Hopefully, the following insanity will be the end of this month’s craziness and we can postpone the next wave of idiocy until after the Christmas holidays:
1) 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.”
Boy, times are tough. The nation is facing some very dire and traumatic issues that effect every American. Thank goodness our politicians are working hard to resolve these issues.
Or maybe not. John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives recently announced that the House will be in session in 2013 on only 13 Fridays. This is actually a 30% reduction in the number of Fridays our House politicians worked in 2011 which was only 21 days. In 2013, Representatives will work only one Friday for nine months out of the year, and two Fridays for the other three months.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) released this not-so-strenuous work schedule last Friday and said part of his goal was to “insure that we never lose touch with the constituents we each represent while completing our work in Washington.”
Now, how many of you actually think our Congressmen and women will actually be spending every one of the other 37 Fridays in 2013 “ensuring they never lose touch with their constituents?” Or “completing their work in Washington? I contend they have not competed any decent work in a few decades.
Please, Mr. Cantor, do not insult our intelligence. You people did not resolve any major issues in 2011 when you worked for 21 Fridays, what makes us think you will do better in 2013 when you work only 15 Fridays?
2) News reports from last month reported on a letter that was obtained by Reuters news service, a letter that was sent from the alternative energy battery company A123 to two U.S. Senators, John Thune and Chuck Grassley. The November 4, 2012 letter from A123 informed the Senators that the company had recently received a check from the Energy Department for $946,830 of taxpayer wealth on October 16, 2012.
This payment was part of another failed Obama administration alternative energy fiasco that resulted in this company, and dozens of others, receiving billions of dollars in taxpayer funding for products and services that were never viable in the marketplace.
Why is the October 16, 2012 date important? Well, it is the exact same day that A123 declared bankruptcy. So on the day that this company decided that it was no longer a viable company and needed to go into court to seek protection from creditors because its business plan never came close to fulfilling its business promises, the Federal government cut it a check for almost a million dollars. Unbelievable incompetence.
3) Roll Call recently competed its annual analysis of who are the richest members of Congress and about how much they are worth. The top two richest members are Texas Republican Congressman Michael McCaul, who tops the list with a whopping $300 plus million net worth and Massachusetts Democratic Senator John Kerry, who comes in second with $198 plus million.
Let’s do some simple math. If memory serves me right, a U.S. Senator makes about $170,000 a year. If we did divide this number by $300 million and $198 million, we see that their annual Senate salaries is about .06% of McCaul’s wealth and about .09% of Kerry’s wealth.
Given the dire financial situation the country is in now, why are these two elected officials, and dozens of other millionaires in Congress, drawing any salary at all? Wouldn’t it be a nice leadership idea and compassionate notion to have these very rich politicians not draw a salary or donate their salaries to reducing our national debt?
But nobility, leadership, and compassion have never been in overabundance in Washington. That is why very rich people in Congress need to have their salaries curtailed, as proposed in Step 41 of “Love my Country, Loathe My Government’ and why term limits cannot happen soon enough, as purposed in Step 39.
4) In all tests of education attainment levels of U.S. kids vs. kids from other countries, we almost always fall behind the education attainment levels of dozens of other countries. In other words, for the most part, the U.S. public education is badly broken.
And it has been badly broken for decades as the Federal government and Washington politicians have wasted trillions of dollars on educating our kids for severely mediocre results. And it does not appear that it will get much better soon, if Michigan is any indication.
A new teacher evaluation system in the state miraculously found that 97% of the state‘s 96,000 teachers were rated effective or highly effective in the 2011-2012 school year. In other words, only 3% of the Michigan teachers were rated “minimally effective” or “ineffective,” the lowest two categories.
Wow, Michigan must have the best educated kids in the world if 97% of the teachers are that good. Not really. If you do a search on the education attainment of Michigan students, one measurement process indicated that Michigan ranks 23rd out of fifty states when it comes to high school graduation rates, 36th out of fifty states when it comes to undergraduate degrees, and 34th out of fifty states when it comes to graduate degrees.
Makes you wonder how a state’s schools can have such mediocre education attainment levels when its teachers are supposedly so great. Obviously, they did not read Step 27 from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government.” Step 27 is a rational, coherent problem solving approach to fix what is broken in our public education arena, a process does not involve bogus teacher evaluation processes.
5) A November 19, 2012 Wall Street Journal article reported on a new electric car that Chrysler will be selling in the near future. This new model will be its very first battery-powered vehicle, the Fiat 500e.
However, much more interesting than the fact that it’s their first electric battery-powered car is the fact that Chrysler expects to lose between $8,000 and $9,000 for each one it sell. Why would they produce a car that’s sure to lose money? Four words: the California state government.
California is one of the largest car markets in the country, accounting for about one in every cars sold in the country California also has a strict zero-emission requirement law which means that unless Chrysler offers at least one model that meets these increasingly stringent emissions standards, California could bar them from selling cars in the state. Given the size of the market, that is something no car maker would want to do.
The problem is that the vast majority of consumers do not want to buy all electric cars for any number of logical reasons:
- They tend to be smaller and thus, do not fit the needs of larger families.
- They tend to be underpowered relative to a gas powered car and no one wants to be pulling out into heavy traffic in an underpowered car.
- They tend to be much more expensive than a comparable gas powered car and usually do not appear to economically justify the higher cost over the life of the car.
Thus, manufacturers are forced to divert research, design, testing and manufacturing resources into a near useless set of products that no one wants. This sub-optimizes the capabilities and resources of the economy for no good reason, just to satisfy government politicians and bureaucrats that have nothing better to do and whom have no sense of reality and business.
The really scary part is that California politicians are not alone in their ignorance of how the world works. Ten other states, including New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, have followed California’s lead and have enacted similar zero-emission requirements.
Consider the insights of a car industry expert, Kevin Kinnaw, Toyota‘s U.S. manager of regulatory affairs: “California can make us sell a minimum amount of cars, but unfortunately, they can’t make people buy them, or even get our own dealers to order them from us.” Well said, just because you call it a leg does not mean it is a leg.
6) 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.” Given how poorly we have been served by the recent collection of politicians, you would have thought that we would have voted these inept people out of office the first chance we got.
Well, that thought would be wrong. According to Jeff Jacoby, writing in the Boston Globe and summarized in the November 30, 2012 issue of The Week magazine, over our recent history, more than 90% of the incumbents in Washington have been reelected. It is so sad that people can perform so poorly in their jobs and still retain them as Washington politicians are able to do.
This 90% number is indictment of our political processes and how much they have been perverted to maintain inept people in office rather than producing the best and brightest people to go to Washington to resolve issues. Numerous steps in “Love my Country, Loathe my Government” address the need to retake control of our political processes with the most important one being Step 39 which would impose term limits on all Federal politicians, “one and done.” If we cannot vote them out of office, we should amend the Constitution to force them out.
7) I wanted to touch on one final piece of political class insanity this month but will follow this point with a more detailed discussion in the near future. Congressman Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s VP running mate, Americans classified as “poor,” it comes out to an equivalent of $20,000 per person.
In other words, if you could cut out all of the criminal fraud, waste, and inefficiencies in our governments’ anti-poverty programs, a typical, four person “poor family” would receive a check for $80,000 a year. This $80,000 a year is 60% more than what a typical U.S. household earns a year.
This gives you some indication of how inept and corrupt our political class has become in the management of the anti-poverty effort in this country. We spend so much money every year, now in excess of $1 TRILLION, enough to make a poor family relatively well off and yet more and more Americans enter the “poor” definition every year.
We would never put up with this kind of corruption, waste, and inefficiency from a real estate agent if we were buying a house. Or from a car dealer if we were buying a new car. Or from a supermarket where we shopped for groceries. It baffles me why we put up such insanity, idiocy, and wealth waste from our political class.
There, that should do it for this week. It was painful in so many ways but it is necessary to find our what insanity is now pervading our political processes, our personal wealth, and our personal freedoms. I hope that at some point in time, we will finally stand up and not take it any more, taking the cue from the newscaster portrayed in the following clip, and finally get “mad as hell.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WINDtlPXmmE
Might as well get mad today because if you do not, I will be back next month with more insanity but no problems resolution from the American political class.
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
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