Monday, January 6, 2014

January, 2014 Poltiical Class Insanity, Part 2: A Do Nothing Washington, Pardoning Turkeys But Not People, Economic Pessimism, and More

This is the second in this month’s political class insanity series where we go through the insanity, stupidity, wasteful spending, and general idiocy of the political class. This is the same political class that has brought us over 20 million Americans being unemployed or under employed, a $17 TRILLION national debt burden, an ineffective foreign policy, wasteful spending on absolutely insane programs and projects, the destruction of First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights, and a slew of other insults and failures.

Over the past week of so we have been reviewing the wasteful spending of the political class and every month for the past five months we have set done a monthly series of posts of the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. Thus, the current political class insanity reviews will focus on just general and varied types of political class insanity with minimal reference to wasteful pending and Obama Care, two topics that deserved the infamy of being singled out in dedicated posts.

1) A Politico article that was reviewed in the December 6, 2013 issue of The Week magazine pointed out that the past Congress, the 113th, was on course to pass less legislation than any U.S. Congress in history. The expected output from this Congress is about 49 laws. The article pointed out that the so-called “Do Nothing’ Congress denounced by Harry Truman in 1947 passed 906 pieces of legislation.

Now, I would never want this political class to pass laws for the sake of passing laws. If the 49 laws they do pass actually resolved 49 major issues facing Americans, I could not be happier. However, the vast majority of these laws were probably either renewals of existing laws or approval of new Post Office location names, actions that do nothing to fix the economy, the environment, foreign policy, public schools, etc. 

For this type of minimal output, these people are paid over $170,000 a year, get great benefits, probably work less than 150 days a year, and are accountable to no one.

2) A more detailed view of their incompetence followed a few weeks later in an issue of Business Week. The final tally apparently was not 49 pieces of passed legislation, members of this Congress actually passed 50 pieces of legislation. Still pathetic.

The article provided a pictorial view of their incompetence:
  • 5,660 bills were introduced but only 50 passed, a success rate of less than a paltry 1%. Maybe in the future they should spend a little more time developing fewer proposed pieces of legislation and focus on passing more beneficial pieces of legislation.
  • 550 armed forces and national security bills were proposed but only seven were passed, a rousing success rate of 1.3%. 
  • Only one of ninety proposed bills related to housing and community development were passed.
  • A whopping 684 bills related to health care were introduced but only six were passed into law, a success rate of less than 1%. 
  • Many major categories of life had dozens and dozens of related bills proposed but NONE were enacted including the categories of environmental protection, commerce, and foreign trade.

Again, just a pathetic performance all around. With so many bills proposed and so many not enacted, it is obvious that this is a dysfunctional set of people operating in a dysfunctional environment where there is no overarching strategy, no cooperation, not strategic plan. Just 535 individuals going in their own direction, getting nothing done of any value. 

If you do the math, divide the 5,660 bills by the 535 members of Congress, you end up with every member of Congress, on average, proposing between ten and eleven bills each, the vast majority of which never see the light of day. Unbelievably poor performance.

3) While some in the Obama administration and their wing of the main stream media may be applauding what they think are good economic times and the fine job the Obama administration did in handling the economy, that optimism does not resonate down to the typical American. According to a recent poll discussed by the Washington Post, a record high 62% of Americans are worried about losing their jobs.

This is the highest it has ever been, going all the way back to the survey’s early results in the 1970s. Americans in households earning less than $35,000 are even more pessimistic with 75% worried about losing their jobs. 54% have already had their work or salaries cut.

This is not surprising since we know that well over 20 million Americans are under employed or unemployed and that hundreds of companies and organizations have had to cut staff and cut hours of staff in order to survive the Obama Care legislation. Add in the fact that nearly 50 million Americans are receiving food assistance from the Federal government, more people than the entire population of Spain, and it becomes obvious that this political class, from the President down to the newest member of Congress, have failed miserably in providing a sound economic policy and strategy.

4) According to an article in The Economist that was summarized in the December 6, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, at least 3,200 Americans are serving life sentences without chance of parole for such nonviolent crimes as cursing at a policeman and selling $10 worth of drugs. The vast majority of these life sentences are the result of mandatory sentencing laws.

Such a waste of life and taxpayer resources used to maintain prison space for these thousands of citizens who are serving time for nonsensical crimes. Fortunately, the Constitution provides a way for these injustices to be undone via Presidential pardons. 

But, according to a Washington Post article, that was summarized in the December 13, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, President Obama has pardoned only 40 people during his Presidency, currently a record low number of pardons for modern day Presidents. At the same time in his Presidency, President Reagan had pardoned 313 people. 

The article did point out that President Obama had pardoned 10 Thanksgiving turkeys in addition to the 40 human pardons he had dealt out.

5) Back to the current convoluted and ineffective law making process present in Congress today. The December 16, 2013 issue of Business Week discussed the Rube Goldberg machinations of something called the Volcker rule. The Volcker rule was stated as a single paragraph in the Dodd-Frank legislation that was passed in response to the banking debacles of the Great Recession. 

The Volcker rule is supposed to make banks safer by forbidding certain types of risky trading practices. According to the lead paragraph in the story:

In 2009, former Federal Reserve Chariman Paul Volcker had a simple idea to prohibit deposit taking banks from trading for their own accounts. Proprietary trading - wherein banks make bets in pursuit of profit, putting depositors and taxpayers at risk - shouldn’t be that hard to define, he told the Independent, a British newspaper, last year. “It’s like pornography,” he said. “You know it when you see it.”

Well, he could not have been any further from the truth since the people that needed to operationalize that one paragraph from Dodd-Frank were members of the Washington political class. That one paragraph resulted in 1,238 days of discussion and agony, 18,223 comments, 71 pages of final rules, an 893 page preamble, all spread across five Federal agencies. Never do the simple thing when politicians can make it complicated, vague, and probably unworkable.

How could it have been made simple? Well, for decades, there was a Federal law on the books, Glass-Steagall, which prohibited this very type of activity by barring deposit taking banks from investment banking activities. You were either a deposit bank or an investment bank, but not both. That law had worked perfectly well for about fifty years but within ten years or so after its repeal, banks got too big and too careless, resulting in the Great Recession and resultant bank bailouts.

Why didn’t Congress to the smart, easy thing and just reinstate Glass-Steagall, resulting in a safer banking system and less chance of bailouts? In all likelihood, it was because big banks make big donations to political incumbents to ensure big bank executives get big bonus checks and their desire to maintain the status quo. 

Is this new Volcker rule likely to work? Probably not, it is too big, too complicated and according to the article conclusion, “the newly approved Volcker Rule leaves many questions unanswered.” So, more than three years later and almost a thousands pages later, we are probably no closer to eliminating “too big to fail” and the nasty ramifications of that issue. Another pathetic, insane job of failure by the political class.

More failure and insanity tomorrow. In the meantime, please consider visiting our term limits website at:


Because really, if we dumped all of the incumbents out of office, how much worse could it get if they were replaced with new Congressional representatives and a new President?

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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