February, 2015, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: HIllary Clinton's Economic Fail, Corruption n Philly, IRS Follies and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again for the our monthly review of political class insanity. We believe that the nation is living through the worst set of politicians to ever hold office in this country, from the President down to the local mayors. Our current politicians never resolve any problems facing Americans, waste untold billions of dollars every year, and operate government programs that never deliver what they promise, always miss their deadlines, always go over budget, and often make the original problem even worse. And these shortcomings do not include outright criminal activity, a topic that will be an integral part of this month’s insanity review.

Last week, we did an in-depth, multi-day analysis of how the Obama administration has failed in an epic way across five dimensions. As you will see over the next week or so, it is not only the President that is an epic fail in the American political sphere today. So, let’s get started, it is going to be a long trek as the political class came out of the holiday season with more incompetence than ever before.

This is the fourth post in this month’s insanity series:

1) A recent Business Week article pointed out an epic fail when it comes to how the IRS is serving the American taxpayer:

• In the upcoming tax season, the IRS is likely to answer less than half the calls it receives from taxpayers looking for help and guidance on filling out their tax forms.
• Those callers that do get their call answered are likely to have been on hold for 30 minutes.
• Those callers that do get through will only get basic tax questions answered by the IRS personnel answering the phones.

This is the type of service we are getting from an organizations that receives billions and billions of tax dollars every year. Now, some supporters of the IRS would say the reason for the lousy service is that Congress has cut its budget over the recent budget cycles, which is true. But consider this: the Treasury Department, the home of the IRS, recently admitted that at least 2,500 emails were passed between the White House and the IRS in an attempt to derail conservative political groups’ tax related activities. 

Maybe if the many IRS employees who were suppressing the First Amendment rights of millions of conservative leaning Americans were actually doing their assigned government jobs and not someone’s political dirty work, service for basic IRS services would be improved. And on a larger scale, if the Washington political class ever got around to simplifying our onerous 70,000 page tax code we would need a much smaller and less expensive IRS staff while improving the economy’s chance of thriving.

2) As we have often pointed out, political class insanity and stupidity is not confined to the Federal level. Consider a really bad law that the California political class recently passed, as pointed out in the January, 2015 issue of Reason magazine. State law now prohibits anyone for working at a for-profit business and not receive a salary. 

In the article, a very, very small winery got fined under this inane law because they had the nerve to accept and use the service of people who volunteered to help out at the winery. Apparently, volunteers willingly worked at the winery for no pay in order to learn the business. The winery was happy for the free help since their annual profits are usually only around $11,000 a year.

Everyone was happy. People got first hand winemaking experience and the winery stayed in business. However, the state bureaucracy came in, fined the winery over $100,000 (or about ten years worth of profits), the volunteers lost a valuable and probably enjoyable life experience, and the winery is now going to have to close down operations. 

Great law: make citizens stop doing what they want to do which was not harming anyone else, force small businesses out of business, depriving the state of the tax that would have been collected if the winery had stayed in business, and causing other businesses to curtail or end their businesses since they too depend on volunteer help. This is not the slave trade, abuse of child labor, etc. These are adults doing what they freely want to do, something that should be allowed in a free country. Obviously, that is not the case in California.

3) We occasionally have done a series of posts that cite stupid politicians’ quotes. To access those past inane quotes, just type in “politicians say the darndest things” in the search box above.

We recently came across a really dumb politician’s quote that we decided to include in this month’s insanity series. Hillary Clinton, almost surely to be the Democrats’ Presidential candidate for 2016, recently voiced the following opinion: “Don’t let anyone tell you that is corporations and businesses that create jobs.” Huh? She apparently did not tell her audience who did create jobs.

This statement is just too stupid and insane to argue with, it is that ridiculous.

4) We have previously shown, using official government data, that it is almost impossible to get fired as a Federal government employee, regardless of how poorly one performs. In fact, a Federal employee is more likely to die than be fired, a situation that exists no where else in the world except in government.

An article from Reason magazine’s February issue showed how hard it is to get fired:

• According to the General Accountability Office (GAO), 57,000 Federal employees have been on paid leave for at least one month during the past three years.
• Several thousand employees were on paid leave between three months and a year.
• Hundreds of Federal employees were on paid leave for more than a year as they waited to be either fired or reinstated.
• Over the past three years, the American taxpayer paid out $775 million in salaries to these in limbo Federal employees but got no work or productivity in return.
• These employees were also accumulating pension credits, vacation time, and sick days as they were paid to do nothing.
• And it is likely these pathetic results are not as bad as they really are since the GAO study covered only about 60% of the Federal government’s organizations.
• The official government policy on paid leave is that it is to be used in “rare circumstances.” 57,000 of anything is not a rare circumstance.

57,000 people being paid to not work. 57,000 people is larger than the entire employee size of Google to give you an idea of how many people we are paying for and that are not doing anything. As we have pointed out so many times before, the Federal government has gotten so large that is is now largely dysfunctional.

5) Two Pennsylvania Democrats in the state government from the Philadelphia area were recently indicted for bribery charges. The charges allege that they took money and gifts, e.g. Tiffany jewelry, in exchange for voting against proposed voter id legislation.

A lot of the evidence was obtained via taped conversations. The grand jury that handed down the indictments had 26 tapings of one defendant, Ronald Waters, accepting nine payments from a confidential informer. Those payments were worth almost $9,000. The other defendant, Vanessa Brown, was caught on tape accepting five cash installments with $6,000.

Scary that an elected politician and public servant can be turned into criminals for such low levels of payments. But integrity and high standards are not overriding characteristics of American politicians today.

6) It is not just politicians that are crooked, many times these days it is political supporters and groupies that are also corrupt. Thomas Lindenfeld, a long term Democratic political activist, has pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to commit honest service wire fraud. Lindenfeld has previously worked on Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign.

That will do it for today, another day of insanity from all over the political world. We have another government entity, the IRS, that is almost totally dysfunctional, whose customer service performance would cause it to go out of business in a short amount of time in the real world, a state government which dictates what people can and cannot do with their free time, we have a leading politician that has no economic sense at all, we have tens of thousands of Federal employees that get paid to do nothing, and we have local Philly politicians that are easily bribed for their votes. More insanity tomorrow, it seems to never end.

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.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w