July, 2017, Part 3, Political Class Insanity: Our Greedy, Bigoted, and Economically Ignorant Politicians

As we do every month, we review the latest idiocy, lunacy, ineptness, and general insanity from the American political class. The members of the political never cease to amaze us with their greed, idiocy, gumption, and criminal activities. And just when we think there is no new way to disappoint us and tick us off, they manage to find a way to do it, wasting our tax dollars and destroying our freedoms in the process.

The political class has been very busy this month so let’s get right to it:

1) Congressman Luis Gutierrez is not my favorite politician. In fact, I find him quite despicable. Kate Steinle was shot in cold blood walking down an American city street by a Hispanic man that had been deported a number of times, arrested a number of times and who was in the country illegally. In a response to the murder, the Congressman said that Ms. Steinle’s killing was “a little thing” that people who were against illegal immigration would exploit as a public relations opportunity. I cannot imagine the horror and grief Ms. Steinle family and friends experienced when a national political figure claimed that her life and killing was “a little thing.”

And now I have another reason to despise him, although his actions below are probably pretty typical of the greed and corruption of the entire Washington political class:

• According to the We The Proud Patriots website and government election filings, Gutierrez used almost half of the money he collected for his reelection campaigns and paid it out to his wife.
• She has worked on his staff and his campaign staff for at least the past seven years and was paid handsomely for her presence.
• In those seven years his campaign effort has paid his wife $385,000 out of the campaign fundraising efforts.
• She got $110,000 in 2014 and $125,856 in 2016, nice work if you can get it.
• Oh, by the way, the Congressman also routed campaign money to his daughters for whatever work they also did.

Although not illegal to enrich family members with campaign donations, it certainly is sleezy. A simple fix would be that campaign funds could not be used to pay out to family members. Simple, but too complicated for our simple and greedy politicians.

2) Liberal politicians and journalists like to think that they are so special, that they are more caring and more enlightened than the rest of us, especially when it comes to illegal immigrants. But almost always they are just as unenlightened as they think the rest of us are. Consider what a liberal writer recently tweeted out:

• Mary Beth Williams is a writer for the liberal intense media outlet Salon.
• According to the Independent Journal Review, she recently tweeted: “I wonder if the GOP has asked itself who will clean their toilets & nanny their children & drive their limos when we’re all dead & deported.”
• In other words, in the mind of this “enlightened” liberal, illegal immigrants are only good for cleaning toilets, being nannies, and mindlessly driving rich white folks around town, quite racist, no?

Nothing worse than a hypocrite in my opinion. You cannot come up with a more condescending statement to assume an entire race of people are only good for society’s lowest jobs and responsibilities.

But these are not the only enlightened liberals who hold similar views:

• Remember back in 2016 when Obama stated in the midst of the 2016 Presidential election that illegal immigrants are necessary to “pick our fruit or make our beds.”
• Former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stated in 2015 the following about illegal immigrants: “We clean your toilets. We clean your hotels. We build your houses’” 
• Liberal TV star Kelly Osbourne asked, “If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilet, Donald Trump?”

Hypocrites, all of them no matter how enlightened they think they are.

3) Okay, we have already covered greedy and self serving politicians and we have covered hypocritical and bigoted liberals, both in the media and the political class. Let’s continue with another shortcoming of the politicians in this country, economics. 

We have previously discussed how the sudden raising of the minimum wage level across the country usually hurts the very people a higher minimum wage is supposed to help. Hours are cut, positions are eliminated, and economic growth is stifled, all hurting those in the lower economic strata of our society.

Becket Adams, writing for the Washington Examiner on June 26, 2017, reviewed the latest economic analysis out of Seattle, a city that has an aggressive schedule for getting its local minimum wage up to $15 an hour but has raised it up to only $13 so far:

• According to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, low wage workers on average have seen their earning drop by $125 a month since the city raised the minimum wage to $13 an hour.
• In other words, workers are earning less money even though the city forced local employers to pay $13 an hour.
• This translates into an annual loss of income of $1,500.
• Not unexpected to anyone except local politicians, the study found that some employers have reduced their staff sizes either by cutting positions or cutting hours of current employees.
• The study was done by University of Washington economists Ekaterina Jardim, Mark C. Long, Robert Plotnick, Emma van Inwegen, Jacob Vigdor and Hilary Wething, who reported: "[W]e conclude that the second wage increase to $13 reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by around 9 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by around 3 percent." 
• So hours were reduced at three times the rate that wages were raised, which resulted in the average worker getting $125 less a month in wages.
• One of the researchers, Jacob Vigdor concluded: "The goal of this policy was to deliver higher incomes to people who were struggling to make ends meet in the city. You've got to watch out because at some point you run the risk of harming the people you set out to help." 
• I believe it’s called price elasticity, a simple economic concept that continues to be lost on politicians.

The economic idiocy and ignorance of our politicians continues to astound us and make life tougher for those that are supposed to benefit from the actions of politicians. Combine this negative trait with their greed and bigotry and one can see how pathetic and useless our current set of politicians are.

More insanity to follow.

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