December, 2014, Part 1, By The Numbers: Bad Economic Numbers For Minorities, Bad Debt Numbers For Us All, and Cost Overrun Numbers Everywhere

On a semi-regular basis we do a series of posts with the theme: “by the numbers.” As we all know, we can really never trust any politician to tell us the truth, especially if it does not fit their selfish needs and strategies. However, while they can lie, deceive, and skew their message, the realities of actual numbers always give us the truth of the situation. 

I used to work for a boss whose favorite saying was: “There is nothing more devastating to an opinion than the right number.” By looking at the raw numbers of a situation, we can look past the polticial spin and other BS that politicians constantly rain down us to divide us, trick, us, and insure their continued time in office. We try to dispel these myths and travesties by looking at the reality numbers to devastate the politicians’ opinions.

1) The Obama administration would like you to think they are doing a fabulous job managing the economy ("Since I have come into office, there's almost no economic metric by which you couldn't say that the U.S. economy is better," President Obama as quoted in a recent interview with the Economist.)

And in some small ways the administration has done a little bit of good. The unemployment rate has come down and the country’s economy has generally enjoyed year over year economic growth since the Great recession ended.

But if you look at ALL of the economic numbers, things are not that great:

• The annual economic growth numbers have never exceeded 3% since the end of the recession, making this economic recovery the worst one ever.
• While the overall economic numbers have come down over the past few years, there are probably still over 15 million Americans who are either unemployed or under employed.
• Across the entire country, the median annual household income has steadily decreased years after the recession ended.

To these less than stellar numbers we now add more bad numbers. According to recent Pew Research, the median overall household wealth of black and Hispanic households has steadily decreased every year since the start of the recession, including those years after the recession ended. The same measure for white households decreased during the recession but has had some marginal improvement during the recovery years.

In other words: despite this Presidential administration claiming it was for helping the less fortunate in our society, their economic policies, programs, and intentions have actually had severe negative impacts on minority households, as we see from the following graph from Pew Research:

Despite spending, and wasting over $800 billion on an economic stimulus program, higher taxes on the rich, increased welfare payments, etc., the first African-American Presidential administration has failed to improve the economic lot of African Americans and Hispanics. That is the reality of this administration, not the false boasts of how well their economic programs have done.

And just to be sure, the answer is not to raise taxes on rich people. The answer is to finally create a an environment where public schools actually educate our kids, regardless of their race, where businesses are not overburdened with excessive government regulations (e.g. Obama Care, Dodd-Frank, etc.) that stifle economic growth, and where Americans’ needs are more important in the political process than the needs and wants of PACs, lobbyists, unions, and corporations. 

The numbers in the graph above show that the status quo is not working for most Americans but especially not working for minority Americans. The numbers do not lie.

2) When President Obama was sworn in as President in January, 2009, the Federal government’s national debt was about $10.6 TRILLION. On a per household basis, that means the first 43 Presidents combined, well over two hundred years of Presidential administrations, had saddled every U.S. household with about $92,000 worth of the national debt. In other words, every one of about 115 million U.S. households would have to write a check for over $92,000 to pay off the debt.

In just about six years, however, the Obama administration has added another $7.4 TRILLION to the national debt, or over $64,000 in new debt burden for every U.S. household. In just six years, the Obama administration has somehow added an amount of national debt that is equal to almost 70% of the entire total that 43 previous president had amassed. 

The overall average household debt has grown from $92,000 per household in 2009 to about $156,000 in six short years.

Unfortunately, these numbers will collapse the economy in the not too distant future unless drastic measures are taken to reduce government spending numbers and reduce them soon.

3) The following situation, as reported by Luke Rosiak for the Washington Examiner on December 10, 2014, could have easily shown up in our monthly “political class insanity” series but there are a lot of bad numbers in his report so let’s cover it here:

• The Veterans Administration (VA) is so mismanaged from a budgeting perspective that government construction projects around the country for veterans are being shut down because of cost overruns and non-payment of contractors.
• For example, a construction company erecting a hospital for the Veterans Affairs Department near Denver has refused to work on the project any longer, claiming that the VA is in breach of its contract and is out $100 million, a claim that was recently found to be true by government review board.
• A new VA Las Vegas facility is $260 million over its construction budget.
• An Orlando hospital is $362 million over its budget. 
• A New Orleans project is $370 million over its budget.
• Ÿ The senior VA manager in charge of these types of projects, Glenn Haggstron, director of VA’s Office of Acquisition, Logistics, and Construction, recently received $20,000 a year in civil service performance bonuses beyond his $180,000 annual salary. Imagine how much of a bonus he would have gotten if he was not almost $1 billion over his budget target.

Unbelievable numbers of incompetence. And incompetence that gets rewarded to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars in one year. And the VA is probably not alone in its incompetence. We have shown dozens of times in this blog that just about every government entity is dysfunctional and wasteful, from the IRS to Medicare, to the Defense Department to Head Start, on and on. 

But as Mr. Rosiak points out in the article, the numbers of firings for incompetence and non-performance in Federal government are still pathetically small. Of 8,000 senior Federal employees across the entire Federal government, only five were fired in 2012, only seven in 2013 and none were fired in the first half of 2014, according to the Office of Personnel Management. 

Thus, despite the Obama administration rhetoric, the numbers are getting worse, not better as government incompetence marches on, the numbers do not lie:

• The Obama economic numbers and the policies that created those numbers have been bad overall but especially bad for minorities.
• The Federal debt numbers are bankrupting the country.
• The incompetence numbers, as witnessed by the VA budgeting scandal, are getting worse as fewer senior government employees are being fired despite the increased incompetency.

If you have a good opinion of the Obama administration, these number should go a long way of devastating that opinion. If they have not, then tune in tomorrow and we will take another “by the numbers” foray into political class ineptness and deceptions.

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