- Due to lax government oversight, government meddling in the market, and crony capitalism we just lived through the worse economic downturn since the Great Depression and the worst economic recovery in the past 100 years.
- We have a national debt of $18 TRILLION, a debt burden of about $155,000 for every U.S. household.
- Our public schools due a lousy job of educating our kids vs. the rest of the world despite an $18 TRILLION national debt.
- Our borders our not secure, endangering the lives of every American, despite an $18 TRILLION national debt.
- We have no comprehensive, overall national energy strategy despite an $18 TRILLION national debt.
- Our nation’s roads, bridges, and other infrastructure are crumbling despite an $18 TRILLION national debt.
- The Federal government has spent taxpayer dollars on inane studies to study why the same college basketball teams always dominate March Madness, how quickly parents respond to trendy baby names, on whether online dating site users are racist, and when dogs became man’s best friend despite an $18 TRILLION national debt.
- The Federal government’s agencies and departments lose hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars every year to outright criminal fraud and wasteful spending.
- No Federal government agency or department delivers any value added service effectively and efficiently.
- The Federal government’s answer to skyrocketing health care costs has been to implement legislation that made health care even more expensive while reducing the quality of health care.
- Terrorism threats are growing, from Yemen to Syria to Iraq to the streets of Paris and the streets of Boston despite the Federal government spending over a TRILLION dollars fighting terrorism over the past 14 years.
- Our foreign relations and diplomacy failures have actually made our enemies not fear us and our friends not trust us.
- Race relations have deteriorated over the past six years, reversing a decades long trend of improving race relations despite the election of the first ever African-American President.
Economic woes, foreign relations woes, race relations woes, dysfunctional government operations, and more, this is what the current political class in Washington has bestowed upon us. These are the end results, let’s see how we got to this dreadful situation.
1) Foreign Policy magazine recently announced the results of its 2014 Ivory Tower survey. This survey polled 1,615 international relations scholars from 1,375 U.S. colleges, of which 660 responded. Thus, the results are based on people that are experts in the international relations field, not ordinary Americans walking down the street.
One of the primary questions of the survey was: “Who was the most effective U.S. Secretary of State over the past 50 years?” Despite being in that position over four decades ago, Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry A. Kissinger of the Nixon administration was the leading vote getter. He was the clear winner with an outstanding 32.2% of those polled.
If Kissinger got the most positive votes, who got the least? It was none other than the current Secretary of State John Kerry who got only 2 votes out of the 660 responses. Additionally, Condoleeza Rice got only three votes out of the 660 cast to finish one place above Kerry.
Thus, two out of the past three Secretary of States garnered less than one percent of the experts’ votes on who was the most effective Secretary of State. The third Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton got less than 9% of the votes, much more than Kerry and Rice but still less than half of those polled who answered the question with “Don’t Know.” Maybe this explains why our foreign relations and diplomacy efforts over the past decade or so have been so bad, we just do not have effective people in a the most important Federal government position.
2) A mid-2014 national Quinnipiac University Poll found that ordinary Americans consider Barack Obama the worst President since World War II, with a majority of those polled believing that at time that Romney would have been a better winner of the 2012 Presidential campaign than Obama. Obama received this dubious “worst” distinction with about 33% of the vote.
But George W. Bush, Obama’s predecessor, was viewed as the second worst President since the end of World War II. Thus, America thinks that over the past 14 years, we have been led by the worst Presidents since the end of the second world war. If these Americans are correct, a lot crises on the list above starts to make more sense.
3) But it is not only Presidents and Secretaries of States that America blames for our problems. According to a post on the Rasmussen website in February, 2012 concerning one of its public opinion studies, 43% of likely American voters believe that a group of citizens randomly selected from the phone book would do a better governing job in Congress than the current members of the Congress. 38% of those polled disagreed with this hypothesis while another 19% were not sure.
When more people think random people off the street can do a better job than those that spent billions of dollars to get elected, Congress at best has a PR problem, at worst they are a major part of the nation’s problems.
4) A June, 2014 Gallup poll reinforces the previous notion that Congress is held in very low esteem by Americans. As of last June, only 7% of Americans felt they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress as an American institution. This is the lowest level of confidence ever during the time Gallup measured this view (since 1973) and is down 30% from the previous low of 10% in 2013:
Americans' current confidence in Congress is not only the lowest on record, but also the lowest Gallup has recorded for any institution in the 41-year trend. This is also the first time ever Gallup has measured confidence in a major U.S. institution in the single digits. As you can see from the above chart, the trend of Congress is downward, leaving little confidence that the perception of Congress will improve anytime soon.
Americans' current confidence in Congress is not only the lowest on record, but also the lowest Gallup has recorded for any institution in the 41-year trend. This is also the first time ever Gallup has measured confidence in a major U.S. institution in the single digits. As you can see from the above chart, the trend of Congress is downward, leaving little confidence that the perception of Congress will improve anytime soon.
This concludes the first half of our discussion on whether or not we are being served by the worst set of politicians ever to serve in Washington. Given that we have presented evidence today that we have been recently served by a few of the worst Secretary of States ever, the worst two Presidents recently, and the lowest ranked Congressional sessions recently, the early indications are that we have and are being served by the worst Washington politicians ever.
We will complete our analysis and discussion tomorrow but odds are "worst" is the leading adjective after day one.
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.loathemygovernmobama,washington post,politifactent.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
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