The Devastation That Is Obama Care, February Update, Part 3: Universal Studios and Doctor Shortages

Okay, I thought I could get the latest Obama Care disasters into two posts but, unfortunately, it is not possible, the impacts of Obama Care are that bad:

• Americans are losing their jobs as a result of Obama Care.
• Americans are losing substantial working hours and wages as a result of Obama Care.
• Americans are losing their health insurance coverage as a result of Obama Care.
• Americans are paying more for their existing health care insurance as a result of Obama Care.
• Hospitals are cutting back services as a result of Obama Care.
• The growth of the economy is being curtailed as a result of Obama Care.
• Younger Americans are being forced to subsidize the health care needs of older Americans.

All for a program and piece of legislation that has no chance of being successful since it never understood the root causes of our escalating health care costs.

The following hopefully sums up the latest insanity coming out of the Obama Care disaster:

1) Universal Studios in Florida recently announced that it would be terminating its health care insurance program for its part time employees. Now, granted, the program was not very robust, it cost part time employees $18 a week in salary to a maximum $5,000 health care benefit. However, for part time employees, it was probably better than what most part time employees can get for health care insurance these days.

Why did Universal cancel this program? A spokesperson explained when making the announcement: “We’d like to have the option to continue offering coverage plans but the ACA [Obama Care] doesn’t offer that kind of flexibility.” Thus, thousands more Americans will be losing their health care insurance coverage as a result of Obama Care.

2) I would never want to deny any human being of quality health care. However, another crisis is coming to the forefront as Obama Care unfolds, the legislation failed to take into account a basic economic reality: if you create more demand for a product or service without increasing the supply of that product or service, you are going to have a very serious supply and demand crisis.

Which is exactly what is happening as a result of Obama Care. As the government pays for more Americans to have health care insurance (increasing demand) without having a plan for more doctors (keeping supply constant) you end up with a shortage of doctors and a likely decrease in quality, as explained in a recent LA Times article:

• The February 9. 2013 Times article reported that California is not gong to have enough doctors to satisfy the increased demand being caused by Obama Care.
• Only 16 of the California’s 58 counties meet the Federal government’s recommended standard of primary care physicians.
• Almost 30 percent of California’s doctors are close to the retirement.
• Some state politicians are proposing physician assistants, pharmacists, and optometrists be allowed to treat more patients and some chronic diseases and allow nurse practitioners to have independent medical practices.
• Of course, the potential for sub par care could develop as non-doctors start to act like doctors, which is what exactly doctors are saying relative to patient safety and increased costs to patients and the health care system as errors mount: “Patient safety should always trump access concerns,” Dr. Paul Phinney, president of the California Medical Association.

Again, no American should ever be denied health care. However, Obama Care and those who wrote it were incredibly ignorant of its impacts on the supply of doctors and made no provision to alleviate the problem it is now creating.

A California legislator summed up the problem quite succinctly: “We’re going to be mandating that every single person in this state have insurance,” Democratic state Sen. Ed Hernandez told the Los Angeles Times. “What good is it if they are going to have a health insurance card, but no access to doctors?” In other words, it’s a good news/bad news situation: you have health care insurance but you have no one qualified to give you health care.

3) As for a little retrospective from a subject matter expert regarding Congressional testimony I recently came across, Richard Foster, Chief Actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was asked what might happen to the national debt as a result of Obama Care during a congressional hearing back in January 2011.
Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) asked Foster whether the White House’s claim that Obama Care would bring down healthcare costs was true or false. Foster, who reported chuckled at the question, replied, “I would say false…more so than true.”

Oh well, just another three reasons why Obama Care is doing the exact opposite of what it is supposed to do because the writers of this legislation never understood the underlying, root causes of the problem.

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

The Devastation That Is Obama Care, February Update, Part 2: Killing Marriages, Killing Work Hours, and More

Just when you thought we could stay away from the devastating effects of Obama Care, another set of bad surprises pop up. We thought we had contained the damage in a series of posts from earlier this year that began with the following post:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-devastation-that-is-obama-care-part.html

Yesterday's post was Part 1 of a February update to that original series of Obama Care posts. Today is the second half of that update.

Unfortunately, more bad news has arisen:

1) One of the biggest reasons why Obama Care is falling apart is that the creators never understood the root causes of our high and escalating health care costs. Until you understand the root causes, you cannot develop the right solutions to address those root causes and anything you try to do without that basis is probably doomed to failure:

• Americans eat too much.
• Americans eat too much of the wrong kinds of food.
• Americans smoke too much.
• The Washington political class subsidizes these bad habits by paying American farmers to grow unhealthy food and making tobacco farming more lucrative via Federal subsidies.
• Government regulations inhibit health care insurance competition across state lines.
• Obama Care never included any major tort reform to remove unnecessary legal expenses out of the system.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to quantify who and what entities were making obscene profits off of obscene health care costs.

Without understanding the root causes of high health care costs, Obama Care turned into nothing more than a poorly structured, poorly run and poorly financed health care insurance program, not a comprehensive health care industry reform program. That is why some components of Obama Care, e.g. the CLASS program, which was supposed to provide long term care for Americans, have already been shut down because of their failure to address the true causes of our problems.

Which brings us to the next component of Obama Care which is about to be shut down even before the whole piece of legislation is implemented. According to a February article from the Washington Post:

• Tens of thousands of Americans who cannot get health insurance because of a preexisting medical condition will be no longer be able to get coverage from an Obama Care program because funding for that program is running out.
• These so-called “high-risk pools” will be closed to new applicants no later than March 2, depending on the state.
• According to an HHS spokesperson, the closing of the program to new applicants is being taken in order to protect the interests of those who had already signed up for the program, about 135,000 people.
• The program launched in 2010 and was supposed to last until 2014 but now will be shut down in the coming weeks because of a lack of funds.
• In another back handed slap at bad government forecasting, the original business case assumed that about 375,000 people would sign up for the program. However, only 135,000 enrolled, about a third of the expected enrollment, but the cost of servicing this one third is far higher than what was expected, causing the shutdown of the system to new enrollees
• In a moment of rare candid honestly from a Washington bureaucrat, that same HHS spokesperson is quoted in the article: “What we’ve learned through the course of this program is that this is really not a sensible way for the health-care system to be run.” Could not agree more.

Another Obama Care program blows its forecasts, exceeds its budget, and does not deliver what it promised to deliver. Par for the course.

And let’s do some simple math to see why this is another epic failure. The article states that between nine million and 25 million Americans are uninsured and have a preexisting health problem. If the current program has 135,000 enrollees and they have blown through $5 billion in three years or so, then the cost of insurance coverage for these enrollees comes out to about $37,000 per person or about $12,000 a year per person. If we take the mid point of the uninsured estimates, we end up with 17 million Americans (9 plus 25 divided by 2) who are uninsured because of preexisting health conditions.

Thus, using the results of this program, the average cost ($12,000) times the number needing insurance (17 million) comes out to an annual cost of over $200 billion a year. There is no way the country and the Federal government could afford this cost. This one program alone would eat up about 8% of the entire 2012 revenue stream of the Federal government:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals

Which gets us back to our original point, you have to reduce the root causes of the high health care costs in this country, the root causes that cause these preexisting conditions. You cannot paper over them with complicated and expensive Obama Care insurance programs that just do not work since “what we’ve learned through the course of this program is that this is really not a sensible way for the health-care system to be run.”

2) Another perverse incentive of Obama Care is to make marriage less palatable for Americans and American families in the lower income ranges. Consider the opinions of two experts on the matter:

• Former Obama Treasury Department executive David Gamage was quoted The Wall Street Journal last year: “Consider a couple with children in which one of the parents earns most of the family’s income. If the couple marries, the family would lose thousands of dollars of subsidies that could otherwise be used to pay for health insurance for the children and the lower-income spouse. If the couple is already married, divorce may be their only option for obtaining affordable insurance for their children and the lower-income parent.”
• Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute testified in front of a Congressional hearing:“Health insurance premium credits in the new law are linked not directly to income, but to the poverty line, resulting in a particularly steep marriage penalty for low-income Americans. With $10,890 as the poverty line for one person and an additional $3,820 for a spouse, marriage means less government help with health insurance.

Thus, despite the President’s claim in his recent state of the union message that he wanted to strengthen families (“We’ll work to strengthen families by removing the financial deterrents to marriage for low-income couples,”) because that is best for Americans and American families, his health care reform disaster does just the opposite, financially incenting people not to get married or to get divorced.

3) We have reported on the many instances where private businesses and companies are cutting the hours of their employees to less than 30 hours a week due to the asinine Obama administration ruling that anyone working 30 hours or more a week is considered a full time employee relative to Obama Care, forcing them to provide full health insurance coverage to these employees. Since many of these businesses’ business model, particularly those in the restaurant industry, cannot support these extra, onerous costs, they have cut their employees hours. Now these Americans still do not have health care insurance AND they have fewer hours to work and lower take home pay.

But this situation is not restricted just to private businesses and restaurant businesses:

• The Virgina Pilot newspaper reported on February 8, 2013 that thousands of part-time state workers will see their weekly working schedules reduced to no more than 29 hours a week going forward. The reason given for the drop in hours is that under Obama Care employees working 30 hours a week or more receive health care benefits, which would cost Virginia tens of millions of dollars a year. The new policy will mean a pay cut for many part-timers, including adjunct college professors.
• The Huffington Post reported back in November, 2012 that Youngstown State University will reduce the hours of part-time employees to ensure that the university is not required to provide them with health insurance coverage under Obama Care. Adjunct professors and lecturers would see their payable hours reduced to that magic number, 29 hours a week or less. Reason given for the decrease: onerous costs of Obama Care.
• We have already reported on how the Community College Of Allegheny County will cut the hours for some instructors to avoid paying for their health insurance coverage under Obama Care’s 30 hour rule, cuts that are affecting about 400 employees.

Again, insanity. These people will still not be able to afford health care insurance and will see a cut in take home pay nonetheless.

4) The Portland Press ran an article on February 18, 2013 that questioned the assertion made when Obama Care was passed that health care costs would go down. Many organizations, states, and politicians who supported the passage of the bill are now backpedaling on the potential devastating affects it may have on their constituents:

• State insurance regulators in California, recently sent a letter to the Obama administration in a recent letter to express their fears and concerns about "rate and market disruption."
• Oregon's insurance commissioner predicts that the new Obama Care regulations could push up premiums for younger Americans by as much as 30% and urged administration officials to slow the rollout of the new regulations.
• Insurance regulators in California, Oregon, Rhode Island and several other states have asked the administration to phase in the new requirement over several years in order to not jolt the insurance market or America.
• An advocate for consumers in their 20s, Young Invincibles, is also worried, sending a letter to administration officials suggesting that additional steps may be needed to protect young people from rising premiums. Remember, one of the insane aspects of Obama Care is that insurance costs for older Americans is reduced at the expense of raising insurance costs for younger Americans, those that are far more likely to have lower personal wealth than older Americans.
• Following up on that point, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that insurance costs for those who buy insurance coverage on their own probably will be 10-13% higher in 2016.

The article lays out a scenario that is very likely to occur in 2014 for many Americans, especially younger Americans:

• As health insurance rates come down for older people, the insurance rates will likely increase for consumers in their 20s.
• If that happens, young, healthy people could elect not to get health insurance and pay the small penalty if AND when they actually get caught by the IRS.
• This is the logical personal financial path for them to take since the cost of their insurance will be going much higher than the relatively minor fine they MIGHT eventually face.
• That, in turn, would leave an older, sicker population in the insurance pool on average, which typically inflates premiums and will leave millions of Americans without health care insurance.

In other words, the entire Rube Goldberg structure of this idiotic legislation will come tumbling down in bad financials, sick Americans, and much higher national debt.

Unfortunately, the bad news keeps oncoming from this massive, ill-conceived, complex, doomed to failure piece of legislation. But we should not be surprised, experts and news outlets have been correctly predicting this coming doom for years. For a nice synopsis of this history, consider going to the following link for a detailed, but easy to read, trek through the past few years to see what was predicted to fail is now actually failing:

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/22/obama-concedes-obamacare-didnt-do-anything-for-rising-health-care-costs/

I am sure this is not the last set of disasters we will cover relative to Obama Care. Unfortunately.

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

The Devastation That Is Obama Care, February Update: More Jobs lost, More Hours Cut, Higher Costs, Fewer Benefits

Earlier this year we did a long series of posts on Obama Care and the implications of its implementation. The first of those six posts can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-devastation-that-is-obama-care-part.html

The findings were not pretty:

• Companies cutting workers hours in order to get out from the onerous fines and expenses Obama Care would ipose on them, fines and expenses that those companies could not survive under.
• Employees who did not have health insurance before Obama Care now not only have health insurance but have seen their hours and wages cut drastically as a result of the legislation.
• Democratic Senators trying to get parts of the legislation repealed, legislation that they touted, since it is resulting in layoffs to medical device companies and higher unemployment in their home states.
• A piece of legislation that never addressed the true, underlying root causes of our high health care costs in this country, rendering the final law useless in actually resolving the causes of these high health care costs.
• While supposed to provide unviversal health care insurance to every American, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) calculated late last year that possibly up to twenty million Americans will not have health care insurance coverage in ten years, falling miserably short of the universal coverage goal.
• A majority of states have opted out of having their own Obama Care health care insurance exchanges, forcing the Federal government to step up and provide that service within ten months even though the information systems, the agreements, processes, procedures, etc. for such a massive undertaking are nowhere close to being on schedule.
• Rampant cronyism and conflicts of interest will render the legislation sub-optimal for the country but lucrative to certain political insiders.
• Increases in health care costs for people with existing health care plans in order to fund the “free” stuff that Obama Care gives away.
• Escalating national debt beyond what would have happened without the legislation.

These are a just a sampling of what we covered, the continuing and unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. Well, since these posts, the news has continued to roll in and it is not good, as the following news reports point out:

1) According to a Washington Times article from February 5, 2013, Obama Care, which was supposed to provide universal health care insurance to every American, will actually cause 7 million Americans to lose their current employer-based health insurance coverage. This is almost double the previous estimate. This new, dire prediction is based on the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.

The CBO said that this year's tax cuts have changed the incentives, in a negative financial way, for businesses to provide health care insurance to their employees, likely resulting in fewer companies continuing to provide coverage. Instead, they'll choose to pay a penalty to the government.

Great program, does the exact opposite of what is supposed to do and the trend is not in the right direction. This is also in direct conflict with Obama’s original boast that workers who liked their current employer provided health care plans would be able to keep their plans. Another promise down the drain, another Obama Care objective missed.

2) In late January, 2013, the IRS announced that the CHEAPEST family health care insurance plan from Obama Care exchanges will cost a whopping $20,000 per year. And this is a so-called “Bronze” plan, gold and silver plans, which offer more features and coverage, will cost even more.

Thus, another objective missed, in addition to the previous objective of getting health care coverage for every American. Not only will Americans not get coverage if they lack it now, as we have previously reported, and not only will Americans currently getting health care coverage from their employers lose it, Obama Care will make it prohibitively expensive for most American families to afford it.

In addition, consider this additional insult. If families do not purchase health care insurance for their families, mostly likely because they cannot afford it, they will have to pay a fine for not getting coverage. Thus, the legislation will result in plans that most families cannot afford and then fines them for not being able to afford the plans the government provides. Insanity.

3) A February 1, 2013 report from CBS in D.C. reported that another medical device company is blaming President Obama’s health care law for the layoffs of nearly 100 of its employees, about 7% of its current workforce. The company, Smith & Nephew, stated that the a 2.3% tax on medical devices in the Obama Care law reduced its profitability and caused the layoffs.

These layoffs are in addition to the many we already described in the previous set of post referenced above. More people losing their jobs and possibly their health care coverage as a result of a piece of legislative garbage that was supposed to increase employment and reduce the number of people without health care insurance.

4) The following Associated Press report is unique in that we had not previously thought this would happen at least partly as a result of Obama Care. A southwestern Pennsylvania hospital, the Windber Medical Center, will stop delivering babies after March, partly because hospital officials believe they will be able to afford providing the service based on revised reimbursements under forthcoming changes to Federal health care provisions as a result of Obama Care.

5) According to a New York Times article from early January, 2013:

• Health care insurance companies across the country are getting double-digit increases in premiums approved for certain customer
• These increases on premiums are occurring even though one of the biggest objectives of Obama Care was to reverse the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.
• Particularly hard hit by the higher rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.
• In California, Aetna has applied for rate increases of as high as 22%.
• Also in California, Anthem Blue Cross has asked for a 26% increase while Blue Shield of California is looking for a 20% increase for some of its customers
• The article points out that these rate increase requests are all coming after a 39% increase requested by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 which helped give momentum to the implementation of Obama Care.
• In other states, including Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20% for some policy holders, amounting to several hundred dollars a month.

No wonder businesses across the nation are cutting back on providing health care insurance for their small business employees. Another Obama Care failure, reining in runaway health care insurance company rates.

So fewer jobs, fewer work hours, fewer people getting health care insurance from their employers and now possibly fewer hospitals delivering babies, all because of Obama Care. The bad news just keeps on rolling in.

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

Washington Politicians: Fiscally Out Of Touch, Protecting Turf, Or Incompetent?

As some of you may know, if the political class does not get its act together by March 1, 2013, automatic Federal government spending cuts will kick in that will reduce government spending by over a trillion dollars over the next ten years. This “sequestering” of budget dollars was agreed to by Congress and Obama in August of 2011 in the debt ceiling negotiations.

While this is a decent first step in reining in government spending, it is still pretty meager. Overall government spending will still increase in the baseline budget view, it will just increase at a somewhat lower rate. Annual spending deficits will continue to mount up, increasing our onerous national debt and burdening future generations of Americans with that debt.

How anemic is this effort at reducing spending? Let’s do some simple math:

1. Let’s assume that the ten year trillion dollar spending reduction averages out to about $100 billion a year.
2. According to the official White House website, the Federal government will spend about $4.5 trillion in 2017.
3. This $4.5 trillion is less than it spent in 2012 but is less than it will likely spend ten years from now, under baseline budget assumptions, so the 2017 estimate is a good ten year annual average.
4. $100 billion a year in spending cuts against an average spending budget of $4.5 trillion is only a meager 2.2% spending decrease.
5. According to the White House budget website, in 2017, this $100 billion in spending cuts would still add over half a TRILLION dollars to the national debt.

Despite this feeble attempt at expense reduction, many in the Obama administration are choking on it. Recently retired Defense Secretary Leon Panetta claimed our national defense would be endangered by reducing spending by 2.2% on average. Secretary of State John Kerry recently made the same assertion that we could not afford a meager 2.2% reduction in his budget since we needed to continue to butt into the lives of people in other countries around the world. President Obama has been spreading panic by claiming all of these vital government services would be cut all because of a lousy 2.2% cut in spending.

Makes you wonder if 1) these so-called leaders are that out of touch with the real world, 2) want to protect their turfs at any cost regardless of the impact on the fiscal integrity of the country, or 3) are just that incompetent that they do not know how to run an efficient operation and can only operate it by increasing their budget rather than decreasing their organization’s waste, redundancy, and incompetence.

To help these politicians understand why this 2.2% reduction is a very easily attainable goal, let’s point out via just a HANDFUL of examples of how wasteful, redundant and incompetent their organizations are today:

- Medicare and Medicaid lose over $100 billion a year to waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud.

- Social Security loses over $100 billion a year to waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud.

- The IRS admits that it is so incompetent that it fails to collect over $380 billion a year from tax evaders.

- The U.S. Navy, one of Leon Panetta’s organizations, recently spent $300 million to build two Navy ships almost to completion before spending another $10 million to turn them both into scrap metal without ever using them.

- The State Department, John Kerry’s new organization, recently spent $80 million to build a consulate building in northern Afghanistan that will never be used since the $80 million is not defensible from a terrorist attack and was built by bypassing the State Department’s own guidelines for consulate building relative to terrorists.

- The Transportation Safety Agency recently bought over $180 million worth of airport security equipment that it will never use, storing it in a warehouse in its original packaging.

- Employees in the General Services Administration threw themselves a Las Vegas bash at taxpayer expense, resulting in the dismissal and resignations of several GSA employees and executives.

- The Obama administration recently made the inane decision to give Egypt over one billion dollars worth of F-16 fighter planes and tanks for no reason at all, weapons that could eventually impact both the Department of Defense and State Department operations in the future.

- And last but not least, consider some new findings relative to the President’s economic stimulus plan, as recently reported by the Independent Journal Review. Unfortunately, these types of expenses are no confined to the stimulus program, they happen every day in every Federal government department and entity.

These insults to the taxpayer occurred even though when President Obama signed the $831 billion stimulus into law in 2009, he stated that “tough choices and smart investments” needed to be made. So ask yourself: if these are “smart investments,“ you can only wonder what the dumb expenses were:

1. $250 was sent to a woman in Maryland who died in 1967.
2. $840 was spent to disassemble and assemble three desks.
3. The Lincoln Center in New York City was paid to host a “tango salon.
4. $10,000 was spent replacing light fixtures at a fish hatchery.
5. $425,000 was spent in $250 increments to 1,700 prisons inmates for social security checks.
6. $426,000 was spent to rebuild a bridge that is used by a average of ten cars a day.
7. $500,000 was spent in subsidies for rain barrel installation.
8. $600,000 was sent to a school district in Kansas …that no longer exists.
9. $1 million was spent in New York on road signs advertising stimulus projects.
10. $1 million was used to build 250 bike lockers.
11. $1.25 million was used to use electric fish to study animal sensory information.
12. $1.75 million was spent on energy-efficient garage doors.
13. $2.2 million was spent to install skylights for a liquor store in Montana.
14. $2.8 was million spent installing toilets in New Mexico’s national forest.
15. $15 million was spent to build an airport in Ouizinkie, Alaska …a town of 165 people.

Disgraceful wastes of money. Which gets us back to our central question: Are Kerry, Panetta, and Obama out of touch, protecting turf or just incompetent? Or possibly all of the above?

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

Obama's March Of Dimes...Into Oblivion

In his recent state of the union message, President Obama proposed that over two dozen new Federal government programs be implemented. In doing so, he spoke one of his more comical lines in his whole Presidency, stating that implementing these programs would not cost the American taxpayer a single dime. Which raises two conflicting questions:

A) If these programs do not cost a dime, how will they actually work and be implemented and how effective could they possibly be?

B) If they are going to be effective, shouldn’t they cost more than a dime?

More political nonsensical talk from an ineffective political leader. Especially this political leader, who has the annoying habit of throwing out these grandiose rhetoric ideas without any solid back up plans at all, never mind even pie-in-the-sky ineffective plans to back up his empty promises.

And why would we even believe that 29 new programs will not cost anything, given the Federal government’s mismanagement of trillions of taxpayer payers dimes historically:

• Every year, Medicare and Medicaid waste or lose to criminal fraud over $100 billion (One trillion dimes).
• Every year, Social Security wastes or loses to criminal fraud over $100 billion (One trillion dimes).
• Every year, the IRS readily admits that it fails to collect over $380 billion from American tax evaders (3.8 trillion dimes).

We could cite hundreds of other examples of Washington political class financial mismanagement that cost Americans a lot of dimes and would cost Americans a lot more dimes of these new programs ever happened.

Consider four recent examples of wasted dimes that extend Washington’s tradition of wasting dimes:

1) A January 25, 2013 article on the CNN/Money website reported actual criminals, locked up in prisons across the country annually bilk the IRS out of millions and millions of dollars by filing fraudulent tax returns with the IRS from within their prison walls. Thus, not only are would-be convicts pillaging the American taxpayer from outside of prisons, actual convicts are also doing some pillaging inside prisons.

Details of this fraud include the following:

• This tax fraud usually involves prisoners filing fraudulent tax refunds from their respective prisons using stolen or fake identities.
• The prisoners often are in partnership with non-prisoners outside of prison, with all parties sharing in the cut of fraud that they execute.
• In one variation of the scams, prisons access company annual reports in the prison library that list Federal tax ID numbers, and then claim they worked for these companies on phony 1040 forms that they file.
• Other scams involve prisoners claiming wages from companies that are in bank bankruptcy proceedings since those wages can be harder for the IRS to track and verify.
• Some prisoners scan obituaries, looking for people’s identities to steal to be used in filing the false tax returns.
• Others use prison computers to file tax returns electronically online and have their fraudulent refunds easily and electronically deposited into the bank accounts of friends on the outside.

How embarrassing, the Federal government is so inept financially that even those already convicted can continue their crime sprees behind bars where their room and board is already being paid for by the taxpayers across this country. The article estimates that in 2010, prisoners attempted to fraudulently bilk the IRS for over $750 million and were successful in obtaining $35 million of taxpayer wealth.

Now, in the big Federal budget picture, this does not sound like a lot. But consider two things:

1. This is the IRS estimates of what is going on. Who knows how accurate these estimates are. The IRS could be lowballing the estimates to minimize their embarrassment in not being capable or they really do not have a handle on the extent of the fraud and it is much worse than what they can identify.
2. Second, theoretically this $35 million could have been used to put armed police professionals in over 600 U.S. schools in order to prevent future Newtown-like school shootings, a much better use of the resources than allowing criminals to continue their crime sprees in prison.

In any case, this losing $35 million, or 350,000,000 dimes every year is a testimony to ineptness of the Federal government.

2) The Bankrupting America website carried an interesting but depressing article on January 30, 2013 about how another Federal government program wastes billions and billions of dollars every year via incompetence

• An important, comprehensive report from the Government Office of Accountability (GAO) reported that $108 billion of unemployment benefits and other government appropriations went towards “improper payments” over the past several years.
• These improper payments often went to the wrong person or were issued in the incorrect amount.
• Citing a Roll Call article: “No business would allow this much of its budget to be wasted. Sadly, this is business as usual in Washington, and solutions are tough to come by.”

The website goes on to give examples of what this wasted $108 billion in taxpayer wealth could have been used for in order to illustrate the extent of the waste:

• On an average American household basis, this error rate would have reduced that average household’s monthly income by about $200 a month. This is $200 that they could not have used for food, gas, and other expenses, a significant drag on a household’s financials, an economic drag repeated over 110 million times across every U.S. household
• The $108 billion could also be used to buy 366,000 Ferraris.
• It also could have been used to make 101 million mortgage payments at $1061 per month.

To this list we would add the calculation that the $108 billion that was wastefully distributed could have put one armed police professional in every U.S. school for about 15 years, a much better use of the 1,080,000,000,000 dimes.

3) An Associated Press report from February 8, 2013 reported that the U.S. Post Office lost $1.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012 or about 13,000,000,000 dimes. This loss came despite the fact that billions and billions of dollars were spent on the November elections, a lot of which ended up funding mailings from the various candidates and other political entities. Thus, the better measure of the slumping Post Office financials iis not the loss of $1.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012 but the loss of $3.3 billion in the comparable timeframe of 2011 where there was no major election spending.

But this should come as no surprise. We reported on the mess that was the Post Office over a year ago in September, 2011:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2011/09/political-class-when-it-comes-to-post.html

In that post we quoted Senator Joe Lieberman’s warning that “we must act quickly” to fix the red ink problems of the Post Office. Apparently, that warning did not get the right attention since seventeen months, later the dimes keep getting wasted due to Post Office inefficiencies.

Quick note: this is not meant as a knock against the management of the Post Office. Back in September, 2011 and now, management seems to have a good handle on what is happening to their industry and what could be done to adjust the Post Office operations to address those changes, e.g. their recent announcement to stop Saturday mail deliveries. It is the political class that is dithering while our dimes slide away, not those employees and executives that recognize the need to change.

4) And finally, a case where the number of dimes being lost is actually incalculable. That, at least is the conclusion of a GAO report on their audit of the Federal government financials. In a massive audit of the entire Federal government, the GAO report concluded the following:

• Our report on the U.S. government’s consolidated financial statements illustrates that much work remains to improve federal financial management. Further improvements are urgently needed.
• Certain material weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting and other limitations on the scope of our work resulted in conditions that prevented us from expressing an opinion on the fiscal years 2012 and 2011 accrual-based consolidated financial statements.
• About 34 percent of the federal government’s reported total assets as of September 30, 2012, and approximately 21 percent of the federal government’s reported net cost for fiscal year 2012 relate to the Department of Defense (DOD), which received a disclaimer of opinion on its consolidated financial statements.
• Because of significant uncertainties, primarily related to the achievement of projected reductions in Medicare cost growth reflected in the 2012, 2011, and 2010 Statements of Social Insurance, we are unable to, and we do not, express opinions on the 2012, 2011, and 2010 Statements of Social Insurance, as well as on the 2012 and 2011 Statement of Changes in Social Insurance Amounts.
• Material weaknesses resulted in ineffective internal control over financial reporting for fiscal year 2012.
• Our tests of compliance with selected provisions of laws and regulations for fiscal year 2012 were limited by the material weaknesses and other scope limitations discussed in our report.

In other words, the Federal government’s accounting processes are so screwed up that we have no idea what is going on or how many trillions of dimes are wasted every year. How scary is this report, the Federal government is so messed up that trained auditors cannot unravel the mess.

All of these examples get us back to the original discussion on Obama’s two dozen plus new programs. If he and the rest of the Washington political class were actually doing their jobs and watching over our dimes, they could fund their additional programs and it truly would not cost the American taxpayer a dime in additional taxes. They could put armed police professionals in every U.S. school to protect our kids. They could do a lot if they just started watching and caring for our dimes.

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

Note To Hillary: What Difference Did You Make?

When recently testifying in front of Congressional committees investigating the murderous disaster that happened at the U.S. Consulate at Benghazi in Libya, former Secretary of State famously shouted, “what difference does it make?” when asked detailed questions regarding the inferior and shoddy security at the consulate. I would ask a slightly different question of Ms. Clinton if given the opportunity: “What Difference Did You Make?”

I keep reading news reports and poll results showing that Clinton has a very high favorability ratings among Americans. To be honest, I don’t see it or get it. Maybe it is me but when I look at her record as Secretary of State, I see a string of failures, missed opportunities, and management shortcomings that culminated in the unnecessary death of four Americans, including a U.S. ambassador in Libya.

This is how I see Clinton’s record as Secretary of State, I would be more than willing to print other opinions that factually counteract this argument that she was pretty ineffective in this role. I am not saying someone else could have done better in this role in this tumultuous times. But I am saying I do not know why she is getting this much love for just showing up for work with no discernible success stories to her credit.

1) Iran is four years closer to having nuclear weapons and no diplomatic efforts from this administration and this former Secretary of State have come close to terminating this growing danger.

2) North Korea is four years closer to having nuclear weapons and more importantly, four years closer to having the rocket delivery capability to put one of those nukes into the west coast of the United States. No diplomatic efforts from this administration of this former Secretary of State have come close to terminating this growing danger.

3) This administration and this former Secretary of State were caught completely by surprise and off guard by the so-called Arab Spring and the ramifications from these uprisings. Once caught by surprise, they never got out in front of the changes and problems associated with these earth moving political shifts.

4) This administration and this former Secretary of State apparently did not anticipate and have no plan to cope with the civil war in Syria, showing no leverage to get the violence to stop or to contain the various types of weapons, including chemical, from falling into the wrong hand.

5) Four years of this administration and this former Secretary of State has gotten us no closer to resolving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Now, granted, not much progress has been made since the whole conflict started in 1948 so this was a tough issue on which no progress was made.

6) We previously reported on the disaster that was to be a U.S. consulate facility in the northern part of Afghanistan. After $80 million of taxpayer wealth had been expended, the State Department decided to abandon the facility since it was basically indefensible, wasting $80 million. Existing State Department procedures and protocols were ignored or overwritten that would have prevented this wasting of $80 million. This calls into question of how well the State Department functioned administratively under Clinton’s direction, especially on high profile, expensive spending initiatives like this consulate.

7) Four years of this administration and this former Secretary of State resulted in no leverage with China, a nation that bullies its neighboring countries, sponsors cyber attacks on other countries’ military, infrastructure, and private businesses and which is the biggest polluter and emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.

8) She was either unaware or stood by quietly as this administration violated any number of laws and treaties by allowing the Fast Furious gun running operation to ship thousands of illegal weapons to Mexican drug cartels, weapons that ended up killing a U.S. border agent and dozens of Mexican civilians without contacting Mexican authorities ahead of the operation.

9) And worst of all, the death and destruction from the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate at Benghazi:

• Despite many, many warnings ahead of the attack regarding the weak consulate security operations, no attempt was made to successfully beef up security in one of the most dangerous places in the world.
• Security was so bad that a badly injured ambassador received medical treatment not from U.S. resources but was driven to a local hospital by Libyan citizens. There Libyan doctors treated him without even knowing who he was. In other words, security operations were so bad we actually physically lost a U.S. ambassador.
• It is still unknown the real reasons behind the attacks: was it a botched kidnapping attempt, with the Obama administration’s involvement, to trade the ambassador for the “blind sheik?” Was it to cover up an illegal gun running operation to the Syrian rebels and shut down the operation and those that were involved? Or was it just gross incompetence?
• These questions do make a difference and it is her responsibility to come clean with America, she was in charge.

So, yes Hillary, is does make a difference. But more importantly. What difference did you make in the four years you served as Secretary of State? To be honest, I see no positive difference between now and 2009 when you took over the difficult job of managing our international affairs.

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

The Political Class Corruption Train Keeps On Rolling - Democratic Politician Version

We have talked many, many times about the corruption that pervades our democracy, Washington D.C., and the American political class. It wastes taxpayer wealth, corrupts decision making processes, and never resolves the major issues of our times. One major piece in this continuing saga ran in July, 2012:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/07/washington-corruption-train-keeps-on.html

In August, 2012 we did a five part series that considered the slime, sleaze and immorality of the political class, beginning with the first post in that series:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-slime-sleaze-immorality-and.html

And most recently, we did a series of posts this past January, starting with the following link, about the buying and selling of America:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-selling-and-buying-of-america-part.html

Today we will continue this unfortunate legacy by reviewing the recent spate of Democratic party politicians and the corruption and illegal acts they have been up to at all levels of government, enriching themselves while neglecting their duties as elected officials.

1) Last summer, Brooklyn Democrat state government Assemblyman Vito Lopez was severely reprimanded by members of his own party and peers in the state legislature for what was called “blatant instances of sexual harassment.” The state government’s Standing Committee on Ethics and Guidance stripped him of a committee chairmanship, cut off resources and funding from the Assembly, stripped him of any seniority perks, and prompted a ban prohibiting him from hiring interns or employing other employees under the age of 21.

I will not go into the gruesome, disgusting details of his actions but they are outlined in the letter of admonishment that can be found at the following link:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/103820462/Vito-Lopez-Letter-8-24-12

Nice guy, even his fellow politicians found his behavior reprehensible, a pretty high bar to get over.

2) On February 16, 2013, the Albany Times Union reported that State Assemblyman William F. Boyland Jr., another Brooklyn Democrat who was already under Federal indictment for bribery, has been charged with falsifying state travel forms in order to illegally and immorally collect more than $67,000 in lodging, food and mileage reimbursements that he was not entitled to receive. These charges came about as a result of a state comptroller's report and investigation.

The state audit investigated and researched Boyland's expense reports for a five-year period beginning in January 2007, and found he filed questionable claims on 609 of the 975 days that he submitted for travel reimbursement. One reason why he got caught is that his claims of traveling were found false since at the time he was supposedly traveling, he was meeting with undercover FBI agents in a sting operation where he was trying to collect $250,000 in bribes. Thus, his participation in one crime was the undoing in another crime.

3) U.S. and New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Menendez finds himself in a tough spot following three accusations:

A) He illegally used the resources of a campaign donor to fly to the Dominican Republic a number of times.

B) While in the Dominican Republic, he engaged in sex with local prostitutes.

C) One of the prostitutes was underage.

Three very bad and chilling accusations and allegations. However, it appears that at least the first charge is accurate. According to news reports, he admitted that disclosure and repayment for two plane trips to the Dominican Republic via a donor’s private jet “slipped through the cracks.” Oops! He paid back the donor this past January to the tune of about $58,000. Must have been a nice jet.

The reason why this type of behavior breaks the law is that a U.S. Senator is required to disclose ALL income and gifts. The disclosure must be accurate, complete, and filed by May 15 for the preceding year. By not complying with this legal requirement, the Senator’s “slip through the cracks” is legally a false statement, which is a felony. Since there were two separate trips, there are two separate felony charges.

It should be interesting to see if there are any ramifications for this type of behavior. Ordinary Americans usually cannot get away with the “oops” defense when they commit a felony. Will this defense work for a politician? Probably.

It should also be very interesting to track the other two accusations above over time as the FBI and others investigate. If true, we easily could make the case that his frolicking with prostitutes in a foreign country is a national security breach and disgraceful behavior for a U.S. Senator.

4) A New York Times article from February 13, 2013 reported that a former New York State senator pleaded guilty to falsifying evidence in an attempt to cover up the theft of taxpayer money from a nonprofit agency that she founded. This plea ended a political corruption investigation that resulted in criminal charges in both Federal and state courts. Details of the corruption include the follwing fact:

• The former Democratic state senator, Shirley L. Huntley, told a judge in State Supreme Court in Nassau County that she wrote and backdated a letter in March, 2011 to create a false record indicating that the nonprofit agency, Parent Workshop Inc., held an event that never occurred.
• The agency was supposed to help parents navigate the school system, but investigators said employees both at Parent Workshop and at another nonprofit organization she operated stole more than $100,000 in state grants instead of spending the money on the nonprofits' programs.
• In the state component of the investigation, Ms. Huntley was not accused of stealing the money directly but covering up $30,000 in thefts by others.
• In the Federal District Court case in Brooklyn, prosecutors accused Ms. Huntley of directly taking taxpayer money from her other nonprofit agency, Parents Information Network Inc. Ms. Huntley pleaded guilty in that case and admitted to stealing more than $87,000 in state grants to pay for shopping for herself and her relatives.
• Ms. Huntley will pay the state the full amount she stole. She faces up to two years in prison under the Federal sentencing guidelines for the charge, conspiracy to commit mail fraud.
• Prosecutors in the state case recommended a sentence of five years’ probation because Ms. Huntley already faces Federal prison time.
• According to a New York Post report, she spent this ill gotten gain on spa treatments, upscale shopping, and expensive gifts for her dog.

You have to give this crooked politician credit, it appears she worked hard at defrauding New York and American taxpayers of their wealth. Fortunately, she got caught and will be a guest at someone’s prison facilities.

5) And last, but not least, consider the corruption and criminal activity of former U.S. Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. According to a February 16, 2013 Associated Press report, Mr. Jackson AND his wife, a Chicago alderman until her recent resignation, agreed to plead guilty to Federal criminal charges. The charges revolve around the plan to misuse $750,000 for luxurious personal expenses including a $43,000 gold watch.

The charges against the Jacksons include filing false tax returns for six years that understated their income. He also filed false financial statements with the House of Representatives. As a result, both of them could go to prison for several years besides paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.

Their various scams and schemes enabled them to complete the following purchases:

• The actual cost of the Rolex gold watch was $43,350.
• They spent $9,588 for children's furniture.
• His wife spent over $5,000 on fur capes and parkas.
• In one effort they used the cover story of a false room rental for a bogus fundraiser to spent $1,500 on porcelain collector’s items.

Disgraceful behavior for a Congressman and city official. Just another reason why no American should pay another penny in taxes. Well, more than one reason, if you include furs, Rolex watches, etc.

No wonder major issues facing Americans never get resolved. At least today, the Democrats in office are spending so much time and effort scamming American taxpayers they have little time left to actually understand and develop plans to resolve those issues.

Groping members of your staff, going to jail, and flying off to the Dominican Republic for alleged hanky-panky is no way to run a government.

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

Government: If you Think The Problems We Create Are Bad, Wait Until You See Our Solutions, Part 3

This is the third and final post in a series that examined the 14 major screw ups of the Federal government over the past fifty years or so. These posts are a continuation of the theme in a previous series as it related to the book and move, the “Hunger Games.”

In the “Hunger Games,” an elitist set of people, politicians, have set themselves up in the seat of government to enjoy personal self enrichment at the cost of hard times for the rest of the citizens and at the cost of never resolving any major issue facing the nation. In our case, we found out that in Washington D.C. the salaries are higher, the unemployment rate is lower, and political cronyism is rampant.

Our political class is so busy taking care of their own needs that government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, ethanol subsidies, alternative energy subsidies, failing public schools, etc. either never work, never come close to attaining their objectives but waste trillions of dollars in the process of not working, or make the original situation and related areas worse than before the government program was established.

Today will go through the final four, greatest Federal government failures. The first ten in this series can be reviewed at:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/02/government-if-you-think-problems-we.html

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/02/government-if-you-think-problems-we_18.html


11) The Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) constantly provides new material to be discussed in this blog, none of it any good. From groping American citizens to purchasing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of airport screening equipment that it will never use to failing random tests of their screening processes, the TSA has been incompetent, expensive, and affront to freedom. It should be privatized like most every other single country in the world has done in order to finally get competent, efficient, and effective airport security in place.

12) According to FBI crime statistics, overall gun homicides have dropped 14% since expiration of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban in 2006. Total violent crime has dropped nearly 70% since 1973. Good news. Bad news: the political class in Washington wants to reinstate the assault weapons and make gun ownership harder to do, if not ban gun ownership altogether, despite these trends. A case of politicians mucking up a good thing, peaceful law abiding citizens defending themselves as a result of the Second Amendment.

13) Some random facts about Social Security:

• When Social Security implemented in 1935, it was a safety net program that taxed only 1% of income. Now it is over 6.2% and growing.
• The Social Security program is financed like a Ponzi scheme, where younger generations pay for the retirement of older generations, who are ironically wealthier in terms of net worth, i.e. poorer Americans subsidize wealthier Americans.
• The system is cash flow negative as of last year, i.e. it is no longer self funding, it requires the Federal government to sell more debt to cover its expense stream, constantly adding to the national debt.
• The Social Security Trust Fund does not exist, it is an accounting mirage. There is no $2 TRILLION trust fund sitting around in the U.S. Treasury to cover future Social Security expenses.
• The Supreme Court has reaffirmed the Federal government’s power to change the rules, payouts, tax scheme, etc. as it pleases, there is no guarantee of future benefits or payouts.
• The Social Security system is estimated to have future unfunded liabilities of about $45 TRILLION.
• The ratio of workers paying into the system relative beneficiaries taking out of the system has gotten dramatically smaller over time, place a larger and larger financial burden on today’s workers.
• Analytical study after analytical study, both by private entities and government agencies, have definitively proven that the Social Security process and model is an absolute lousy retirement investment program.

A typical government approach: expensive, going bankrupt, inefficient, and subject to the whims and actions of the Washington political class.

14) In an ABC News interview in 2009 President Obama said that if Congress did not pass health care legislation that brought down health care costs, the Federal government “will go bankrupt.” Congress passed his plan but Obama Care costs are now triple what the President promised they would be in 2009, now standing at $2.7 trillion, up from under $900 billion just a few years ago (double click on the image for a larger view):

Seems like the Federal government will go bankrupt but Obama Care, rather than preventing it, will accelerate the bankruptcy proceedings.

So let’s review this less than stellar checklist of accomplishments:

• Operating a successful retirement program via Social Security: Failure
• Operating a successful retirement medical program via Medicare: Failure
• Operating successful pre-retirement programs via Medicaid and Obama Care: Failure
• Operating a successful national energy program via ethanol and alternative energy subsidies: Failure
• Operating a successful farm policy via programs that encourage farmers not to farm: Failure
• Operating a safe society by disarming law abiding citizens in violation of the Second Amendment: Potential failure
• Operating an efficient, non-groping airport security program: Failure
• Operating an efficient, effective, and compassionate illegal immigration policy: Failure
• Operating an efficient, effective, and compassionate illegal drug policy: Failure
• Operating anything that is efficient, effective, and compassionate: Failure

One damning list of non-accomplishments. That is why several steps from “love My Country, Loathe My Government” are critical to fixing what ails America:

1. Step 1 would reduce Federal spending by 10% a year for five years. Not only would this go a long way to getting our national debt under control it would also help focus the political class on far fewer priorities since they would not have the budget to fund everything they fund today. Hopefully by having less to focus on they could actually resolve a major issue or two.
2. Step 34 would hold Congressional committee members responsible for their committees' actions and records. Poor performing committees would have their members replaced for incompetence and dereliction of duty, i.e. we would hold politicians accountable, a foreign concept to most of them.
3. Step 39 would impose term limits on all Federal politicians. Many members of Congress have been in office for twenty, thirty, or more years. They were present when all of the above failures happened. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Maybe we can eventually get to a state of government when government solutions actually work and work efficiently and cost effectively without unwanted unintended consequences. Until then, let these 14 examples of failure and incompetency be the legacy of the people we continue to keep in office.

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

Government: If You Think The Problems We Create Are Bad, Wait Until You See Our Solutions, Part 2

Last Thursday was the first of three posts where we will discussing the premier failure of 14 Federal government programs. This discussion is in light of the “Hunger Games” scenario we had previously proposed, a scenario that illustrates how a small, elitist set of people, the political class, get all of the benefits of a hard working society without doing a lot of work or resolving any major issue of our times. The first five issues we discussed included:

1. Prohibition and the related lost war on drugs.
2. The continuing saga of our failing public schools.
3. The financial and medical disaster that is Medicare.
4. The financial and medical disaster that is Medicaid.
5. Our lack of a compassionate and security minded illegal immigration policies.

The next five Federal government failures are listed below:

6) Since Nixon launched the “war on drugs” over forty years ago, the U.S. has spent over a trillion dollars in executing that failed strategy. The Independent Journal Review article, on which much of these posts are based on, pointed out how drug use has probably been unaffected by this “war,” given the exponential growth in Americans locked up behind bars for some sort of drug offense (double click on the chart for a larger view):

Thus, over a trillion dollars spent/wasted without reducing illegal drug usage, if we use incarceration has a surrogate for usage. All the Federal government ended up doing was to enrich Mexican drug cartels with no benefit back to American society in improved drug treatment policies, reduced drug abuse, or reduced prison expenditures.

7) The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 did two bad things: it allowed the Federal government to get deeply involved in private enterprise, in this case the farming industry and more insanely, used taxpayer dollars to pay farmers NOT to farm. This is like paying doctors not to doctor, accountants not to do taxes, restaurants not to serve food, etc. It pretends that Washington bureaucrats, living in a far off land known as Washington D.C., have a better feel for the market, the laws of supply and demand, and the challenges of farming than those actually doing the deed of farming.

As a result, we get a complete distortion of the free market, wasting of taxpayer dollars, and an obese nation since these policies have resulted in an abundance of foods and sweeteners that are bad for us and an under supply of food that is good and healthy for us.

We end up spending trillions of dollars to restrict and misdirect food supplies while millions of Americans go hungry or get fat.

8) Staying down on the farm, according to a Daily Finance report on AOL: “Over the past 30 years, the Federal government has given an estimated $45 billion to the corn industry to help support ethanol production. In 2011 alone, those subsidies totaled about $6 billion, or about 45 cents for every gallon of ethanol.

Those in Washington who administer this program obviously had a very limited understanding of supply and demand. If you reduce the supply of farmland that is used to raise edible crops, diverting that farm land’s use to producing inedible crops that are used to power cars, if demand stays the same or rises, the need to eat, the price of food has to go up.

And this is exactly what happened, screwing the American taxpayer in two ways. Politicians took taxpayer wealth, gave it to farmers to make ethanol, and which resulted in Americans paying more for food since their taxpayer dollars had been spent to reduce the supply of food. Circular, idiotic government logic at its best.

9) One of the Obama administration’s big drives was in the alternative energy fields. We have covered the many failures of this effort many times as it relates to the companies that Obama gave American tax dollars to, all of which are already out of business or are in some stage of bankruptcy proceedings. These ill-fated but crony-important investments include, but are not limited to, Solyndra, A123, Evergreen, Spectra, Ecotality, and others.

But bad investments in companies is not the only way the Federal government wasted money. Number 9 out of our 14 epic Federal government disasters include the following data from the Department of Labor’s Inspector General from January, 2012:

• A major component of the Obama green/alternative energy program included a goal that was to train 124,893 people in green technology jobs.
• After training, the related goal was to place 79,854 (64%) of these newly trained workers in actual new green jobs.
• 17 months into the program, program results indicate that only 52,762 were trained, and only 8,035 got green jobs.
• Each job cost taxpayers about $62,000.

So the program only attained 42% of its planned training objective and a measly 10% of its placement objective. These results are failures in whatever human endeavor you are talking about.

10) In the realm of unintended consequences, consider the knee jerk reaction of Washington politicians to one book, a book whose assertions, conclusions, and science has pretty much been debunked over time. Shortly after Rachel Carson published her book, “Silent Spring,” in 1962 which cited the use of the insecticide DDT as a major menace to humans and the environment, Washington and other Western nations banned production and use of it.

However, while the misuse of DDT was a real problem, proper use of DDT was not. DDT had proven to be a very effective deterent against the spread of malaria. However, because the political class never took the time to understand the deeper cause and effects of DDT, their knee jerk reaction to an unneeded outright ban has probably led to the premature death of millions of people according to two experts in the field, Michael Arnold Glueck and Robert J. Cihak, both M.D.s: “That DDT prevented 500 million deaths by 1970 and that the banning of its use in poor countries has resulted in millions of unnecessary deaths holds no sway with true believers in this doctrine [of banning DDT].

Thus, in this disaster, taxpayer money was not wasted and a major domestic issue did not go unresolved for decades. The political class just condemned millions of people to premature deaths because they never took the time to properly analyze the situation.

Mishandling the drug abuse problem, ignorantly intervening in the farm industry market, wasting money on failing or failed alternative nergy intiatives, and causing people to die for not understanding a problem. Yes, I would say these were five major disasters, courtesy fo the American political class. We will finish up with the final four of 14 disasters tomorrow.

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