Political Class Insanity, Part 1, February, 2013: Politicians That Cannot Budget Or Save, Luxurious Government Bathrooms and More

At the beginning of every month we review the insanity, idiocy, and follies that the political class has dumped on us over the previous month of so. Last month seems like the whole month of posts was dedicated to political class insanity as we did extensive reviews of the idiocy of Obama Care and the fumbling, grandstanding, and politicizing of the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

However, today and for a few days after today, we will be reviewing just plain old, simple incompetence of the political class, the never ending stream of insults and wasting of taxpayer wealth that we get hit with every month from our current set of politicians.

1) Our first example this month actually happened in 2007 but has just come to light. ABC News Reported the following story and facts on January 16, 2013:

• In 2007, the personal bathroom used by the Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, was remodeled.
• The renovation cost an amazing $222,000. One bathroom, one Cabinet level Secretary. I would bet that the average cost of an American home on the market today costs less than $222,000.
• The renovated bathroom has a $3,500 sub-zero refrigerator. Yes, the need for a high end refrigerator in one’s bathroom cannot be underestimated.
• According to the story, one faucet cost $689, which implies there were more than one faucet and more than one sink in the Secretary’s personal bathroom.
• The toilet paper holder cost “only” $65.
• It took the ABC News affiliate in Atlanta four full years to get the details of a single bathroom remodeling costs under a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request. Four years, one bathroom, talk about government inefficiency or more likely, a cover up due to the embarrassment of spending so much on a single bathroom remodel.
• This disgraceful waste of taxpayer wealth was uncovered by an audit done by the General Accounting Administration who appears to have a gift for the understatement: “A number of the items incorporated into the renovation project call into question the need for luxurious materials.”

You think? $222,000 to remodel a single, personal bathroom with faucets that cost over $600 each and a $65 toilet paper holder? It really is looking like we have an elitist set of people working and living in the D.C. area who think they deserve this kind of special treatment at our expense. A real “let them eat cake” moment from the Washington political class.

2) There are many, many reasons why the nation and its citizens are facing a massive $16.4 TRILLION national debt. Government programs are inefficient, ineffective, redundant, and many infested with massive criminal fraud. Old programs never die, they just get refunded every year even if their purpose for existing is no longer needed. The Democratically controlled Senate has not passed a formal budget since April, 2009, making coherent and rational spending decisions and tradeoffs next to impossible.

To this lurid mix of incompetence we can add in the inability of the Obama administration to hit the legal and required budget deadlines that every President before him has been able to meet:

• Obama’s current budget proposal to Congress might not be passed over to Congress until March, a full month past the legal deadline of the first Monday in February (February 4 this year).
• This extends an abysmal track record of Obama’s fourth late budget submission in five years.
• He is now the first President to present three consecutive late budgets.
• Obama already is the first President to deliver three of his budgets late in just one term and the first to submit budgets late two years in a row.
• He also holds the record for the latest delayed budget submission: 98 days.
• According to the House Budget Committee, since enactment of the 1921 Budget and Accounting Act, which created the formal executive budget process: “All Presidents from Harding to Reagan’s first term met the statutory budget submission deadline in every year.”
• Even during World War II and the Korean war, the President’s budget reached Congress on time.
• With the Obama administration, meeting fiscal deadlines is an anomaly.
• Obama has also never submitted a Mid-Session Review by July 16, as required by law.

When laws get broken by ordinary citizens there are consequences. When laws get broken by Presidential administrations there are no ramifications, except for the fact that without timely and effective budgets, government spending goes wild and current and future generations are faced with incredibly burdensome national debt loads. Dereliction of Presidential duties is too mild a term for this atrocity.

3) CBS News in Detroit reported on November 28, 2013 that a Michigan state senator has proposed that an option for the future of Detroit might be dissolving the city outright and letting neighboring communities pick up parts of the Detroit real estate and govern it as if it was their own. The financial and governing environment has gotten so bad that some people actually think killing off the city is the best solution. And they may be right.

Think about the magnitude of this position, a position that is not so far fetched. Detroit was once one of the largest cities in the U.S. It had a thriving economy and a large middle class population, mostly as a result of the auto industry. It was a major, major manufacturing center for the country.

Now, it is a vast wasteland with abandoned homes, whole neighborhoods that were abandoned and their structures razed to hinder the crime that the empty buildings harbored. There is effectively no middle class left in the city. The city government and the officials/politicians that have operated it either did a bad job, went to jail for crimes committed while in office, or both. And no political person, political party, or political solution has been able to resurrect what was once a thriving metro area.

The only political solution that might make sense is to just dissolve the city and make it go away, as if it never happened. So sad, another disgraceful performance from a political class that can spend and waste but cannot budget and grow the benefits for ordinary citizens.

4) The Americans For Prosperity website had a post on January 9, 2013 that documented just SOME of the special spending tidbits that our gutless political class had embedded in the fiscal cliff deal that was signed on January 2, 2013. This deal increased the tax burden on almost 80% of Americans starting immediately.

Think about that fact when reviewing the additional spending that Washington politicians approved for their crony and political donor friends, at all of our expense:

1. Tax credit for wind farms (Section 407) Cost: $12.2 billion. Description: Extends the wind production tax credit, also offering the credit to those wind farms at the beginning of energy projects instead of at completion.
2. Active financing exception for Wall Street (Section 322) Cost: $9 billion per year. Description: Multinational corporations can use this exception to avoid paying some taxes by creating certain overseas entities, a mechanism known as active financing.
3. New Goldman Sachs offices (Section 328) Cost: $1.5 billion. Description: Initially established to provide tax-exempt financing for rebuilding the World Trade Center area, this provision partially went to fund Goldman Sachs offices. It has been extended.
4. Whirlpool Corporation tax credit (Section 409) Cost: $650 million. Description: For producing energy-efficient appliances, Whirlpool receives an extended $650 million tax credit (not nearly as much as the $1.8 billion extended to financial institutions for investing in “low-income areas”).
5. Extended rum tax (Section 329) Cost: $220 million; $547 million in 2009. Description: Funnels the revenue of the excise tax on rum to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, subsidizing their rum industries.
6. Incentives for taking public transportation to work (Section 203) Cost: $220 million. Description: As part of an incentive to have people take public transportation, benefits have been set to an equal level with those for driving. Now employers can cover the same amount toward commuting expenses tax-free whether workers take public transit or drive.
7. Railroad repair (Section 306) Cost: $165 million per year. Description: Railroads can claim tax credits for performing maintenance.
8. Hollywood subsidies (Section 317) Cost: $75 million per year. Description: Provides producers with deductions of $15-20 million for filming in the United States, especially in low-income areas.
9. Help grow algae (Section 404) Cost: $59 million. Description: Algae growers receive tax credits in their quest to turn algae into a biofuel source.
10. NASCAR racetracks (Section 312) Cost: $43 million over the past two years. Description: Tax benefits for racetracks in order to supposedly even competition with “other amusement parks.”
11. Mine safety (Section 307 and 316) Cost: $14 million. Description: Encourages implementation of common sense safety measures by mining companies.
12. Electric scooters (Section 403) Cost: $4-7 million. Description: Electric vehicle tax credits extended to include electric motorbikes.
13. Indian coal: alternative energy? (Section 406) Cost: $1 million. More specifically, Section 406 subsidizes by $2 per ton coal produced on Indian lands.

Let’s see: raise taxes on almost 80% of all Americans and turn right around and give tax breaks of over $15 billion right back to your political friends. As we have said many times in the past, these people are shameless.

5) The Washington Guardian posted a Pentagon related article on its website on January 10, 2013 that discussed two interesting situations. First, the U.S. Navy had decided to retire seven of its battle cruisers from service. In the opinion of the Navy’s experts, these ships were no longer needed for national defense and to upgrade them would unnecessarily cost billions and billions of dollars.

Wow, a part of the Federal government actually trying to do the right thing and be efficient, saving taxpayer wealth in the process. Certainly something you do not see everyday. But it turned out to be too good to be true.

Congress stepped in and prohibited the Navy from decommissioning the ships that it said were no longer needed. Congressional members quoted in the article said they felt that losing these seven, almost obsolete ships would endanger our national defense.

This might be true but who would you believe first, the professionals in the Navy who felt the ships were not needed and wanted to save some taxpayer wealth ($259 billion over five years) or the politicians in Congress that want to protect jobs back in their states and districts, even if those jobs were useless, or who wanted to keep their defense contractor political backers happy? I would vote for the admirals every time.

The second situation is of a broader scope but reinforces the notion that politicians do not want to get spending under control or do not know how to get spending under control. According to the Guardian: “The Defense Department requested $613.9 billion for fiscal year 2013 - almost $32 billion less than it received last year. Instead, lawmakers sent the Pentagon roughly $633 billion for 2013, still less than the agency received last year but $20 billion above what Pentagon leaders had requested.”

Who does not think that the additional funding set aside for the Defense Department, money it said it did not need, was purely for earmarks for favored political cronies and backers of the Washington politicians?

By the way, in light of the Newtown school shooting, that additional $20 billion that the Defense Department said it does not need or want could staff a trained and armed police officer in every U.S. school for almost three years. You decide what the better priority is, unneeded military expenditures or protecting our kids.

That’s it for now, the insanity out of Washington just keeps on coming. And more will come over the next few days.

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