When we started this feature several years ago, we could usually contain the monthly insanity to one post. However, over time, the insanity level seems to have increased exponentially, reflecting the growing ineptness of politicians everywhere. Thus, as has been the recent trend, we will probably need six or seven days to get through everything again this month.
1) On January 12, 2014, the Washington Examiner reported on how the Washington political class has rigged the Federal government’s farm subsidy giveaways so that many very affluent Washington power brokers, politicians, lobbyists, etc. now enhance their high annual incomes with taxpayer funded subsidies for farms they do not farm.
Details of this legal scam, according to the Examiner analysis and reporting, include the following:
- Thousands of residents in and around Washington D.C. receive millions of dollars every year in Federal farm subsidies even though there are very few farms within the Washington metro area.
- In nearby Chevy Chase, Md., one of the nation's wealthiest communities, lawyers, lobbyists and at least one psychologist collected nearly $342,000 in taxpayer farm subsidies between 2008 and 2011, according to the watchdog group, Open the Books.
- Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack continues to receive government subsides even though he has overseen the agency that pays them since 2009, even though he is in Washington in government service and not back working the farm, a clear conflict of interest.
- Billions of dollars once spent to keep small family farms from going under now go mostly to large agriculture corporations like Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland, and to wealthy landowners who have never farmed.
- Over just the past four years, taxpayers have sent over $30 million to residents New York City, and Chicago, hardly farming meccas by any stretch of the imagination, to compensate them for converting farmland to conservation areas and for growing soybeans, cotton, corn, rice and other crops.
- Apparently the scam is for these rich big city residents to buy farm land, hire a farm manager and collect a check from the Federal government.
- Van Boyette, a lobbyist living in Washington's wealthy Palisades neighborhood, received $186,761 in Federal farm subsidies between 2004 and 2012 for growing corn, soybeans and other crops, and for land conservation on farmland he owns in six different Iowa counties.
- Gerald Cassidy, one of Washington's top and richest lobbyists, got $41,000 in farming subsidies since 1995 for a farm he owns in Dorchester County, Maryland.
- U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa has proposed capping Federal payments to $250,000 per couple per year, likely because he also receives money from the subsidy trough.
- His obscenely high cap is about five times the median income of an average U.S. household.
2) The Associated Press reported on January 21, 2014 that former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and his wife had been indicted in late January on Federal corruption charges. They are accused of accepting tens of thousands of dollars in loans, shopping sprees, money for their daughter's wedding, and even a joyride in a Ferrara.
Although innocent until proven guilty, maybe the former governor should have bought a farm in order to legalize his corruption via the farm subsidy program that we led off this post with. Bad planning on his part to go the illegal corruption route when he could have gone the legal corruption route like so many of his political peers are using.
3) Let’s stay with our corruption theme, looking at some data from the New York Times and U.S. government that was reproduced by the Against Crony Capitalism website on January 24, 2014. The data and their chart depicted the number of criminal convictions for corruption by state or other legal U.S. entity (e.g. Guam. Virgin Islands, D.C. and Puerto Rico) per capita.
46 out of the 54 entities included in the analysis had a per capital corruption conviction rate less than seven convictions per million residents. The entity with the highest per capital corruption conviction rate was, no surprise, Washington D.C. Their per capita calculation came out to over 66 corruption convictions per million people, nine times higher than the conviction rate of 46 other states and other legal entities. Nine times higher, that is a lot of corruption.
4) A Business Insider article from January 24, 2014 had some interesting statistics from International Centre For Prison studies. It seems that the United States has more of its citizens in prison than any other country in the world. About 2.3 million people are now residing in U.S. prisons. China, which has been framed as a much more totalitarian government, has about 1.6 million people locked away in its prisons even thought its population is about four times larger than ours.
The main reason for this dubious worldwide honor? According to the article and the Centre, the U.S.’s war on drugs has resulted in prison populations growing exponentially with low level dealers or recreational users of illegal drugs, a problem that much of the rest of the world does not seem to have. Despite this problem, and the extraordinary expenses that come with it, the American political class seems to be in no hurry to fix what has been a losing and expensive war on drugs for the past four decades.
5) The wasteful and idiotic spending by the Federal government is not restricted to just a handful of government entities. Consider some recent news reports on how the Health and Human Services (HHS) department has been wasting taxpayer wealth over the past few years:
- According to an article from the Washington Free Beacon on January 13, 2014, from 2006-2011, HHS spent almost $175 million on penis pumps, according to a recent HHS Inspector General report.
- Adding insult to injury, HHS paid more than double the retail price for the pumps, with the Inspector General saying that the prices HHS paid “remain grossly excessive compared with the amounts that non-Medicare payers pay,”
- According to an article from the Fiscal Times from January 15, 2014, in 2013 alone HHS wasted almost $56 billion on improper payments that never should have been made in seven of HHS’s programs that were examined. This rate of wasteful spending is enough to have given every U.S. household an almost $500 tax rebate.
5) But the Federal government is not the only government entity that wastes taxpayer money while remaining incompetent. Consider a report from January 15, 2014 that was put out by the EAG Foundation:
- In Camden, New Jersey, the student to teacher ratio is an excellent and low 14 to 1 in its public schools.
- In addition, Camden on average spends over $26,000 a year per student, much higher than the state and national average.
- Despite that stellar ratio and large budget, Camden’s public school graduation rate is less than 50%.
- Only three Camden high school seniors who took the SAT test would be considered college ready.
- About 75% of Camden’s third grade students have already fallen behind the levels they should be at for reading and math proficiency.
- Despite these horrible academic results, the Camden school budget recently included an expense of $24,000 that was used to take students on out of school trips to bowling alleys and skating rinks.
6) The wonderful website, Bankrupting America, had some great examples of past Federal government spending idiocy in its January 15, 2014 posting analyzing the latest trillion dollar omnibus spending agreement:
- Based on the results of a $374,000 taxpayer-funded grant, we now know that inhaling lemon and lavender scents doesn’t do a thing to increase our ability to heal a wound.
- $666,000 in taxpayer wealth was used by scientists to determine whether distant prayer could heal AIDS. They found out after spending the $660,000 that it could not heal anything.
- The Federal National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine paid scientists $406,000 to study whether squirting brewed coffee into someone’s intestines was beneficial in treating pancreatic cancer. But alas, pancreatic cancer is imperious to coffee enemas.
- The center also paid out a whopping $1.25 million to determine whether or not massage sessions makes people with advanced cancer feel better. They found out that the massage did, something I could have told them for far less than $1.25 million.
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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