November, 2013 Polticial Class Insanity, Part 5: Iraq Imploding, Medicare Wasting, Economy Staggering, and More

Although yesterday was supposed to be the final political class insanity for this month, by the time we got done writing the first four posts of insanity we came to realize that the political class had created enough new lunacy that we could do another post today. These five posts have purposely stayed away from the biggest insanity of all, the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We will need at least five or six posts next week to get in all of that nonsense as we continually prove that it is the worst piece of legislation ever to come out of Washington.

Today we will focus mostly on the ordinary, run-of-the-mill insanity that we get bombarded with from the political class every day:

1) This should be a golden time for the U.S. economy. We are years removed from the last recession. The Federal Reserve has kept interest rates at record low levels for a record length of time which should have resulted in an economic boon. The technology advances in the energy section have made energy cheaper and created a load of jobs in the industry sector. We should be living through great economic times comparable to the dot com boom of the 1990s.

However, that is not the case, Unemployment is historically high, college graduate cannot find jobs, minority employment is very high, the national debt is skyrocketing due to trillion dollar annual deficits. The political class in the White House and Congress have failed to provide economic leadership and policies that lead to economic vitality and growth despite optimal conditions. 

How bad is it? The following graph, based on data from the Census Department, shows the “job deficit” by industry where the job deficit is defined by the difference between the number of jobs available in an industry and the number of people trying to get a job in that industry (click on the graph itself for a larger view):

As you can see, across the board, EVERY industry segment has far fewer jobs than the number of people that might fill those jobs. Thus, despite  record low interest rates, record setting energy sector successes, and years removed from the last recession, this group of politicians in Washington has managed to create a horrific economic condition.

2) Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently said the following on a Nevada radio station, contending that EVERYBODY in America wants to pay more in taxes: “Everybody else, including rich people, are willing to pay more. They want to pay more."

Some insanity from a politician is insane enough to stand on its own without my commentary.

3) Long time Congressman Bill Young from Florida passed away several weeks ago, condolences to his family. But even this seemingly simple incidence reveals more political class insanity and waste. The Washington Times reported on October 22, 2013 that Congress would close down and arrangements would be made for members of Congress to be flown to Florida to attend Congressman Young’s funeral ....using Air Force planes.

Several things truly wrong about this situation:

• Many members of Congress are millionaires many times over, they could easily and painlessly pay their own airfare to take commercial jets to Florida to attend the funeral.
• All members of Congress earn at least $174,000 or so a year, putting them in the top 2-3% of all American workers, they could easily afford a few hundred dollar expense to pay their own way to Florida.
• No one ever pays my way to a funeral, why should taxpayers pay the way of these relatively wealthy Americans to attend a funeral that was not even a family member?
• If the Air Force has enough spare planes and gas lying around for this kind of boondoggle, then we really need to trim the Defense Department budget.

Just another example of the “Hunger Games” world we currently live in where life is made easy for Washington politicians and their cronies at the expense of everyone else in the country who pays for their expenses and luxury life styles.

4) Here is a throw back piece of insanity that still haunts the country today. We have spent billions and billions of wasted taxpayer dollars and wasted the lives of thousands of brave American military personnel as a result of our ill fated invasion of Iraq. Our actions destroyed just about everything institution and working piece of society in that country for very little gain except to overthrow and kill a dictator that was a nuisance but not a threat to the U.S.

Well, according to a November 1, 2013 CNN report, that country is about ready to explode because of the renewed presence of Al Qaeda and civil war like strife:

• Almost a thousand Iraqis died in just October from in-country violence.
• Over 6,000 have been killed so far in 2013. 
• The economy is imploding. 
• Al Qaeda is back and getting stronger.
• The civil war in neighboring Syria is spilling over into Iraq.
• And if our nation’s cost was not enough, the Prime Minister of Iraq is in Washington asking for weapons and other help to fight terrorism in the country.

The invasion of Iraq, the war that keeps on taking, thanks to the Washington political class both a decade ago and possibly today.

5) In a government report released on October 31, 2013 by the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, we find that  the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the same bureaucracy  responsible for managing  the Obama Care rollout, paid  $23 million in false benefits to dead people in 2011. They also erroneously paid out $29 million in drug payouts for illegal aliens.

$52 million paid out fraudulently and wastefully. And this is just the wasted money they have identified and/or admit to. While $52 million is a small fraction of the overall government expense stream, when you replicate $52 million in wasted thousands of times across all Federal departments, you eventually come up with some serious destruction of taxpayer wealth.

The final taxpayer insult in this affair is that the CMS had been warned about this type of waste five years prior to 2011 and still allowed it to happen. As always, there was no evidence that anyone was fired for wasting $52 million, that would have involved accountability, a virtue seriously absent in Washington.

6) Many times we have discussed how stupid and invalid most of our anti-drug laws are. We have been fighting, and losing, the so-called war on drugs for four decades. All we have accomplished is to waste billions and billions of law enforcement dollars and fill our prisons with Americans who were simply users of illegal drugs, not peddlers of illegal drugs. Oh, as a side effect, we have helped create large, rich, and ultra violent foreign drug cartels that now operate freely throughout the United States.

The absurdity of our drug laws was highlighted in a recent article in the September, 2013 issue of Reason Magazine. The article reviewed a new study in an online journal, run by the Public Library of Science, of 130,000 Americans and the 21,000 within that sample who had used psychedelic drugs in their past. Obviously, psychedelic drugs like LSD, peyote, and mescaline are illegal and banned by the government and political class.

What did the study’s researchers find:

• There are “no significant associations between lifetime use of any psychedelics or past year use of LSD and increased rate of the mental health outcomes.”
• “Over the past 50 years tens of millions of people have used psychedelics, and there just is not much evidence of long term problems.”
• In some cases, “psychedelic use was associated with lower rate of mental health problems.” 
• The study also found that on average, psychedelic drug users had higher educational attainment and income than non-users.

And for this, the Federal government has spent forty years worth of fighting illegal psychedelic drug trafficking to prevent people from not hurting themselves.

There you have it for this month, the continuing insanity of the political class. People who lose tens of millions of dollars despite being told how not do, a Senate leader who is truly delusional when it comes to increasing taxes, total ignorance when it comes to creating economy growth and vitality, an Iraq that is ready to implode and explode despite how much blood and national treasure we have expended in it, and another example of the pampered political class using taxpayer wealth to attend a funeral. Just a typical month of lunacy, courtesy of our political class.

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