However, please note that the Washington political class has been on vacation for the past four weeks so that is probably the reason for the lighter craziness this month. I shutter to think what we will need to cover next month once the minions are back in Washington for a month and causing trouble.
1) Back in 2009, the Citizens Against Government Waste organization applauded the Obama administration for saying it would attack wasteful government spending by slashing some programs including the infamous West Virginia “Road to Nowhere.” This embarrassment was a pet pork spending project of the late Senator Robert Byrd. The road had no financial or economic value at all except to divert American taxpayer wealth into some road construction jobs in his home state.
Well, four years later, Senator Byrd has passed away but the road to nowhere continues to get funding to go nowhere. A recent Washington Post article points out that Byrd’s ability to fund pork spending in his state is just as strong in death as in life, as the road continues to get $40 million a year from the Federal government and the U.S. taxpayer. It will continue to need that amount of money every year until 2035 when it should be finished but still lead to nowhere. Pathetic.
As a recent Cato Institute article points out, why don’t we just build a large statue honoring the late Senator and be done with this annual wasteful spending. Sounds good to me.
2) The Independent Journal review had some interesting statistics and findings in an article it published on August 22, 2013:
- A recent Gallup poll asked a set of Americans how much they trusted the Federal government and the politicians that operate it to do the right thing, "how much of the time do you trust the government in Washington to do what is right: just about always, most of the time, only some of the time and never."
Their latest survey found that a whopping 81% of Americans do not think that the Federal government will do the right thing just about always or most of the time, only 19% think it will. This finding of 81% has been trending worse for the past five years or so with 70% saying government will not do the right thing (still not a great perception) as late as 2007.
Another confirmation of our hypothesis that we are living under the worst set of Washington politicians in the history of our country, a hypothesis confirmed by over 80% of Americans thinking that Washington hardly ever does the right thing.
- Despite President Obama’s assertion that the economy has fully recovered, recent research from Pew Research indicates that only 28% of Americans agree with him while 46% think economic recovery is a long way off. Looks like the President needs to get out of his cocoon of non-reality and get out into the real world where the real unemployment rate is still about 14% and over twenty million Americans are unemployed or under employed.
I would hate to see what he thinks America looks like if it had not fully recovered, given these dismal statistics.
- According to another Pew Research study from May, 2013, 66% of Americans think that the public education system and processes in this country either need a major overhaul or need to be torn down and started over. However, in the four and a half years that Obama has been President, there has been absolutely no effort made on his behalf to change this negative status quo to stop under educating our kids. Perhaps it is because his kids and most of the rest of the politicians in Washington send their kids to elite private schools.
- When the Obama Care legislation was passed three years ago only 46% of Americans had a favorable view of it. Today, that number has dropped to 37%, probably as a result of the myriad of problems and stupidity that was embedded in the law and how much of that insanity has now become public.
However, Obama and other political types in Washington continue to insist that this is a wonderful bill, that they have exempted themselves from much of, and that there will only be a few bumps in the road to roll it out. Highly doubtful
I think what these statistics point out is that the politicians in Washington have a gross misunderstanding of the reality of what Americans think about the major issues and even what the major issues are. A paragraph from the article sums up this disconnect quite nicely:
Even a blind monkey with half a brain could tell you that there’s a disconnect between the current administration and the public. Just how big is this disconnect? As you probably expect, massive. On the major issues that dominate interviews and debates each year, political leaders are increasingly distancing themselves from the views of the majority of American people.
The President is taking multi-million dollar vacations while regular Americans are decreasing their number of paid off days just to keep their jobs. Legislators are enrolling their children in elite private schools while the rest of us are volunteering personal time and money to help our local public school systems. The NSA is defending its right to access public phone records, though we are adamantly calling for it to stop.
Well said, a major disconnect between what the political class perceives and what reality is throughout America.
3) An August 16, 2013 article from the wonderful website, Bankrupting America, had a great example of how perverted reason and logic can be in Washington D.C. According to the Department of Agriculture (USDA), Virginia recently passed their yearly food assistance/food stamp audit with flying colors. Virginia had one of the lowest food assistance mistake rates in the country. They mistakenly paid out ONLY $19 million in taxpayer wealth in their state program. ONLY $19 million and they were one of the best states with the lowest mistake rate. I cannot imagine what the millions and millions of dollars the worst states paid out mistakenly.
Even if Virginia was one of the best, $19 million is still a lot of waste. But how did the USDA reward a state like Virginia that over-issued $19 million worth of food stamps?The USDA gave the state a whopping $2 million bonus for being the best of a bad lot.
Makes no sense: get rewarded with two million dollars for mistakenly paying out $19 million. Maybe Virginia should have paid back the American taxpayer $2 million for being so incompetent. Talk about rewarding idiocy. And, again, Virginia had one of the lowest mistake rates in the country! In 2012, the USDA rewarded 14 states a total of $22,325,811 million in rewards. Florida earned the top spot with over $8 million from the USDA.
At the same time that states were being paid bonuses for mistakenly giving out food stamps, Tom Vilsack, Secretary of the USDA, claimed that the only way he could deal with the minor budget cuts that came about as a result of the sequester, was to layoff 500 firefighters to make up for the $52 million budget cut he had to absorb. Seems that if the states, and the Federal government that was overseeing the states and their food stamp/food assistance programs were actually doing their jobs correctly, it would have been no problem to overcome that $52 million budget reduction.
Vilsack could have closed about 80% of that budget hit just by making sure that Virginia no longer had an annual $19 million mistake and if he eliminated the silly reward system, over $22 million annually, for rewarding incompetence. That gets him back $41 million before he even fixed anything in the other 49 dysfunctional state food assistance programs. Instead, he let’s the status quo go on and endangers the lives of Americans and their assets and property by cutting fire fighting resources. Pathetic set of priorities.
4) Einstein once said the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Keep those insightful words in mind as you read the following information, as reported by the California Report website.
In 2011, as a result of the housing collapse and the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve and other government entities, agencies, wisely decided to tighten lending rules for Qualified Residential Mortgages (QRMs). In the lead up to the Great Recession, recall that many homeowners were able to get mortgages that they could not afford by signing up for mortgages that required little or no down payment and mortgages that did not require an income or asset verification. Millions of these mortgage holders eventually defaulted on their mortgages, leading to the near collapse of the financial system and the crash of the stock market and the end of many, many banks.
In order to not duplicate this devastating economic meltdown in the future in the housing industry, the Fed and other government organizations instituted common sense changes to the home mortgage process. These changes required the buyer to put up a 20% down on the purchase, have viable assets, personally fund his own closing costs and not exceed 36% total debt to household income, including all housing costs. Good, solid guidelines to make sure people did not get into mortgage payments that were over their financial means.
But the definition of insanity…. Citing the dismal recovery in the housing market and rising rates, the Fed and other regulators recently announced that the rules on QRMs would be relaxed in order to stimulate the market and give many more people an opportunity to purchase a home. These changed rules include a proposal to not require ANY down payment and a debt to income ratio of 43%. In exchange, banks who make these loans would hold a 5% stake in the loans sold off on the secondary market.
We just came off a housing induced Great Recession, took remedial steps to fix what caused the Great Recession and we now want to allow banks, the same banks that got bailed out to the tune of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, to do the same stupid mortgage things all over again. While these relaxed rules and guidelines will probably allow more people to purchase a home, it will in no way make them more likely to afford a new home in tough financial times. You cannot make up this stupidity.
That will do it for today, I promise that tomorrow will be the final political class insanity post for this month. You will be surprised, shocked, and ticked off to see what your Federal politicians are spending your tax money on as we explore a new, insightful source of wasteful government spending.
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:
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Please visit the following sites for freedom:
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http://www.robertringer.com/
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