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.

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http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w