blowers rather than solve the problems. U.S. Senator Charles Grassley was properly outraged by the FDA actions, saying that “the FDA is discouraging whistle blowers,” and “they think they can be the Gestapo and do anything they want.”
If the government spies on itself rather than fixing its own problems, there is little doubt it would spy on its own citizens rather than fix its own problems.
8) I guess we should not be to discouraged by the incompetency and greed of our politicians since political class insanity and idiocy is not restricted to the U.S. The September 7, 2012 issue of The Week magazine showed such insanity from around the world.
In Russia, political opposition leaders to Russian President Vladimir Putin claim that the President is spending mega bucks on outrageously lavish palaces, yachts, and jets, many of which he has for his own personal use. To get to and from his palaces, coastal homes, and luxury ski lodges, he can choose from his fleet of 13 helicopters, four yachts, and 41 airplanes, one of which has gold plated bathroom fixtures. Lenin and Marx must be turning over in their graves.
In Taiwan, the government has started a campaign to encourage men to sit down in public restrooms rather than stand in front of a urinal to relieve themselves. The official reason for the taxpayer funded effort is to produce less of a mess in restrooms. You cannot make this stuff up when it comes to politicians and wasteful spending. I find it hard to believe that there are not better uses for these government funds than to change the urinal habits of Taiwan’s male citizens.
That is enough for today. The insanity and idiocy will continue tomorrow, as will the continued wasteful spending of politicians everywhere.
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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 our times.
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Please visit the following sites for freedom:
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http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment
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