http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-2013-obama-care-disaster-update.html
Unfortunately for the country, we may have to devote another long series of posts this month to capture the continuing fiasco that is Obama Care. However, for the next several days, we will focus only on the non-Obama Care insanity that constantly rains down on us by our elected officials and the dysfunctional government entities it oversees and directs.
1) The United Nations recently released its World Happiness Report which ranks 156 countries based on their citizens’ sense of well-being. It takes into account perceptions of wealth, freedom, corruption, and other measures.
Unfortunately, we are not as happy as we used to be. According to the report, the U.S. percent change in their happiness score went down about 4% between 2007 and 2012. Now, one could make the argument that we suffered through the Great Recession (and are still suffering through it) and that is why Americans are not as happy as they used to be.
However, the entire world suffered through the same recession and a whole set of countries’ citizens are happier now than they were five years ago including Peru, South Korea, Ethiopia, Mexico, Brazil, and many others. Makes one wonder if the current set of politicians in Washingotn are the ones to keep going around forward if our happiness levels during their reign has gone down so dramtically vs. the rest of the world.
2) The American taxpayer has easily spent over a TRILLION dollars on the Federal government’s Department of Education since it was formed about 30 years ago. Have we gotten our money’s worth? Probably not, if you consider a fact from a recent Wall Street Journal article that was summarized in the October 11, 2013 issue of The Week magazine.
According to the article, almost half of American eight grade students cannot put three fractions in order by value. The article points out that this ability is typically taught and learned in the third grade. A TRILLION dollars spent and this is the end result. We probably could have gotten the same results by not spending the TRILLION dollars.
Time for a major reconsideration of this Federal bureaucracy including shutting it down and walking away, letting the states take their best shot at educating our kids. Lord knows, based on info like this, the Federal government cannot educate our kids.
3) Given all of the Obama Care fiascos over the past month or so, it is pretty obvious that the Federal government and the politicians that operate it are not capable of involving themselves in the health care industry in a positive and effective way. But that fact should come as no surprise since we already know that the Federal government was not capable of involving themselves in another major industry in this country in a positive and effective way, the housing industry.
Their bumbling around in the housing industry via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was a major, major driver of the Great Recession’s root causes. Their ineptness has resulted in the American taxpayer already shelling out over $180 billion to resuce the bad investments, bad decisions and the corruption that were hallmarks of Fannie and Freddie.
But the taxpayer bill does not stop with Fannie and Freddie. According to the L.A. Times, the Federal Housing Administration’s financials are now under water and it will require at least $1.7 billion in taxpayer bailout money to stay solvent. It needs the funding to “ensure it has sufficient reserves to cover anticipated losses on the loans it backs.”
It seems that everything the political class and the Federal government touches eventually ends up failing, needing taxpayer support, and/or failing to meet its objectives, from housing to healthcare to education.
4) According to an article in a recent issue of Businessweek magazine, the economy, in many ways, has reached epic lows for a lot of Americans. How do we know that? The article points out that a major market has arisen, due to dire economic conditions, where Americans are selling body parts to get by.
These body parts range from long tresses of hair to breast milk to eggs to possibly kidneys. At the Shady Grove Fertility Center offices, the number of women donating their eggs is up 13% from 2012 with about 65% of the donors saying that financial considerations and payments were part of their decision.
Americans can buy and sell hair on websites such as www.buyandsellhair.com and can sell their breast milk at www.onlythebreast.com. Kidneys sold on the black market, because kidney selling is illegal, can result in a donor getting about $15,000.
Did you ever think that Americans would endure such a bad economy for so long that selling body parts is needed to get by financially? That is just another example of the inability and ignorance in Washington when it comes to economic matters and policy. Four years after the recession ended and this is what some Americans need to do. Unheard of.
5) How about some more bad economic news and evidence that those leading this country, both parties, have no idea how to preside over a vibrant, growing economy? According to a Census Bureau report that was issued on September 17, 2013, American working men who worked full time year round earned LESS in real, inflation adjusted terms, in 2012 than working American men earned in 1973.
During that time, we have had both parties control the White House and Congress so this is not a Republican vs. Democrat issue, it is a political class failure. Both parties have contributed to the deterioration of living and economic conditions in his country over the past four decades.
6) After the Great Recession hit, the Washington political class went about developing legislation that would ensure that the housing, banking/financial, and mortgage industries would be put under more government regulation so that another Great Recession would never happen again. They ended up writing this huge, cumbersome set of regulations called Dodd-Frank that was supposed to fix everything.
One of the major components of the legislation was to eliminate the “too big to fail” conditions that required the American taxpayer to bail out banks via the TARP program when the Great Recession hit. The justification for the bailout is that if one of these super sized banks went out of business, the ripple effect across the financial markets would be dire. Thus, we HAD to eliminate the too big to fail syndrome.
Well, years after Dodd-Frank was enacted, the major banks in this country now have 28% more assets than they did in 2007, according to Michael Hilzik writing in the L.A. Times. Thus, a handful of banks are even bigger than they were prior to the legislation and are now much too big to fail.
Thus, the legislation did the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do: rather than make banks less capable of killing the economy it somehow made it more capable of dragging down the economy. Talk about incompetence.
This is just the start of the poltical class nsanity for this month. Happiness is down, bailouts are up, and more ineptness is just a start. Until tomorrow, consider visiting our term limits website because, given what we cover every month in our insanity series, how much worse could it get if we dumped every current Washington politician out of office:
www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
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:
Term Limits Now:http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
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