President Obama is calling for nearly a $4 TRILLION Federal government budget for the next fiscal year without any concrete plans or strategies to fix any of our major problems with that $4 TRILLION. By the way, that $4 TRILLION comes out to almost $11 billion a DAY, or a half a billion an HOUR, over $7 million a MINUTE. For that level of spending, we should not have any problems in our lives at all.
But we do have major problems in our lives and those major issues have been with us for decades despite TRILLIONs and TRILLIONs of taxpayer dollars spent in the hope that they would get resolved. Furthermore, the political class has rigged the election processes so that incumbent politicians continue to get reelected even though they are always a failure while serving in office.
Today and tomorrow we will look at a series of graphs and pictures that vividly illustrate how inept and useless our politicians have been over the past few decades despite the oppressive tax burden they now subject us to.
1) Nowhere has the political class failed the nation more then in the education of our kids. Every year we pay more and more at both the local and Federal government level to educate our kids with dismal results, relative to kids around the world, and our own national standards. Consider the following graph of educational attainment and the amount of resources we have put towards educational attainment over the past few decades (click on the graph for a larger view):
While the amount of money spent on education over the years is up almost 200% and the number of employees in the education field is up almost 100% over the past 42 years, math, reading, and science scores have barely budged over the same time frame. This is not a good investment for our money despite a Federal government Department of Education that spends tens of billions of dollars every year in its budget for apparently no results.
2) Back in the 1970s, the Washington political class under Jimmy Carter decided that it would be a good idea if it was easy for every American to own their own home, even those in the lower income brackets. That resulted in the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act, a piece of legislation that directly led to the Great Recession of 2008. For a detailed assessment of that conclusion, please go to the following link:
Since the Carter administration, we have spent trillions of dollars supporting the home purchases of lower income Americans and the subsequent bail outs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
For all of this expense and the trillions of dollars of economic damage from the Great Recession, how successful was the Federal government in increasing home ownership? Consider the following graph:
Yes, back in the Carter administration, the percentage of Americans who owned their own home was about 65%. About 40 years and trillions of dollars later, the percentage of Americans who own their own home is…. about 65%. 40 years and trillions of dollars later we are right back where we started. Pathetic.
3) Over 40 years ago, the Nixon administration declared a “war on drugs.” If that war had been successful, than after trillions of dollars and 40 years, one would have hoped that the political class would have finally won that war resulting in two situations: 1) the amount of money spent in this country on illegal drugs would now be close to zero and 2) the number of citizens in jail for using illegal drugs would have been dropping significantly as the war was being run and won.
However, just the opposite happened, not unexpected since the exact opposite usually happens when politicians are involved. According to a recent study by the Rand corporation, every year, Americans spend about $109 billion on all types of illegal drugs. You cannot say you have won the war on drugs when the illegal market for illegal drugs is still over $2 billion a week.
And to our second point as far as drug abuser prison populations, over time the number of citizens being jailed for using illegal drugs has been growing substantially:

When the war on drugs began, there were less than 50,000 Americans in jail for illegal drug violations. Four decades later, there are about ten times as many Americans in jail for illegal drug violations. If the war on drugs had been successful, one would have expected the number of jailed Americans for drug violations would be less than when the war started. Not the case.
This is not a commentary on whether or not drugs should be decriminalized or legalized. It is a simple observation that we still have a drug addiction problem in this country that the war on drugs has turned into a criminal problem while wasting trillions of dollars in the process.
We will finish this discussion of political class failure tomorrow. Today we learned that despite spending trillions of dollars, our kids are still undereducated, the housing market is right where it was forty years ago, and the war on drugs has made the situation at least ten times worse than when it began under Nixon.
You have to really try to be this incompetent for so long. But somehow the political class in Washington has managed to exceed all standards of ineptness and we still have more to cover tomorrow.
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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