It is unknown how many more days we will need to be dedicated to the ongoing insanity of our politicians but I am quite sure we will not wrap everything up today.
1) Yesterday, we discussed the fact that the final bill has come in for the taxpayer bailout of General Motors and that the company’s ineptness and the government’s meddling cost the American taxpayer just over $11 billion. This comes out to the equivalent of every U.S. household sending a check for about $100 to the Detroit car maker to cover its mistakes.
According to an article in Moneynews on May 2, 2014, the final bill on their entire set of buyouts has now been tallied. Including the General Motors loss, the overall American taxpayer loss on the bailouts has come to about $40 billion. This is the equivalent of every American household sending a check out for about $350 to bailout the big auto makers and banks.
The really distressing part of this final report is the fact that the American taxpayer still faces a potential, worst case liability of $190 billion that could be needed to bailout Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This potential hit comes out to the equivalent of each household paying out about $1,650 each to cover this ticking time bomb, all because the political class meddled in the housing market without really knowing what they are doing. Pathetic.
2) It is amazing how many different ways government officials can screw things up in so many different ways. According to an audit done by the EPA’s Inspector General, the EPA's international affairs office lost track of about 200 passports required to be in its possession, according to a new report from the agency's watchdog. The EPA Inspector General found that 199 of the 417 employee passports reportedly in the possession of the Office of International and Tribal Affairs couldn't be located.
The office failed to enforce its own passport guidance of having staff return passports after travel. The report found: "Lack of compliance with agency guidance may put the agency in the position where sensitive personally identifiable information is not being adequately protected." The EPA agreed with the audit findings, agreed that it had violated its own rules, and was taking steps to remedy the situation.
All of which raises a few questions:
- The EPA has been around for decades, has it not figured out how to keep control of sensitive information like passports?
- Has any fraud or crimes been committed as a result of the organization losing track of almost two hundred passports?
- Has anyone been fired (doubtful) for not following the organization’s own rules and guidelines?
3) Political class insanity is not confined to Washington. The Associated Press recently reported that state Democrats in Illinois are trying anyway possible to approve $100 million in Illinois taxpayer wealth to woo those responsible for deploying the Barack Obama library to deploy it to Illinois.
The problem, as reported by the Associated Press, is that the state has roughly $7 billion in past due vendor bills and a $100 billion shortfall in its employee pension programs. The state’s financial position is so serious that the governor wants to make permanent a three year-old tax increase, which was set to expire next year, to avoid making huge budget cuts.
Given the dire financial situation, isn’t it pretty insane to divert $100 million to build a library? Talk about a sad state of priorities and please, do not tell me added tourism dollars will more than offset the $100 million cost. First of all, all politicians always underestimate the actual costs on every government expense so you can be pretty sure that the $100 million estimate will eventually balloon to several times that size. And second, do we really think the world’s citizens are going to beat a path to south Chicago to visit the Obama library? Doubtful.
3) With all of the political class shenanigans going on, it is no surprise that we have been reporting and discussing many recent Inspector General reports that have uncovered much of that insanity. The Treasury department, which houses the IRS, had a recent audit uncover the fact that more than 2,800 IRS employees are facing disciplinary actions.
While the lack of discipline by almost 3,000 IRS employees is distressing enough, the Inspector General report also uncovered the following disgraces:
- Those 2,800 employees facing disciplinary actions received more $2.8 million in monetary bonus payments.
- Those 2,800 employees also received 27,000 worth of additional time-off bonuses and more than 175 quality step increases (which allows employees to receive promotions faster).
- More than 1,100 of the 2,800 employees have “substantiated Federal tax compliance problems” yet they still received over $1 million in cash awards, $250,000 in time-off awards and 69 quality step increase awards within the same year the IRS proved the employees hadn’t fully paid their income taxes.
4) Although the numbers are not very large, the growth rate of these numbers is increasingly worrisome. 231 Americans gave up their citizenship at the end of the George W. Bush administration in 2008, the end of the Bush administration. By 2012, just four years later, that annual 231 number had more than quadrupled to about 1,000 and had tripled to 3,000 by 2014.
Again, the numbers are not large but the growth in the number of Americans giving up on their country is distressing. These are Americans who most likely have become so fed up with the conditions and government and political class insanity that they are willing to give up their citizenship, move to a foreign land, and forego their past for what is increasingly being viewed as better opportunities overseas.
That trend is probably not because the Washington political class has improved economic opportunities in this country, has respected and increased freedom in this country, or have shown any penchant for caring for the country before taking care of the personal ego and financial needs. Such a shame when our politicians are so bad that citizens are willing to forego their homes and citizenships for a better life elsewhere.
5) Speaking of bad cost forecasting by the political class, consider the unfolding nuclear disaster in South Carolina. As the Soviet Union dissolved two decades ago, Russian and U.S. officials decided that reducing each country’s nuclear arsenal would be a good idea and that the nuclear material taken from the disabled nuclear weapons should be processed into nuclear fuel rods that could be used in nuclear reactors to generate electricity. The final agreement included plans to convert 34 tons of weapons grade plutonium into fuel rods to be used on commercial reactors.
The U.S. conversion was going to take place in South Carolina. The initial estimate to complete the job was put at $1 billion and was to begin in 2007 and be finished by 2016. However, as always, the political class did another lousy job at cost forecasting:
- The U.S. Department of Energy has already spent $5 billion on the project despite the overall original estimate of $1 billion.
- The Department estimates it will take another $6 to $7 billion to finish the job just to build the facility to do the conversion.
- It will take at least another $20 billion to do the conversion once the facility is built.
- It will take another 15 years just to complete the conversion, at least 13 years beyond the original estimate.
- Thus, the entire effort will cost about $30 billion, assuming no more cost surprises, which is about 30 times higher than the original estimate and 13 years later than the original time estimate, assuming there are no more time delays.
But the insanity does not end there relative to the Department of Energy:
- The Department of Energy has put a hold on the project for now with no date on when to restart the program, essentially wasting billions and billions of dollars with absolutely nothing to show for it, as described by Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists: "It’s a major fiasco. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted, it’s a classic boondoggle."
- But it is not the first time the Department has screwed up badly. Costs for a nuclear waste treatment facility in the state of Washingotn have almost tripled over the original cost estimate.
- A uranium processing plant in Tennessee was supposed to cost $1 billion but will likely cost $11 billion and is currently running a whopping twenty years behind schedule.
- And the final insult to injury relative to the South Carolina effort: the cost of uranium from other sources has fallen by about 70% over the years making any fuel rods that eventually come out of the South Carolina conversion effort priced far to high to be useful to commercial reactors.
So let’s review. The political class has wasted billions on bailouts, it has wasted billions on energy programs that never succeed, they have lost passports, they reward unruly IRS employees and they cause Americans to give up their home and heritage to move overseas. Seems about right for one day of political class insanity, tomorrow is another day of the same.
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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