June, 2016, Part 3, By The Numbers: Sanders Numbers Are Insane, Obama's Ecomomic Numbers Are Terrible, Our Veterans Are Still Not Getting Treated and More

On a periodic basis we do some posts that fall under the theme of “by the numbers.” Rather than trust what the American political tells us about reality, we like to examine the real numbers and the real reality in the world to understand what is actually going on. Relying on politicians, and their cohorts in the media, to tell us what is reality is always a sucker bet. They have their own agendas and goals, usually centering around their needs and self-enrichment. So we need to look at the reality of the numbers to determine what is really going on.

Previous analyses of “by the numbers” can be accessed by entering the phrase in the search box above. This is the third post this month where we look at the numbers to truly find out how good, not likely, or bad, most likely, the American political class is doing in managing our tax dollars, protecting our freedoms, and resolving major issues that affect all of us. 

1) We have often talked about the insanity of some liberals and Democrats who want to ban guns and shred the Second Amendment in the insanely silly argument that if the government banned guns, no one would have guns and the death toll from gun violence would drop considerably. There are so many holes in their argument but we will save that discussion for another day, today and this week we are only talking about the numbers.

Guns kill about 30,000 Americans every year. But that number is not as large as it appear since a lot of those deaths are deaths of criminals that die at the hands of other criminals or police so they deserve the situation, in this case death that they got themselves into. The number of innocent people killed by gun violence is much less.

And while less than 30,000 deaths a year get liberals and Democrats all choked up, they say nothing and have no outrage towards the number of Americans that die every year from medical mistakes. Not medical conditions, medical mistakes by doctors, nurses, and hospitals. According to a recent Johns Hopkins University study, more than 250,000 innocent Americans die every year from medical mistakes that range from undetected complications to medication mix ups. 

This is at least eight times higher than the number of innocent Americans who die from guns every year. It is the third leading cause of death in the country. Medical mistakes kill more innocent Americans every year than respiratory disease, strokes, accidents, and Alzheimer’s disease. 

And this is six years after Obama Care was passed, indicating that the legislation did little if anything to fix this broken part of our healthcare system. And yet, nary a peep out of people like Obama and Clinton that obsess of an issue that results in far fewer innocent Americans dying every year.

2) Bernie Sanders has made a lot of noise and convinced a lot of people that his loony socialist economic policies and social engineering are great ideas. As a socialist, he would tax the hell out of EVERYONE, give it to the government, and let the government, i.e. the political class elitists, spend the wealth way they say fit, not for the good of the masses, but for the good of themselves.

Usually, the mainstream media, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, and ABC never question ideas on the left side of the political spectrum which is certainly where Sanders resides. So when one of these liberal media outlets actually criticizes someone like Sanders, you know that the numbers must be overwhelmingly bad.

Which is exactly what Washington Post writer, Max Ehrenfreund, did when he put together the underlying numbers and costs of Sanders’ lunacy:

• To fund all of Sanders ideas, as determined by the Tax Policy Center and the Urban Institute, the Federal government would have to spend an incremental whopping $33 TRILLION over ten years.
• This comes out to about $3.3 TRILLION a year compared to the $4 TRILLION the Federal government spends today.
• Thus, taxes and tax revenue would have to be raised by about 82% to cover his new programs.
• But his proposed tax increases would cover only $15 TRILLION of the $33 TRILLION, requiring the Federal government to borrow $18 TRILLION.
• This $18 TRILLION would almost double the current national debt load.
• This would get us to about a $38 TRILLION national debt load which would be almost double the total economic output of the country.
• The good news is that the national debt would likely never get that high since the country would likely default long before we hit $38 TRILLION.

Even liberal leaning economists agree that such a massive tax increase and debt load would push up interest rates which would depress business creation, discourage job creation, and hurt current businesses while depressing home buyers.

And even how bad these projections are, this assumes that the wealthy, that would be taxed at the 60% level just by the Feds, would a) continue to work as hard as they do even though they would keep less than half of what they make and b) would actually stay in a country that taxed them so high, both conditions of which would make the debt load increase even more.

You cannot get much more stupid than these numbers as they relate to these stupid political dreams and nonsense. As the writer correctly states at the end of his article: “In simpler terms: There’s no free lunch.” The numbers show it as does at least one sane component of the mainstream media.

3) The ineptness of the people running the \Veterans Administration continues to astound the world and the latest numbers describe some of the worst behavior to date. An article by Morgan Chalfant, writing for the Washington Free Beacon, on June 6, 2016 showed how bad the latest VA numbers are:

• Half a million veterans are waiting over 30 days to medical care and treatment from the VA’s medical facilities around the country.
• These latest numbers show that 506,000 veterans waited more than a month for appointments, an increase of more than 10,000 in just two weeks and 23,000 in the past month.
• 300,000 of the 506,000 would waited between one and two months, 130,000 waited between two and three months, 50,000 waited between three and four months, and over 30,000 waited over four months.
• These obscene waiting times have occurred even though Obama forced the resignation of the VA head in 2014 and promised to give the problems at the VA his full attention, another promise that obviously is not happening.
• Congressman Jeff Miller summed up the disaster quite nicely: “This news is unwelcome, but not unexpected. Quite frankly, it is illogical to think the department’s performance and veterans’ experiences with the agency will ever significantly improve as long as VA routinely tolerates egregious behavior among employees such as armed robbery participation and wait-time manipulation.”

More bad numbers from a very badly performing Federal government agency. And to think that some in the Washington political class want the Federal government to handle EVERYONE’S medical needs via a so-called single payer government medical system. If they would operate that system like they operate the VA system, best not get sick.

4) Let’s finish today’s and this month’s discussion of “by the numbers” with a nice, simple, comprehensive look at nine major economic indicators. This graphs comes from the Zero Hedge website:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-01/economy-better-now-when-i-started-obama-delivers-remarks-state-economy

It is in response to Obama’s recent boasting of what a great job he did in saving the U.S. economy after the recession. As these charts show, that boast is quite empty if you look at the numbers. Some Obama supporters may say that some of these economic trends were already in place when he took office and in some cases, they would be right. 

However, in every case, his economic policies and strategies either did nothing to change or mute the negative trend or accelerated or started a negative trend, i.e. he did not make these better even though he had the following three tailwinds to help him:

• Spent over $800 billion on a failed economic stimulus plan.
• Enjoyed very low energy prices that should have spurred business spending and expansion, consumer spending, and overall economic expansion and job creation...but did none of these things.
• Had the benefit of the Fed pumping TRILLIONS of dollars into the economy and not taking advantage of TRILLIONS of dollars.

- Student loan debt: still rising as fast as when Obama came into office.

- Americans on food stamps - rose 50% from about 30 million to about 45 million Americans and has not come down even blyugh the “Obama recovery” is now over six years old.

- Federal debt - accelerated and will probably double during his eight years in office.

- Money printing - although controlled by the Fed and not Obama, he could not take advantage of the Fed radically increasing the money supply.

- Healthcare costs - slowed down during the recession because people did not have jobs or the money to pay for the healthcare they needed, the increasing trend in health care costs has now gone back to the long term increasing trend.

- Labor force participation rate -  continues to plummet to forty year lows despite being 6 years out of the recession.

- Black inequality - has continued to increase as the economy has gotten marginally better.

- Median Family income - continues to trend downwards despite being six years out of the recession.

- Home ownership - continues to plummet downward.

Again, Obama did not start a lot of these trends but he certainly did not stop or reverse them and in some instances he made them worse despite the three tailwinds we discussed above.

Bad economic numbers, bad veterans servicing numbers, bad political ideas and concepts, and a bad focus on what is really killing innocent Americans. As we go by the numbers, the numbers do not lie and they tell us that we need some fresh people, some fresh idea in political office because the current people are giving us bad numbers.

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

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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