August, 2017, Part 1, Political Class Insanity: Vote For The Worst Federal Government Entity Today!

It is the beginning of another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us.

1) Joseph Lawler, writing for the Washington Examiner on July 27, 2017, reviewed how even if you are a major screw up working at the IRS you really are never fired:

• The IRS Inspector General recently reported that the IRS is still hiring former employees that it fired for various types of misconduct.
• The Inspector General report found that of the 2,000 former IRS employees that the IRS rehired in 2015 and 2016, more than 19%, or 200 individuals, had earlier been fired or had resigned in the midst of an investigation into their bad behavior.
• Some of those 200 had been investigated for improperly accessing taxpayer private tax records while some had actually cheated on their own taxes.
• Senator Richard Burr had requested the inspector general report, calling the IRS' rehiring of fired workers a "mind boggling abuse of taxpayer money."
• Burr was also ticked off that during Senate testimony, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified under oath that the IRS does not hire workers it had previously fired.

Ah, the la-la land of Washington D.C. where government workers can get away with just about anything and still get a good paying, taxpayer funded job and lying to Congress and the American people, under oath, is a generally accepted practice with no criminal consequences. Insanity.

2) Over the years it has been a tough call as to what Washington bureaucracy wastes the most taxpayer money with the Social Security Administration, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Pentagon usually topping the list of the most inept and inefficient organizations. Anneta Grieffe, writing for the Dennis Michael Lynch website on July 25 2017 puts a vote in for the Pentagon with her latest report on waste:

• A recent 17 page report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) found that the Pentagon wasted over $28 million over the past decade by buying the wrong type of uniforms for Afghan soldiers.
• Unbelievably, someone in the Pentagon authorized the purchase of $28 million worth of forest camouflage uniforms, useless in a country like Afghanistan which has very few forests, instead of desert camouflage uniforms.
• Adding insult to injury, the forest camouflage uniforms are more expensive than the desert camouflage uniforms.
• Adding further insult to injury, SIGAR report cited another major screw up in that the Pentagon spent extra money for the license to the camouflage uniforms when they could have gotten a pattern for free.
• As always, the politicians get involved AFTER the damage is done with Senator Claire McCaskill ranting: “This is a contracting decision that makes you smack your head in frustration. It’s a prime example of wasting hard-earned taxpayer dollars, and we’ve got to get to the bottom of how this happened.”

She and the rest in Congress should all be smacked in their head for allowing this and thousands and thousands of other government wasteful spending endeavors to occur and endure.

3) As we always do lately, let’s check in with Chicago and see how their violence is doing. As you know, Chicago has been in the grip of a crime wave and violence wave for years now with no local, state, or Federal politician having the brains or the willpower to stop it. 

Probably driven by the illegal drug trade, Mexican cartels and other local gangs use violence to protect and secure drug sales turf every day, with the residual violence killing innocent city citizens on a daily basis. The reality is that the very stringent and tight gun control laws in the city has done absolutely nothing except make lawful and frightened citizens have a tougher time arming themselves to defend themselves.

As far as the latest from the streets of Chicago:

• In a recent week, six people were killed and 35 others were injured by the city’s violence.
• This puts this year’s death toll at a rate that was slightly higher than last year’s carnage. 391 deaths in 2017 vs. 387 vs. the same timeframe from last year, a year in which 783 Chicago citizens died from criminal violence, about two per day.
• If there is any good news from this recent week of violence is that the number of people shot is down so far this year, 2,112, vs. 2,337 in 2016. 
• This violence continues despite the boast by Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson that his department has removed more than 5,000 firearms from city streets this year.
• And yet, there have still been more murders this year vs. last year, indicating that maybe more gun control is not the way to resolve this situation.

While there has been some small encouraging signs of winning back the Chicago streets, e.g. murder arrests are up 10% and gun confiscation is up over 30%, getting more than two civilians killed every day is still a disaster with no politician in sight having the answer.

4) While the Pentagon was busy wasting tens of millions of dollars on the wrong type of uniforms, the Social Security Administration (SSA) was busy wasting hundreds of millions of dollars through sheer incompetence:

• According to a new inspector general report, the SSA improperly paid out over $200 million over the years to people who collected SSA benefits under two different Social Security numbers or people who were dead.
• This double SSA number blunder happened in at least 5,000 instances identified in the inspector general report.
• In 13,000 cases, SSA benefits were paid to dead people even though they were recorded and recognized as dead somewhere in the bowels of the SSA data systems processed.
• In addition, the report found that a whopping 4.9 million Americans currently have more than one SSA number assigned to their names.
• In one example, an individual who died in 1997 had his SSA benefits properly terminated but the SSA never checked if he had a second number assigned to his name, which he did, and that number resulted in $31,000 being cashed 14 years later.

Always tough to pick out the worst performing Federal government organization, the Pentagon that paid for the wrong kind of uniforms, the IRS who hires back people that should have not been rehired  or the Social Security Administration who doubles pays benefits to living people and continues to pay benefits to dead people. More insanity to follow over the next week or so.

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