1) According to a Washington Monthly report that was summarized in the April 26, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, since the enactment of the Dodd-Frank financial industry reform legislation, the nation’s 20 largest banks have met 1,298 times with Federal government representatives to debate the 400 rules needed to be created to enact the law. Two thirds of those rules are still under construction despite the 1,298 meetings.
How pathetic is this piece of legislation when years after it was written, the bureaucracy and regulations to implement it are still significantly less than even one half done? Given this complexity, it is almost a lock that it will burden the economy with unnecessary paperwork, resources, and costs and probably never attain its original objectives.
Better to scrap it and start over, doing it with a lot more simplicity and elegance than thousands of pages of legislation and hundreds of thousands of pages of associated regulations that seem to have never get done. It is a good bet the legislation will be obsolete before it ever gets fully implemented. Insanity.
More in-depth insanity on Dodd-Frank can be found at:
http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2011/11/how-is-that-financial-industry-reform.html
http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/04/dodd-frank-financial-services-industry.html
http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/09/september-2012-political-class-insanity_5.html
2) In our March 8, 2013 post,
http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/03/march-2013-political-class-insanity_8.html
we reported on an Office of Management and Budget research report that found that the Federal government spends $1.7 billion annually for maintenance on empty buildings it owns, although some sources put the figure at closer to $25 billion, and estimates that 55,000 Federal government properties are underutilized or entirely vacant.
Now, keep these numbers in mind in light of a recent Bloomberg article that was summarized in the April 26, 2013 issue of The Week magazine. This article reported that the new headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security is scheduled to be completed in 2023 and will cost $3.9 billion to construct.
Are we to believe that of the 55,000 buildings and properties that the Federal government now spends billions of dollars a year to maintain, that none of those buildings could have been used to house the Department of Homeland Security and save the taxpayers what is likely to be far more than $3.9 billion when this is headquarters building completed ten years from now?
Why do we need to build a palace for another Federal bureaucracy when our debt is $17 TRILLION and we have 55,000 unused pieces of property laying around? The article points out that 17,000 employees of the Department will be housed there. Shouldn’t these resources be spread around the country and on our borders to protect us, “homeland security,” rather than shut up in a single, massive headquarters location far away from where terrorists are planning their next attacks? Insanity.
3) A recent Pew Research study found that for the first time ever in their survey work, a majority of Americans, 52%, favor the legalization of marijuana. This support for legalization has grown substantially from the 41% level measured in 2010.
Given that our decades long war on drugs has been a bust and now apparently more than half of America has decided that legalizing pot is okay, shouldn’t we as a nation finally begin a serious and comprehensive discussion of the drug problem in this country and end the idiocy and futility of our lost war on drugs?
How long do we think it will take the political class to come to this realization and appreciation of reality? I would put the over/under bet at 15 years during which time we would have spent trillions of dollars more and wasted millions of lives for nothing.
4) Staying with the lost war on drugs, consider an article from The Telegraph newspaper in Great Britain, that was summarized in the April 5, 2013 issue of The Week. According to the article, the North Korean government is up to their neck in selling illegal drugs across the world to support the life styles of the North Korean elite and to finance their military and nuclear weapons needs. Apparently, their embassies and missions in other countries are a main distribution channel for their illegal drug operations.
South Korean defense analysts suspect that North Korean factories are producing narcotics that are “so renowned for their purity that they are in high demand across the globe.” Thus, our failed war on drugs has not only created a violent set of drug cartels that threaten to overwhelm the Mexican government but apparently our lost war is contributing to the creation of a reckless dictator and his growing nuclear weapon power that threatens us and the rest of the world.
5) Speaking of wars, a Bloomberg report that was summarized in the March 1, 2013 issue of The week magazine reported that U.S. defense spending was more than $700 billion in 2010 and 2011, up from $287 billion in 2001. The country now spends $250 billion more each year on defense than it spends on Medicare. On average, this means that every U.S. household is obscenely spending about $6,100 of its annual income on defense.
Maybe it is time to have a serious discussion on this out of control spending. At $700 billion a year, you know there has to be tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars, of waste in a budget that size. Maybe it is time that we seriously consider not deploying hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops around the world that no longer serve any purpose except to maintain an obsolete status quo (Japan, South Korea, Europe, Australia, Kuwait, etc.), bring them home, and bank the savings rather than waste the wealth.
6) Despite a $700 billion annual budget, apparently the Pentagon has not given disabled veterans a priority when it comes to disability claims. A recent new York Times report indicated that there are about 250,000 disability claims for veterans that are one year old or older.
While the Veterans Administration has announced a plan to speed up the claims process, it is an insult to our brave fighting forces to treat their potential welfare as secondary while we spend money to garrison troops around the world for no reason. We should be ashamed of how we treat this soldiers despite having a $700 billion annual defense budget.
7) When President Obama took office in 2009, he told Federal agencies and entities to cut back on noncompetitive government contracts, calling them “wasteful” and “inefficient.” Good strategy since competitive bidding, if done properly, can insure quality at the lowest price for any program or project.
Unfortunately, he never followed through with this noble thought. According to a Business Week blurb from their March 25, 2013 issue, the Federal government money spent on no-bid contracts under the Obama administration in just 2012 was a whopping $115.2 billion, an 8.9% increase from 2009, the year Obama said to cut back on no-bid contracts.
If just a 10% savings could have been wrung out of the $115.2 no-bid billion figure via competitive bidding, the $11.5 billion savings could have been used to give a tax break of about $100 to every American household, used to fund White House tours for almost 12,000 years, or used to give every one of those 250,000 veterans with disability claims a one time check of about $46,000.
Certainly better uses of the wealth than allowing no-bid contracts to be awarded, with Business Week reporting that about 87% of those no bid contract went to defense contractors.
Disgusted yet with Washington waste and incompetence? We are just getting started with this month’s political class insanity.
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
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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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