- Spending taxpayer wealth on idiotic programs and projects.
- Wasting taxpayer wealth on their own selfish financial and political needs.
- Implementing legislation to resolve problems that make the original problems worse or which created unintended bad consequences as a result of their legislation.
- Implementing legislation that supports their political donors and financial backers rather than the typical American citizen.
- Issuing idiotic and stupid comments.
- Overseeing government organizations that are incompetent, inefficient, ineffective, and wasteful of taxpayer wealth.
1) Everyone likes the idea of the government stepping in to help out disaster victims. What is seldom reported is the botched job the government usually does in handling the disaster aftermath and more importantly, the funding that eventually gets wasted to support the government effort. From 9-11 to Hurricane Katrina, we could probably go on for days about how the political class and government agencies probably wasted more money than they used to actually help disaster victims.
Which brings us to one of the latest disasters that the government and politicians had to handle, Hurricane Sandy, which ravaged the middle Atlantic states a few years ago. According to an article posted on the Convention of States website from the Washington Free Beacon, nearly one million dollars in taxpayer funding was given to a New York City cherry factory that had a hidden basement filled with hundreds of hydroponically grown marijuana plants.
The company, Dell’s Maraschino Cherries in Brooklyn, got $900,000 in Hurricane Sandy relief cash after it’s “cherry” inventories were damaged by the 2012 storm. But that money might have to be given back, assuming it still exists, after investigators found a hidden door in the factory.
The door led to a 2,500-square-foot basement containing hundreds of thousands in cash and about 100 pounds of weed: “We have advised Dell’s that the funds are subject to recapture and the city can commence legal proceedings, if necessary,” said a spokesman for the city’s Department of Small Business Services, which administered the Federal Sandy money.
To add insult to injury, the company has also received hundreds of thousands of dollars from New York state taxpayers in state government for power subsidies, which was important since the marijuana plants that were being grown need strong grow lights to grow in the basement, eating up a lot of electricity. Adding more insults, the article reported that the New York District Attorney’s office had been tipped off about the illegal drug activity going on at Dell’s….. in 2009, years before the government gave them almost a million dollars of taxpayer wealth. Insanity.
2) In 1978, Washington politicians passed a law that allowed Federal employees who are union members to spend part of their day addressing union issues. The theory behind the law was that since not all Federal employees have to pay dues and be union members, the law was supposed to provide a financial help to the unions in their union activities by allowing union work to be done with taxpayer funding.
But some in Washington think that after 37 years, the program and intent of the program have gotten out of control. According to the Office of Personnel Management, in 2012 (the most recent year there are statistics for) Federal workers spent a whopping 3.4 million man-hours on union issues and not the work they were hired for. The estimated cost to taxpayers was more than $157 million.
What’s worse is that two of the most dysfunctional government entities, those that have experienced the most failure in serving their respective clients, purposes, and goals, the Veterans Administration and the IRS, also appear to have the most Federal workers doing union work vs. helping Americans. In both entities, hundreds of workers spent 100% of their time doing only union work.
At the VA, a whopping 259 employees worked solely on union issues. At the IRS, which only disclosed their statistics when the National Review sent them a Freedom of Information Act request, the number of employees was 201. These are 259 employees that are not serving our underserved veterans and their medical needs and 201 IRS employees that are not serving the tax filing needs and questions of Americans.
Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson is co-sponsoring a bill in the Senate to curtail the practice for the same reasons we just discussed: "The VA's had problems getting veterans appointments within 30 days, yet they're taking thousands of hours to organize the union. Something's wrong with their priorities. We need to get it fixed."
While we wish the Senator luck in this endeavor to protect taxpayer wealth, three previous efforts to do the same thing failed to get out of Congress. Thus, even a simple thing of controlling out of control employees is beyond the reach of the Washington political class unless the fourth time is the charm.
3) What is an interesting correlation with the previous piece of insanity is the recent speech of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. He asserted that IRS taxpayer/customer service levels have gotten so bad that the IRS is ignoring an embarrassing 60% of taxpayers’ phone calls. And apparently the trend is not good since a couple of weeks ago they were not answering 57% of the phone calls.
Maybe if the good Commissioner had used the 201 employees discussed above for the jobs they were hired to do, vs. union work, and had not used a lot of IRS resources to harass tea party and other organizations, he would actually be able to do a better job than failing 60% of the time. Rather than do his job efficiently and effectively, the good Commissioner is crying poverty and is looking for more budget money rather than fixing what is wrong within his organization. At a 60% failure rate, if he worked in the real world, he would no longer be holding that job for his ineptness.
4) I am not going to try to summarize the following insanity and insulting deception that the Washington political class set up to to avoid the additional costs that Obama Care would impose on Congressional members and their staffs. Instead, I have copied below the press release that recently came out from U.S Senator David Vitter and Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton on how the Obama administration's Office of Personnel Management has been using taxpayer money to illegally subsidize healthcare for Congress:
The Affordable Care Act clearly states that Congress and staff must participate in the new insurance framework based on health-care exchanges, but there’s no available exchange for large employers, like Congress who has nearly 16,000 employees. That meant members of Congress and staff could only participate in the individual exchanges. Just like the rest of America, Congress had to abide by the same Obamacare rules and use these expensive individual exchanges with no employer contribution to help pay their premiums with non-taxable dollars.
In fact, part of the political price to pass the law was that specific provision that there would be no special treatment for Congress. But Republican and Democrat leaders in Congress begged Obama to step in. Rather than losing their tax-free premium subsidy, which would mean higher health insurance bills for themselves and their families, congressional leadership cut a side deal with the administration. The result? The Obama administration’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) ignored the law and decreed that Congress could participate as a “small business” eligible to purchase a “Gold-tier” plan from Washington D.C.’s health-care exchange.
The District of Columbia defines a “small business” as fifty employees or less. Congress has nearly 16,000. According to the documents disclosed by Judicial Watch in a taxpayer lawsuit challenging this scam, the House and Senate filed false applications with the D.C. Health Benefits Exchange claiming they each were a “small business” with “fifty or fewer full-time equivalent employees.”
The applications state that the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives each have 45 employees and that the federal institutions are actually “local/state governments.” The “electronic signature” section of the application states that the signatory has “provided true and correct information to all questions” and is aware that if “not truthful, there may be a penalty.” When we requested to see these documents, the names of the signatories had been blacked out by the D.C. Exchange.
These documents appear to be an outright fraud. They are the basis for using taxpayer money to illicitly subsidize health insurance for Congress. More than 12,300 members of Congress, their staff, spouses, and dependents obtained health insurance through the exchange between October 2013 and September 2014, and that number surely is climbing. It would be hard to credibly attack Obama’s executive overreach (and as the House did – sue to stop him from violating Obamacare), when Congress is a co-conspirator.
The classic "do as I say, not as I do," a common theme of the Washington political class. Or in this case, "pay as I say [relative to Obama Care], not as I pay."
The classic "do as I say, not as I do," a common theme of the Washington political class. Or in this case, "pay as I say [relative to Obama Care], not as I pay."
5) The following is political class insanity but in a somewhat good way, especially when you consider that over 45 million Americans are receiving food assistance from the Federal government and other welfare rolls are at record highs. According to an article on the www.800whistleblower.com website, Maine Governor Paul LePage is among the states cracking down on welfare fraud by instituting work requirements for benefits recipients:
- Beginning in 2014, Maine required non-disabled residents who get Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits (food assistance/”food stamps”) to put in at least a 20-hour work week, attending vocational training, or volunteering.
- The results of the work and volunteer requirement was astonishing.
- According to David Sorensen, spokesman for the Department of Health and Services, of the 12,000 non-disabled enrollees without children who were previously on the dole, only 2,680 remain as of now, an amazing drop of almost 80%.
- Could it be that a large number of people receiving food assistance, and other forms of welfare, simply because it is so easy to do so?
Previously we reported in this blog that when the English government required disability payment recipients to re-register in order to continue receiving benefits, they also experienced an incredible decrease in people claiming benefits. Lesson learned: when you make it easy for people to get free money, they will take it, whether it is food assistance leeches in Maine or disability fakers in England.
Imagine how much taxpayer money could be saved if this Maine model was repeated across the country. The insanity of it all is that why this type of gross mismanagement has been going on for decades, not a single Washington politician has had the will, intelligence, and courage to do what the Maine governor has done. How insane and pathetic is that?
Unfortunately, after five days, we are still not through the latest month of political class insanity, more to follow.
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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