We have captured the latest below and promise, absolutely, that this will be the last political class insanity post for this month. Not because it is over but because it is too depressing to keep pointing out how inane and ineffective our current politicians have become. We all need a break until next month’s update.
We started dong these updates several years ago, usually taking one or two days every month to get all of their insanity covered. Unfortunately, over time, the insanity has seemed to accelerate almost exponentially, causing us to now have to take six or seven posts each month to get it all in. This month will be no different. As our foreign policy implodes, the economy stagnates, and the midtem elections approach, the insanity levels are intensifying daily.
To check out past instances of political class insanity in this post, simply go to the first week of each month and check out the posts that begin, “Political class insanity.” This is the ninth entry in this series for this month, with the first eight posts appearing over the past few days.
1) A recent article by Elizabeth Harris writing for the Washington Free Beacon discussed the reality that the Federal government is spending almost a half a million dollars to find out why obese teenage girls have a hard time getting dates. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a $466,642 grant for the study, which will examine whether social skills have an impact on why obese girls have fewer dating experiences than their less obese counterparts.
The objective of the grant is as follows: “Mounting evidence demonstrates that weight influences intimate (i.e., dating and sexual) relationship formation and sexual negotiations among adolescent girls. Obese girls consistently report having fewer dating and sexual experiences, but more sexual risk behaviors (i.e., condom nonuse) once they are sexually active."
“The conceptual framework that has guided this research presumes that differences in the social skills for relating to peers and intimate partners along with differences in the relationship experiences of obese and non-obese girls account for these differences. However, no studies have actually examined whether the interpersonal skills and intimate relationships of obese and non-obese girls differ.”
The description goes on and on but you get the idea. This is a terrible waste of money that will be invested in a project will take four years worth of study to answer these less than pressing questions.
This does not mean I am not sympathetic to the lives of obese girls. But rather than waste money on such a nonsensical long term study, wouldn’t it be put to better use to put forth a national public health initiative to help ALL obese people to control their weight for their health and never mind about worrying how obesity affects sexual behavior and attitudes?
Better yet, would it not be better and much more immediate to use half a million dollars to get veterans the immediate medial help the need, to get our homeless the immediate shelter they need, to get our drug addicted the immediate medical help they need? Such a terrible sense of priorities when so many Americans are suffering and such a terrible waste of taxpayer wealth.
2) A recent Federally and taxpayer funded sex research project is even more absurd than the obesity study we just reviewed. An October 1, 2014 article for CNS news by Melanie Hunter discussed a National Institutes of Health grant worth $288,503 that went to the State University of New York at Albany to study, wait for it…., family and health consequences of the sex ratio imbalance in India caused by sex-selective abortion technologies.
So in this case of dreadfully wasted money, the research is not even to be used in this country or by any stretch of the imagination of any use for anyone in this country. It will study a societal situation in India: “India has long experienced a numerical shortage of females, and this sex ratio imbalance is likely to grow with the widespread adoption of sex-selective abortion technologies.India is the world’s second most populous country and projected to become the largest by 2050. Growing imbalances in India’s sex ratio have the potential to alter substantially multiple dimensions of demographic and family-related behavior, including the sexual behaviors that contribute to the spread of HIV/AIDS.”
I get it, society has a problem, it needs to be studied, …in India by Indian researchers using Indians' wealth, not Americans’ wealth. It is amazing how garbage like this gets approved and funded with American taxpayer wealth…for research in India.
3) A research study recently published by the American Action Forum (AAF) reported that 50 financial items that banks are required to send to the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the three main Federal entities overseeing U.S. banks, cannot be submitted electronically. This requires banks and other financial institutions to submit this information and data manually to the Federal government.
Which raises two questions:
- How many hours and resources does it take to submit such large amounts of manual data to the Federal government, resources that might be better spent reducing costs for the banks and eventually reducing costs for consumers?
- Does anyone at those three Federal entities actually look at the mountains of manual, paper intensive reporting and even if they do look at the paper, to they have the resources to properly analyze the paper numbers and do any constructive with it?
There does not appear to be a readily available answer to the second question we posed: is the Federal government actually looking at these mounds and mounds of paper reports? If it took 18,000-19,000 bank employees to furnish the data, I sincerely doubt there are thousands and thousands of Federal employees that are wading through the paper.
Thus, we are likely looking at a near total waste of resources and costs that could be much better spent expanding the economy and providing real worth to the country rather than an empty exercise in bureaucracy.
4) One last parting shot of insanity for this month, I promise. California Governor Jerry Brown recently signed a critical piece of legislation. Although California is basically bankrupt (with about a half a trillion dollars worth of unfunded future debt), it had nothing to do with plotting a course of fiscal responsibility for the state.
Although the state’s public education system is mostly a failure, it had nothing to do with fixing the system to better educate California kids.
Although the state has a higher unemployment rate than the rest of the country (the 5th highest state unemployment rate), it had nothing to do with getting the California economy rolling again.
No, the critical piece of legislation he signed was to impose a statewide ban on the use plastic bags for grocery stores and convenience stores. Talk about a bad sense of priorities. This is what the California political class is working on, banning plastic bags.
Again, it is not as if I am not sensitive to the environmental impacts of plastic bags. But, come on, with all of the other unresolved, major problems facing the majority of California citizens, this is what they are working on? Insane.
But bad priorities of the American political class are a severe symptom of the illness that pervades American politics today, whether it is in a state capital or inside the D.C. Beltway. That is why we may never run out of insanity things to talk about in this blog until Americans finally decide that the inmates are running the asylum and that the only way to get rid of them is to term limit them out via the following website or other term limit effort:
www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com.
Because, just given the above examples of wasteful government spending and bad priorities, how much worse could it get if we started over with new people in office?
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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