June, 2016, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: Biden Admits He Does Not Work, The VA is Still Dysfunctional, and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc. In fact, last month we set a record, needing ten full posts to cover it all.

To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity posts we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history.

It looks like our politicians have been especially insane over the past month or so let’s get started with the latest insanity from today’s American politicians:

1) Politicians usually take themselves way too seriously in public, given how poorly they generally perform their tasks. That was certainly not the case of Vice President Joe Biden who recently pronounced: “I’ve never been gainfully employed in my life. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.” Never have truer words ever been spoken by a member of the political class. Maybe if Biden had been gainfully employed, he and Obama would not be leaving office in seven months leaving behind the following legacy:

• 45 million Americans still receiving food assistance every month, six years after the recession ended.
• A true unemployment rate that is just under a whopping 10%.
• A doubling of the national debt from $10 TRILLION to $20 TRILLION.
• A labor participation rate that is at 50 year lows.
• Household incomes and wages that have been stagnant for the entire length of the Presidency.
• Annualized national economic growth rates that never got close to the historical trend of just over 3% and which will probably average about 1.5% for the duration of the Presidency.
• A national healthcare law, Obama Care, that is failing miserably.
• A foreign policy that is also failing miserably with ill fated military interference in Libya and Syria, causing millions of people to die, get wounded or become refugees and which led to the creation of the most ruthless and heartless terror organization of all time, ISIS.
• Failure to fix Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, all of which are hurtling towards insolvency.
• Failure to address and remedy the drug addiction problem in this country, leaving about 50,000 American to die every year from drug addiction and leading to the creation of world wide crime syndicates called the drug cartels.
• Failure to address the under education of our kids in our public schools relative to the education of kids in other countries around the world.
• Shredding of the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution.
• Numerous violations of the Constitution and existing laws.
• Failure to reign in the lawless action of people in the executive branch, from Fast and Furious to the harassment of Conservative groups by the IRS to the intentional use of private email accounts to bypass Federal laws and guidelines.

This is what happens when people like the Vice President are not “gainfully employed,” no problem ever gets addressed, never mind resolved.

2) Speaking of drug cartels and the failure of this administration, or any administration, to adequately address the lost war on drugs, consider a recent article by Fox News Latino. Andrew O’Reilly wrote on May 16, 2016 that:

• Mexican drug cartels have taken over the methamphetamine production and trade in the Ozark mountains in Missouri.
• Douglas County Sheriff Chris Degase told Fox: “We’ve always had a meth problem because we’re a rural county. But now we’re not seeing the ‘shake-and-bake’ cooks anymore, the stuff we’re getting now is about as pure as it can get.”
• The Sheriff has arrested 69 people in just the past four months relative to the meth problem.
• In neighboring Webster County, prosecutors recently charged five people with the murder of a cartel agent who was sent to the county to collect a debt.
• The DEA suspects that the Sinaloa drug cartel is likely the cartel most active in the mountains of Missouri when it comes to meth.
• This should not come as a surprise since the DEA has already admitted that Mexican based drug cartels are operating in all 50 states and these cartels have expanded their product offerings to also include high grade heroin, meth, and human smuggling.
• By moving their operations out of big cities and into rural areas like the Ozark mountains, it is easier for the cartels hide their operations.

Thus, due to the failure of the Obama administration, and every administration that came before it, to address and resolve the scourge of drug addiction, we end up with higher crime rates, more death and destructive of American lives, and the enrichment of the criminal drug cartels. Instead, Biden and his boss focus on who should use what bathrooms across the country. Insanity.

3) Obama likes to claim that he did a great job saving the U.S. economy from the last recession. As we listed above, his salvation was very tepid at best, and downright horrible at worse, especially when you consider he had the following tailwinds to help him:

1. A failed economic stimulus plan that cost well over $800 billion.
2. A long stretch of remarkably low energy costs that should have juiced the economy well beyond what actually happened.
3. The infusion of trillions of paper dollars into the economy by the Federal Reserve.

Despite these helping economic tailwinds, his administration could not even attain half of the long term average growth rate of the U.S. economy.

But the human cost of having overseen a failed economic recovery and the strategies that caused it are starting to mount up. According to a recent Bloomberg article, almost 20% of Americans over the age of 65 are still in the workforce. That’s the largest percentage of older Americans still working since early 1960s. I would bet that they are working not because they want to continue their careers but because economic conditions are causing them to work into their retirement years just to survive. 

On the opposite end of the age spectrum, a recent report found that more Americans aged 18-34 are living at home with their parents than ever before. Either they are too lazy to move out or more likely, they cannot find a job that would allow them to be economically self sufficient outside of the economic break they get by living at home.

So despite a massive economic stimulus program, record low energy costs, and massive Fed dollar infusions, this administration’s economic strategies are causing older Americans to work longer, younger Americans to not find substantial jobs, have caused the true unemployment rate to linger at around 10%, has led to anemic economic growth, and have not helped minority Americans lower their unemployment rate vs. the overall national average. Insanely bad economic management. 

4) As we have discussed in previous posts, the Obama administration has done a horrible job in providing the medical and health care treatment that has been promised to our veterans. Obama promised to take care of them when he was campaigning, after he was elected, and a year or so ago when he replaced the head of the Veterans Administration because seven years into his administration, veterans were still waiting and sometimes dying because of the inept Veterans Administration.

Which raises the question: given all of the promises, has the treatment of our veterans gotten any better? Apparently not, according to recent reporting by Martin Matishak writing for The Hill:

• A Veterans Administration internal report asserts that about one out of every three veterans waiting to receive medical treatment have already died.
• The estimate comes from a Huffington Post analysis of veteran death records which found that as of April, 2016, 847,822 veterans were officially waiting for health care treatment and of those, 238,647 had already died.
• The VA tried to spin the numbers to show that while some of the veterans may have been awaiting VA medical care, many of them may have gone ahead and gotten medical treatment outside of the VA sphere.
• However, the article quotes Scott Davis, a program specialist at the VA’s Health Eligibility Center in Atlanta: "The VA wants you to believe, by virtue of people being able to get health care elsewhere, it's not a big deal. But VA is turning away tens of thousands of veterans eligible for health care. VA is making it cumbersome, and then saying, 'See? They didn't want it anyway.'"

If it comes down to believing a VA employee or the official VA position, one has to go with the VA employee’s accusation, given the history of botched VA operations, lies, and coverups of the VA administration and executives. So sad that in this week of celebrating Memorial Day and those veterans who served to defend our country and its freedoms, that the Obama administration still has not fixed what is broken in the VA, likely resulting in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of veterans.

5) One last sad bit of insanity for today, also courtesy of the Veterans Administration. Robert McDonald was brought into to head up the Veterans Administration and shape it up, getting veterans the medical attention they were promised and what the deserve. Given what we just talked about, massive VA waiting lists, it does not look like he is doing a good job so far. 

And then he compounds this ineptness with the following insanely insensitive public statement: “The days to an appointment is really not what we should be measuring. What we should be measuring is the veteran’s satisfaction. What really counts is how does the veteran feel about their encounter with the V.A.? When you go to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? What is important is, what is your satisfaction with the experience.”

Well, sir, they actually do measure the time you wait in line at Disney, Disney measures everything. Plus, if you wait in a long line at Disney, you do eventually get into the attraction and the potential of dying while waiting is quite low. That is not the same thing as waiting and waiting for the VA to get to where you have a very real chance of dying. Insanely insensitive and stupid, of course waiting times matter and should be measured when people’s lives are at stake. Idiocy. 

That will do it for today’ insanity. A truly out of touch head of the VA, an organization that continues to be a failure, bad economic performance continues affecting the old and young in dramatically bad ways, the cartels continue to infest every part of America as 50,000 drug addicts die every year, and Joe Biden admits he has never been gainfully employed in a rare burst of political honesty.

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