1) The Bankrupting America website, citing a recent Wall Street Journal article, explained the dire financial situation the state of Illinois finds itself in:
- A recent analysis and announcement from the Commercial Club of Chicago concluded that the Illinois’s state pension crisis has grown so severe that it may be “unfixable.”
- The analysis estimated that the state’s nearly $200 billion debt is now threatening health care, education, and other basic public services.
- The problem appears to be getting so bad so quickly that the usual, incremental reforms won’t be enough to keep public pensions from eating up a larger and larger share of state tax revenues.
- Illinois’s state pension liabilities for 2013 are expected to be $5.9 billion, up from $1.6 billion a decade ago.
2) But the state of Illinois is not the only government entity in Illinois in really sad financial shape. Consider an article by Scott Shacklefor of Reason magazine that was posted on the Reason website in early August:
- Somehow, the Chicago city employee workforce has gotten substantially smaller over the years but the cost of that smaller workforce has gotten higher!
- In 1993, the city had 42,400 full time equivalent positions (FTEs) in 1993 but downsized that number to fewer than 33,800 FTEs in 2012.
- At the same time, the cost per-employee skyrocketed from $58,299 in 2003 to $96,082 in 2011.
- Thus, while the city cut its workforce by about 20 percent, per-employee costs have gone up by better than half.
- Put all these numbers together and you find that labor costs for Chicago as a whole went up by 14%.
- Things are now so bad that by the city’s own estimation, almost three quarters of city expenditures over the last nine years have been eaten up by personnel expenses.
- Such financial costs leave less and less city financial resources available for schools, road, bridges, social programs, etc.
- And not only are current operating costs in such bad shape, but the liabilities and expected costs of promised pension and retirement benefits are even in worse shape: the firefighter and police pensions have only 26% and 33%, respectively, of the assets they should have available to cover future liability costs, the city’s largest pension fund, which covers most city employees (outside of public safety) as well as some non-instructional public school employees, has only about 41% of the assets it will need to be certain of paying benefits on time while other city pension funds are in comparably bad financial shape.
- According to the budget math, the city needs to increase its pension contributions from $476 million this year to $1.2 billion in 2015, leaving even less resources for schools, roads, bridges, social programs etc.
3) Still quite unbelievable and insane that any entity can cut its personnel staff by 20% but see its cost for a much smaller personnel staff actually go up in total. But not unheard of. Consider a piece of political class insanity we talked about back in 2010:
According to an October 12, 2010 New York Times article by David Brooks, that appeared in the St. Petersburg Times, the city of Buffalo has as many public government workers today as it had in 1950 even though the city has lost half of its population since then. Combine this ridiculous situation with the fact that computers, cell phones, and other pieces of technology have made working much more efficient and productive since 1950, and you can see that Buffalo has lost far more than 50% in productivity from its government workers in the past 60 years.
4) In the depths of the Great Recession, a week after President Obama was elected in Nov ember, 2009, the Gallup organization surveyed a representative sample of Americans, asking the following question: "Do you think the country will be better off or worse off four years from now?"
In 2009, 72% felt the country would be better off, 20% said it would be worse off, 4% said it would be the same, and 4% said they had no opinion.
Four years later, a week after President Obama was reelected and three years after the recession ended, Gallup asked another sample of American adults the same question. This year’s survey found only 54% of those surveyed feeling the country would be better off in four years, while 41% said they believed it would be worse off, 3% said it would be the same, and 2% said they had no opinion.
Thus, despite being three years away from the end of the recession, the political class and its lack of leadership has caused the pessimism level about the future of America to double in just four years.
5) The fiscal cliff. 23 million Americans unemployed or under employed. National debt above $16.3 TRILLION. A never ending, no win war in Afghanistan. Personal freedom being stripped away by the Patriot Act, NDAA, surveillance drones overhead, FISA, etc. A never ending, no win “war on drugs.” Times are tough but according to a November 30, 2012 Associated Press article, what are many members of Congress worrying about via proposed legislation and the Congressional hearings behind the proposed legislation?
Apparently, in another outrageous example of bad priorities, Congress is working on legislation that would eliminate the paper one dollar bill and replace it with a one dollar coin. Of all the things they could be working on, things that cost the American taxpayer literally of trillions of dollars, some politicians in Washington are actually working on this dollar bill issue (or non-issue). Talk about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, as the country sinks further into the fiscal doom these folks are weighing the pros and cons of the paper one dollar bill. Pathetic.
6) The fiscal cliff. 23 million Americans unemployed or under employed. National debt above $16.2 TRILLION. A never ending, no win war in Afghanistan. Personal freedom being stripped away by the Patriot Act, NDAA, surveillance drones overhead, FISA, etc. A never ending, no win “war on drugs.” Times are tough but according to a recent article in the Hawaii Reporter, President Obama and his family will be in beautiful, sunny Hawaii, taking in a 20-day Christmas holiday vacation.
This Presidential vacation will cost the American taxpayer $4 million. Of particular irony, when the country potentially goes over the fiscal cliff on January 1, 2013, the President will be thousands of miles away from the decision center in Washington D.C., still on vacation.
Details of the excursion include the following:
- The President and his family will be not be staying at any discount accommodations, they will be by the ocean and canal that surrounds multi-million dollar homes at Kailuana Place.
- The $4 million will be spent at a time when the country is wrestling with dire economic deficit spending problems, i.e. the government spends way too much money that it does not have.
- Almost a half-million dollars will be spent on C-17 military aircraft transports for limos, a Navy SEAL mobile security detail, a U.S. Marines helicopter with associated crews and pilots.
- The rental houses for the Presidential family face the ocean in the front and a canal in the back. So, the taxpayers must cover the costs for housing U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Coast Guard and Navy Seals in very expensive beach front and canal front homes around where the President stays.
- This is likely to be seven high end homes for three weeks for a total cost, just for security personnel housing, of over $176,000.
Heartless, insensitive vacation planning, more wasteful spending, and certainly a continued lack of leadership from this President… or Prince.
7) Even when the government has a good idea or intention, they almost always cannot operationalize it to meet the original intent or the original cost. According to a recent Washington Post article that appeared in the November 30, 2012 issue of The Week magazine, there are Federal guidelines that direct certain government contracts to be awarded to small businesses.
However, it appears that these “small business” contracts are ending up being given to large corporations instead. In the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2012, about $4.7 billion of the Federally designated small business funding, out of the total $10 billion budget, was actually given to the country’s major corporations instead. Missed that target by only 47%, which for government work is no all that bad.
8) And for the best example from the past month of “we have fallen down a rabbit hole into another reality” insanity, a Washington Examiner article from November 29, 2012 reported on a total wasting of $100,000 of taxpayer wealth. According to the article, the Obama administration is funding a $100,000 University of Houston study of pregnant and "at-risk" 14-17-year-old girls who are on probation in Houston, Texas. The purpose of the study is to help these girls' "condom negotiation" tactics.
The study will include 30 at-risk girls, ages 14-17 and according to Danielle Parish, the assistant professor at the school's Graduate College of Social Work who is conducting the government funded effort, one of the big problems young girls need to learn is how to talk their boyfriends into using condoms:
“According to the school’s (press) one of the big issues for this population of adolescent girls is condom negotiation. They may have a boyfriend who says it isn't 'cool' to use a condom. To prepare the girls for these types of situations, the counselors and pediatricians will teach them how to negotiate condom use with their partner. The intervention also helps empower and motivate girls to make healthier choices regarding their alcohol use, smoking and prevention of unplanned pregnancy.”
So much wrong with this waste of money:
- First of all, with the country already $16.3 TRILLION in debt, this is not a vital use of limited resources by any stretch of the imagination.
- As a trained statistician with a masters degree in statistics and a long history of statistical analysis, there is no way that a sample size of 30 in a single geographic area has any statistical validity relative to help every at risk teenage girl in the country.
- The only valid conclusions that can be drawn after the $100,000 is spent is relative and valid to only 30 girls in Houston Texas.
- Since the girls are only aged 14-17, maybe a better approach would be to educate the girls that they are being raped, not how to negotiate for condom use.
That's it for this month. Three days of political class insanity, idiocy, incompetent fiscal planning and management, and more. Can you say term limits, because it is now so obvious the current set of Washington politicians are the biggest part of the major issues facing the country today. Time to dump them out of office and try a little sanity for a change.
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.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
No comments:
Post a Comment