1) According to a USA Today article that was summarized in the February 8, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, almost 50% of working Americans with college degrees are overqualified for their current jobs. Around 15% of taxi drivers and 25% of retail sales clerks have at least bachelors degrees. Looks like the Great Recession was NOT followed by the Great Recovery. Or even the Mediocre Recovery.
2) The Boston Globe reported in late January, 2013 that Obama’s inaugural committee raised more than $53 million, mostly from 458 elitist donors who gave $50,000 each. Possibly a better use of that money would have been to provide a trained police officer in some of our schools to protect our kids from another Newtown school incident. That $53 million could have protect over 900 schools for a year rather than blowing it on a pompous and unnecessary set of political class parties and celebrations.
3) This set of bad inaugural priorities is not to be confused with the overall set of bad priorities when it comes to the amount of money spent on the November, 2012 elections. According to a Politico article that was summarized in the February 15, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, the total amount spent on all campaigns and advertising for the 2012 election cycle was a record $7.3 billion.
This is just one indication of how big money has corrupted our election processes. You can be sure that the voices of individual Americans was never heard in this onslaught of billons of dollars from corporations, unions, PACS, and lobbyist.
By the way, from a bad priority perspective, that $7.3 billion could have protected just about every American school with a trained police officer for a whole year.
4) As the U.S. prepares to withdrawal most of its military assets from Afghanistan, let’s review what a financial disaster this military incursion has been across the previous two Presidential administrations, as recently reported in the Tampa Bay Times based on Government Accountability Office analysis
- Total amount of taxpayer wealth spent on Afghanistan - Half a TRILLION dollars.
- Percentage of Afghanistan’s government spending covered by U.S. tax dollars - 64%
- Percentage of Afghanistan’s government spending that comes from Afghanistan - 10%
- Percentage of Afghanistan’s population that is illiterate - 72
- Percentage of Afghanistan’s women who can read and write - 13%
- Afghanistan’s security situation as measured by the number of daily attacks from the Taliban - Increasing over time
- Number of attacks on U.S. forces by Afghan security forces - Increasing over time, with 2012 seeing the most attacks ever, more than twice the number of attacks of any previous year.
Not a great return on our investment, an investment that cost the average American household about $4,400 each, with those households who lost family members in the fighting paying a significantly higher cost.
5) Business Week had an interesting article in its February 11, 2013 issue regarding a Federal law that is still on the books even though it was passed during the Presidential administration of Ulysses S. Grant:
- This mining law was originally established to encourage the settlement of the West.
- It allowed prospectors to remove gold and other valuable minerals from government lands without paying any royalties.
- Since then, the West has been long settled and the age of the solitary prospector is long gone but the law still exists, allowing large corporate mining companies to mine Federal lands for free.
- Not only do the mining companies not pay anything for the privilege of mining on government land, the American taxpayer, not the mining companies, is responsible for any environmental cleanup that is needed as a result of the mining operations, a cost that the General Accountability Office estimates at $2.6 billion since 1998 but which the EPA estimates could be as high as $54 billion going forward, all paid by the American taxpayer.
- If these mineral mining efforts were assessed royalties at the same rate that royalties are assessed on oil, coal, and gas that is mined from government lands, the article estimates that $1 billion a year could be generated to offset government spending overall and government spending on cleaning up mining sites.
But, alas, when does logic and good sense every come into play when dealing with the Washington political class? Although there have been some half hearted efforts to fix the situation, powerful politicians, specificially Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have always succeeded in stopping reform. Want to bet that mining industry companies have been heavy donors to previous election campaigns for politicians like Harry Reid? Just a thought.
That’s enough for today, the third part of our March series on political class insanity. Underemployed Americans, bad priorities, half a trillion dollars wasted for no good in Afghanistan, and living with an 1872 law. The case for term limits for Federal politicians (Step 39 from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government) gets stronger every day.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:
www.loathemygovernment.com
It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
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