November, 2012 Political Class Insanity, Part 2: Regulation Nation, The Continuining Lost War On Drugs, and More

Yesterday, we covered the first set of political class insanity acts from over the past month or so. These acts included the disgraceful under defending of our consulate in Libya which resulted in the death of four innocent Americans, the Ohio bridge to nowhere, various TSA insults to the American taxpayer and other acts of idiocy.

Let’s take a look at some more of the latest insanity with the following political class actions:

1) Through its welfare program, the Federal government provides free cell phones to people that supposedly are down on their luck and on the welfare rolls. This program of freebies is supported by non-welfare Americans, paying additional fees and taxes on their telephone services bills.

A Mexican telecommunications mogul, Carlos Slim, who has an estimated net worth of $70 billion, which makes him the richest person in the world, is the majority owner of the company called TracFone. TracFone makes $10 per phone for each phone that is distributed to poor Americans. The company‘s president and CEO is Frederick Pollak.

The company, which is the major supplier of phones through this welfare benefit, also makes money from extra minutes and data plans it sells to subscribers who get phones and service through the government's free cell phone program. It is estimated that the company has picked up almost four million subscribers as a result of this partnership with the Obama administration.

Who is Mr. Pollack? Let’s see:

• Pollak has donated at least $156,500 to Democratic candidates and committees this election cycle.
• Included in these donations is at least $50,000 given directly to the Obama campaign.
• His wife, Abigail, is a campaign bundler for Obama and has raised more than $632,000 for the President’s reelection efforts.
• She has raised more than $1.5 million since 2007.
• She has personally contributed more than $200,000 to Democratic candidates and committees since 2008.
• The Pollaks hosted the President at their Miami Beach home this summer for a $40,000 a plate fund raising event.
• They also hosted another event with Michelle Obama back in the summer of 2008.
• Together the couple donated $66,200 to Obama’s campaign that year.

As we have discussed many times in this blog, this administration, more than any other in recent memory, has raised the level and quantity of crony capitalism to the highest possible disgrace. Just about every one of this administration’s alternative energy programs involved giving loans and outright grants of taxpayer wealth to companies that had been major political friends of the President and the Democrats, regardless of the merits of their companies. Since most of these companies have already gone bankrupt or out of business, it has been a disgraceful waste of taxpayer money.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that this Presidential administration is rewarding its political cronies outside of the alternative energy realm, this time in the telecommunications world, all at the expense of the taxpayer.

2) The Atlantic Wire website had an interesting article posted on it on October 12, 2012. The article discussed our continually losing war on drugs using data that was used to produce a chart used in the documentary, “The 1315 Project.“ The documentary was produced by filmmaker Matt Groff. The sources of the chart are the rate of addiction to drugs from the U.S. Department Of Health and Human Services, the total Federal government drug war budget numbers from the International Center for Science In Drug Policy, and prison costs and anti-drug costs from state governments as estimated by the office of National Drug Control policy.

When Mr. Groff put all these numbers together, numbers from non-partisan, expert organizations, he found that from 1970 to 2010 the rate of addiction of Americans was unchanged, remaining constant at around 1.3%. During that time, our societal cost in the losing war on drugs was about $1.5 TRILLION, according to Groff’s data compilation. Talk about a futile waste of taxpayer money. No change in the addiction rate, a wasted $1.5 TRILLION change in our wealth.

The actual chart can be viewed at:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2012/10/chart-says-war-drugs-isnt-working/57913/#.UIQQnzsrADA.facebook

3) Reuters reported on September 18, 2012 that:

• The dollar volume of U.S. home lending (mortgages, refinancing and home improvement loans) dropped 10 percent 2011 despite us being two years out of the recession.
• This is the lowest lending levels for homes since 1995.
• The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, a group of U.S. regulators, estimated in September that 7.1 million home loans were made in 2011, down from 7.9 million the previous year.
• Refinancing of home loans dropped 13 percent during the 2011, while new mortgages dropped 5 percent, the FFIEC said in a statement.

Thus, although there may have been some small improvements in the housing industry in the past month or so, it is pretty obvious that all of the political class efforts to fix what ails the American housing industry has been a failure since three years after the recession ended, the housing industry is still a basket case.

This should come as no surprise, this inability to fix the problem. It was the work and incompetence of the political class and the Federal government that caused the housing mess in the first place.

4) In mid-September, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released its analysis of the regulatory burden placed on American businesses and American households by the Federal government. Their analyses were not pretty:

• Over the past three years, the bound edition of the Code of Federal Regulations, the government’s bible of every regulation it issues, has increased by 11,327 pages.
• This is a 7.4% increase from Jan. 1, 2009 to Dec. 31, 2011
• Just in 2009 alone, the increase in the number of pages was the most over the last decade = 5,359 pages.
• Over the past ten years, the Federal government has issued almost 38,000 new final rules, according to the draft of the 2011 annual report to Congress on Federal regulations by the Office of Management and Budget.
• This ridiculous rate of introducing new regulations is over ten new regulations EVERY DAY, 365 days a year, for ten years.
• The total number of Federal regulations now takes up 169,301 pages.
• That is more than double the number of pages needed to publish the Federal regulations back in 1975 when the bound edition consisted of 71,244 pages.

Economists with the Chamber also analyzed the OBM’s report on the study, calculating that if every U.S. household paid an equal share of the Federal regulatory burden, it would mean a $15,586 tab for each household in 2008.

At over 165,000 pages of regulations, on has to imagine:

1. Does anyone really know the cost/benefit analysis of all these regulations?
2. Are any/most of these regulations needed or are they just the manifestation of a too large Federal bureaucracy trying to prove it has a right to exist?
3. Seem like back in 1975 we got along quite nicely with 50% fewer regulations, why do we need so many today?

How easy is it just ignore these massive, burdensome regulations that may be just to large and cumbersome to comply with, raising the question that if no one knows about the regulations and no one complies with the regulations, what good are the regulations?

Whatever the case, 165,000 pages of regulations is truly government out of control insanity.

5) Why does it seem we cannot go even a week without stumbling across another alternative energy/green jobs screw up by the Federal government” The latest snafu comes to us this week courtesy of a report from the Labor Department’s Inspector General. The report found that:

• President Obama’s green jobs training program, which was part of his stimulus, has failed on most key jobs measures.
• The report concluded that this green jobs training program was training workers who already had jobs that didn’t need green energy skills, and was failing to place new enrollees in jobs once they finished the training
• The Inspector General’s investigation also said companies and organizations who received the green jobs-training money did a poor job of reporting their results.
• Only 38% of those who completed training got jobs based on their new training, and only 16% still had those jobs six months later, a key measure of success/failure of the program.
• “Outcomes for participants were far less than originally proposed,” the auditors said, making one wonder if the $400 million budgeted cost for the green jobs training programs, of which $328.5 million has been spent, was really worth the effort.
• Of those workers who already had energy-sector jobs, the auditors said they were retrained, even though they didn’t need it: “We found no evidence that the incumbent workers in our sample required services or training to keep their job or obtain a new one.”

Great program: training people who did not need the training, low placement and retention rates after the training, and bad tracking procedures implemented by those that were responsible for the program. Sounds about right for a wasteful government program.

That should do it for now but not for the month. We will wrap up the latest insanity from the political class with the final, third part of this month’s version of politicians and the government they operate acting badly.

Please give a thought to what our Washington politicians are doing to our wealth and democracy next month when you get a chance to vote the incumbents out of office and start anew with a set of people in office that probably cannot do any worse than what we have now.

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.

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http://www.cato.org/
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http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment/