April, 2019, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Government Health Care Intervention Equals Less Quality Health Care

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

Let's continue with more disasters today:

1) Although Obama Care and its socialistic tenets turned out to be a massive failure, liberals and Democrats want to go further down this road of failure to a single payer, socialistic health care system in this country. They like to point out that other countries, usually using the Scandinavian countries as an example, have a single payer system and thus, based on that fact alone, we should have it in this country.

But numerous times we have shown what a failure the single payer system is. Long delays to get in to see a doctor, waiting months to get a simple diagnostic test done. Higher and higher healthcare taxes to get less and less healthcare coverage. Citizens leaving a country to come to the U.S. because the wait times for a procedure is so long in a single payer system. Basically, expensive healthcare that makes you die younger.

But the Legal Insurrection website recently ran article that shows that single payer systems in Scandinavian countries are not all that liberals think they are or dream they are:

• The Washington Free Beacon reported: The government of Finland collapsed Friday “due to the rising cost of universal health care and the prime minister’s failure to enact reforms to the system.”
• This caused Prime Minister Juha Sipila and his entire cabinet to resign after his governing coalition could pass the necessary laws to reform the government’s single payer health care system.Much like the U.S., Finland has an aging population with 26% of its citizens expected to be over the age of 65 by 2030.An aging population almost always means higher and higher healthcare costs.
• To head off financial disaster, Finland has tried to cut costs and boost health care efficiency for years but has been unsuccessful in doing so, resulting in more and more financial distress for the government.
• And according to Reuters, Finland is not alone in this crisis: “Nordic countries, where comprehensive welfare is the cornerstone of the social model, have been among the most affected. But reform has been controversial and, in Finland, plans to cut costs and boost efficiency have stalled for years.”
• Other Nordic countries with single payer systems such as Sweden and Norway are facing similar health care financial stress.

Nasty stuff, people getting older and their government likely not going to be able to fulfill its commitment of health care. And yet, liberals and Democrat in Washington continue to champion a losing approach to healthcare with a recent tweet by Bernie Sanders showing just how ignorant he is of reality and finance: “In the United States it costs on average $12,000 to have a baby. In Finland it costs $60.”

So Sanders thinks that for $60 you can give birth to a baby in Finland and that $60 will cover hospital, doctor, nurse, and medicine costs for the birth. It does not cost $60, Bernie. It costs much more, it is just that the couple having the baby pay less while the rest of Finland society and taxpayers pay much more than $60. Are you that ignorant of finance or are you just a flat out liar? In either case, single payer systems are not efficient, effective, or healthy for sick citizens. Obama Care proved that and the Scandinavian countries, along with England and Canada, prove that every day.

2) Chris Pope, recently writing for the National Review website, wrote an excellent article that not only showed how bad Obama Care was but how bad Medicare For All would be, which is really Obama Care on steroids. Rather than review all aspects of his in depth and well researched and reasoned article, I encourage you to read it at:

https://webmail.earthlink.net/wam/msg.jsp?msgid=22&folder=0/b6bb4176c6d599b2e6f150162a4126e9&isSeen=true&x=-838493755

My trying to summarize his analysis and logic would not do it justice. But let me pull out some facts and realities from his work that prove again that Obama Care is nothing more than a series of unfolding disasters, much like Medicare For All would be:

• Mr. Pope reminds us that Obama and the entire set of Washington Democrats promised us that Obama Care would reduce costs and improve medical and health care delivery.
• Obama actually promised that an average American family could actually see their annual health care insurance costs go down by up to $2,500 a year.
• Of course that did not happen, health insurance premiums skyrocketed, health insurance copays skyrocketed, millions of American lost access to their favorite doctors and hospitals and drug costs continued to escalate.
• By the numbers, health insurance premiums for individual health insurance programs under Obama Care doubled within three years of the legislation being passed.
• Premiums for Obama Care health insurance plans now average $4,700 a year, almost $400 a month, hardly the $2,500 reduction Obama promised.
• And yet Democrats want even more government intervention in the market even though Obama Care’s intervention was a disaster.
• The state of Vermont, a very liberal state that is the home of Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, a big Medicare For All advocate, tried to implement a single payer system in 2014.
• Thus, if any part of the country had any chance of making a single payer system work, it was Vermont.
• And yet, when the liberal politicians in Vermont ran the numbers and actually looked at the reality, they decided they could not afford a single payer system.
• The costs on a national level, costs that Vermont found out quite rudely, would add $3 TRILLION to the Federal government operating costs every year, more than double the amount that the Federal government collects in personal income taxes.
• This $3 TRILLION annual incremental cost was independently arrived by analysis done by both the liberal leaning Urban Institute and the conservative leaning Mercatus Center.
• Even Nancy Pelosi’s health policy advisor, Wendell Primus, notes that, “recently noted as fundamental obstacles to Medicare for All the large number of potential losers, widespread opposition from stakeholders, and the desire to reserve funds for other priorities. As the party’s presidential candidates for 2020 have jockeyed for position, many have endorsed proposals in full knowledge that they cannot be implemented. Indeed, even Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose state enacted single-payer but abandoned the plan when the scale of associated tax increases became clear, has refused to advocate abolishing the filibuster in order to enact Medicare for All.”
• One version of Medicare For All that is less expensive than the full blown Medicare for All theory is to allow people of all ages to “buy in” to the program, a facet of Medicare that already exists for senior citizens that have not contributed enough in payroll taxes over their lifetime to qualify for regular Medicare.
• However, this program would cost Medicare For All customers to currently pay $974 a month for Medicare Parts A,B, and D, hardly affordable for most Americans.
• Many Obama Care programs cost much less than $974 a month so things would be worse, not better, under Medicare For All.
• But as soon as liberals decide that the $974 should be subsidized then we are right back to an incremental $3 TRILLION a year in cost.
• And liberals never seem to talk about the reality, that according to Gallup, 80% of Americans rate their current health care as excellent or good so why would the vast majority of Americans want to give up their current excellent or good health care for a long shot, long odds program like Medicare For All?
• Plus, the average out of pocket costs that Americans pay as a share of average household consumption (3%) is actually slightly less than the average among developed countries, another reality that liberals like to ignore.

But consider another reality that the article does not cover: do you really think that Washington, like the following idiots, should be trusted with every aspect of your medical care:

• Democratic Congressman Hank Johnson actually stated in a televised Congressional hearing that he was worried the island of Guam could tip over in the Pacific Ocean.
• Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee thinks the Constitution is over 400 years old, that her Congressional district is 50 feet below sea level (it is not), and wondered out loud if a Mars Rover mission would drive by the place where Neil Armstrong planted the flag on the moon.
• Democratic Speaker of The House Nancy Pelosi once proudly stated that the Obama Care legislation had to be passed so that she and the rest of the country could see what was in it, like a Christmas present.
• And of course, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does not know the simple definition of the unemployment rate, does not know how tax credits work, chased Amazon and its 25,000 high paying jobs out of her Congressional district, etc., etc., etc.

So, Scandinavian countries’ single payer healthcare plans are going bankrupt, with costs increasing as quality goes down, and Medicare For All is so stupid and ill fated along every dimension imaginable. It is a no brainer that the ore government and the politicians who operate it the less healthy and less wealthy people become.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Joe Biden's Pathetic Attempt To Convince Us There Were No Obama Presidency Scandals,Not A "Whisper"

We wanted to move on to the latest unfolding disasters of Obama Care theme that we have been running over the past decade or so, given how pathetically bad that piece of legislation has performed. But we decided to put that off for a day or so and follow up on a statement that Joe Biden made in the past few days. 

As you probably know, Biden is now the 300th or so Democratic candidate for President in 2020. He made a bunch of press and TV rounds the day he announced his candidacy and made a ridiculous assertion that Obama has also made any number of times since his failure of a Presidency ended. Biden claimed that the Obama administration had not had a single major scandal. Specifically, he said there was not a “whisper of a scandal” in the Obama White House.

Such insanity and such a lie. Hey, Joe, let’s review a few “whispers” of a scandal:

• Benghazi - Four Americans were killed when the Obama administration refused to allow U.S. military resources to deploy and rescue them. The scandal got compounded when the entire Obama administration claimed that the attack on the U.S. consulate at Benghazi was caused by an obscure YouTube video. However, we knew years ago that the Obama crew lied through their teeth, that they knew ahead of time what was going to happen and it had nothing to do with a video. Judicial Watch’s actions and access to government documents in the past few weeks proves the lie, a lie that was needed to protect Obama’s false assertion that he had conquered terrorism and to protect his run for reelection. Obama, Hillary, et al committed to the family of those murdered Americans that they would bring the perpetrators to justice, an unfulfilled promise seven years later.
• The Obama administration broke numerous domestic laws, international laws, and international treaties and agreements by gun running military grade weapons to Mexican drug cartels via the Fast and Furious scandal. These weapons eventually were used to kill Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and dozens, if not hundreds, of Mexican civilians.
• Obama allowed his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to operate an illegal and unsecured computer server in her home which ended up in the unlawful mishandling of government classified information. The data management processes of secret information was so atrocious that over 600,000 pieces of information ended on on the unsecured laptop of convicted sex pervert, former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the former husband of Clinton’s chief of staff.
• Obama released five high value Taliban prisoners and leaders for a measly single American Army deserter, Bowe Bergdahl. These five Taliban leaders are believed to have reentered the world of terrorism while the many soldiers that were killed and wounded searching for Bergdahl after he deserted received no special treatment and were basically ignored by everyone in the Obama administration.
• Obama broke precedent and laws by paying the Iranians $40 million for the release of an American prisoner and then tried to cover up the reality that pallet loads of cash had indeed been shipped to the Iranians for the release.
• Obama allowed Hillary Clinton to run an international pay to play and money laundering operation, using the Clinton Foundation as a front, during her time as Secretary of State.
• Mismanagement of the Veterans Administration during the Obama years resulted in months long wait times for veterans to get a simple appointment with a doctor. This situation likely resulted in the death of some veterans while on the appointment wait list. At the same time, the inept VA administrators that allowed these conditions to exist received robust bonus and promotions opportunities. Despite promising to fix the problem early in his Presidency, he never made any attempt or achieved any success in doing so.
• Obama allowed his Attorney General to meet with Bill Clinton on the tarmac at an Arizona airport in a blatant attempt to make sure the Federal government and the Obama administration did not pursue criminal charges against Hillary Clinton on any number of different fronts.
• Obama gave out billions and billions of taxpayer dollars to shaky alternative energy companies, the vast, vast majority of which were run or backed by Democratic operatives and donors, all of which went belly up along with billions of taxpayer dollars. The administration then compounded the disaster by, in at least one case, Solyndra, illegally putting a private Democratic donor ahead of the American taxpayer in Solyndra bankruptcy proceedings.
• Secret Service agents partook of frolicking with prostitutes during an Obama South American visit, frolicking that may have been financed by drug cartel money.
• The initial Obama Care website, that never worked even though $600 million had been spent on it, a failure that was the result of Michelle Obama’s college friend’s company blowing up the effort, was illegally approved for rollout despite not getting the lawfully required government approval.
• There is not enough time in the day to list all of the Obama Care scandals including the multiple times that the Obama administration broke the law by unlawfully delaying, changing, or ignoring the tenets of the law he helped pass.
• His administration illegally tried to get Americans and American companies to pay high amounts of money for Freedom Of Information Act requests even though the law prohibits such payments.
• Obama shredded the Fourth Amendment by using the country’s spy apparatus to collect, store, and spy on just every Americans’ electronic communications.
• Obama shredded the First Amendment by weaponizing the IRS against Republican and conservative interests to illegally support his reelection campaign.
• Obama continued to shred the First Amendment by spying on journalists, an action that drew rebukes from many journalism industry groups and spokespeople.
• For the first time ever in America, the Obama administration put together and executed a formal hit list of American citizens to be assassinated overseas, depriving those Americans their right to a fair trial.
• The Obama administration violated the Constitution and the War Powers Act by involving the United States and its military in the Libyan civil war, an action cost untold billions of American tax dollars, toppled one of the more progressive Middle East societies, resulted in untold thousands of Libyans being killed and maimed, and turned the country into a terrorist haven that exists up to today.
• Biden fought against the operation that ended up killing Bin Laden, the terrorist that oversaw the plan that killed almost 3,000 innocent American on September 11, 2001.

Okay that is enough, you get the idea, we could have listed more but that would get to be overkill.

Joe, these are much more than whispers of scandals. These actions were often illegal, wasteful of taxpayer wealth, violated Americans rights, violated American and international laws, violated the Constitution, and resulted in the deaths and maiming of thousands of human beings around the world. 

If, after reading this list, you or any of your supporters still believe that there were no scandals during the Obama administration then I pity you and your lack of touch with reality.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

April, 2019, I Am A Global Warming Doubter and a Believer In Science

On a periodic basis, we revisit a continuing theme in this blog, “I am a global warming doubter AND a believer in science.” Several years ago we started investigating the viability of this position for a number of reasons:

• It did not appear that global warming advocates were looking at all of the available global warming science, realities, and trends, just those select pieces of information that supported their position.
• There seemed to be a growing sense of doubt among scientists about whether or not global warming was actually a real thing.
• We were getting tired of Al Gore and others of his ilk who constantly were calling those that were undecided about global warming a whole litany of slurs including racists, homophobes, and other insulting terms.

After researching and writing about dozens of global warming information sources, we have proven over and over that it is perfectly logical to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science:

• Realities show that global warming actually stopped about 18 years ago, causing global warming advocates to rebrand their position as “climate change” since “global warming” was no longer an emerging reality.
• Turns out the major global warming forecast models all turned out to be grossly inaccurate in predicting future climate and warming trends, throwing into doubt whether any man made global warming or climate change was actually happening.
• Major and reputable scientists and science organizations (e.g. the renowned CERN Institute) were either originally determining that man made global warming and climate control never existed or changing their position to become doubters of what they may have original believed about global warming.
• Important and prominent scientists around the world were caught manipulating climate data to verify their false claims and forecast models or were outed for at least contemplating changing real world data to match their ill performing analyses and forecasting models.

Previous exposes’ of global warming and climate change theories by using real world numbers, scientific experiments, and the simple act of observing can be accessed in this blog by typing “I am a global warming doubter” in the search box above. At that point, you will be provided many previous posts from this blog including dozens and dozens of information sources that more and more point to a repudiation of Al Gore and others, man made global warming, and man made climate change.

The latest proof that you can be a global warming doubter and a believer in sciences is discussed below:

1) NBC News, hardly a traditional global warming critic, reported on a good reason why it is perfectly sane to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science:

• A recent NASA research effort has found that a huge Greenland glacier has started to expand again after years of melting.
• Back in 2012 it was found that the Jakobshavn glacier had been diminishing by 1.8 miles every year.
• An article in a recent issue of Nature Geoscience found that the glacier has now been expanding.
• According to climate scientist Jason Box: “That was kind of a surprise. We kind of got used to a runaway system. The good news is that it’s a reminder that it’s not necessarily going that fast. But it is going.”

So, a glacier is growing in size even though probably every global warming forecast kept saying all glaciers would get smaller and smaller over time. At no time do I believe a scientist said that glaciers will grow and shrink, grow and shrink. This implies that climate scientists who advocated for global warming really did not understand what was going on since they completely missed this growth in the Greenland glacier.

But these folks are not giving up their reputations without a fight. Co-author of the NASA study Josh Willis said this is "good news" only in the short term. Willis claims the oceans over the coming years will continue warming due to man-made climate change.

In other words trust us, we never expected this to happen today but we know what will happen decades from now. These are the same types of people who said in the 1970s that a new ICE Age was coming...but it did not happen. These types of people then said that global warming was going to melt the North Pole ice cap….but it did not happen. These types of people said that the glaciers would steadily decrease in size….but this one at least did not. 

And yet this global warming advocate expects us to believe that he got this one right, i.e. despite this contrary news, glaciers will continue to melt in the coming decades. Sorry, no disrespect, I have my doubts.

2) Global warming advocates always like to crow that carbon dioxide levels on Earth are at all time historic highs which means that mankind’s use of carbon based fuels HAS to have caused the higher levels of CO2. But was that an actually a truth? Maybe not:

• Warner Todd Huston writing for the Godfather Politics website on April 11, 2019, reported on a recent study that disputes the myth that CO2 levels have never been so high.
• A new study by the Potsdam Institute For Climate Impact Research concluded that Earth has seen comparably high levels of CO2 in the past history of the Earth.
• According to the website Think Progress: “Current CO2 levels of 410 parts per million (ppm) were last seen on Earth three million years ago, according to the most detailed reconstruction of the Earth’s climate by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and published in Science Advances.”
• But mankind was not around 3 million years ago to cause such high levels of CO2 which would seem to mean that higher levels of CO2 can occur naturally without mankind’s help.
• In both cases, life on Earth did not disappear, either 3 million years ago or today.
• All of which begs the question: how can we tell how much of the CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere today is natural and how much is manmade? This is an especially interesting question in that we now know, according to this study, that the Earth is capable of getting to current CO2 levels without mankind’s carbon usage.
• Or said another way, courtesy of Breitbart News: “Yes, you read that correctly, three million — million — years ago CO2 levels on Earth were the same as they are today, but there is one major difference between three million years ago and today…Three million years ago, we humans were not driving cars or eating the meat that requires cow farts; we weren’t barbecuing or refusing to recycle or building factories; there was no Industrial Age, no plastic, no air conditioning, no electricity, no lumber mills, no consumerism, no aerosols. In fact, three million years ago, there were probably no human beings on Earth, at least not human in the way we use that term today. And yet…CO2 levels were the same then as they are now Hmmm…?”The same study noted that three million years ago there were ice sheets covering 1/3 of the earth. But, guess what? Those ice sheets have been gone for millions of years and the earth was not destroyed when they disappeared. Plus, global temperatures were even higher millions of years ago than they are today. The study had more gems like that scattered throughout… but in the end, the report merely confirmed that the earth has seen wildly different weather patterns, eco-systems, and conditions and it’s still here. Sort of makes your global warming religionists look like doomsaying fools, doesn’t it?”

So glaciers were supposed to to continuously get smaller but at least a big one, in Greenland did not. Mankind was supposed to be the cause of high CO2 levels in the atmosphere but Mother Natural has previously done the same thing on her own without mankind’s carbon footprint.Two more reasons why it is perfectly sane to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Americans Beware: See How Socialism and Inept Politicians Are Destroying Three Cities In America Today

As readers of this blog know, we have very little respect, patience, or faith in the vast majority politicians, regardless of what party they are in and what level of government they are serving. They all waste taxpayer money, they are ineffective in resolving any issues, they are greedy and selfish and they divide the country with their partisan, angry, and often violent rhetoric.

But it seems lately that the Democrats have gotten even worse in all aspects of their governing. Many have left the historical Democrat standards and are now socialists bordering on communists by controlling every aspect of our lives:

• Many want to take control of every aspect of our health care via a socialized medical disaster known as Medicare For All.
• They want to significantly raise taxes of everyone….even though they claim they only want to tax the rich more.
• They want to suppress freedom as Obama tried to do with the shredding of the First and Fourth Amendment and the politically correct speech that Democrats love to cater to.
• They want to take control of our travel and energy options via the ridiculously stupid New Green Deal.
• They want even more control of our kids’ education by harassing and shutting down educational alternatives like charter schools, which generally provide a much better education than government controlled public schools, the total failure of Common Core notwithstanding.

The list goes on and on but you get the idea: they think that they are better suited to run our lives, make decisions for us, and control every aspect of our lives by using our own money, confiscated at almost slave like taxation levels, to do so.

But maybe we are wrong, maybe these newly minted socialists, communists are onto something. Maybe they are smarter than us and are better suited to control our fates then we are. I doubt it but let’s consider three cities across the country, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, who are really already being run by Democrats/socialists/communists and see if they are actually doing a better job than the freedom that was promised in the Constitution and Bill of rights.

Before doing this, though, let’s refer back to a post we already did about San Francisco:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2018/07/july-2018-part-3-political-class.html

If you remember that post, or go read it for the first time, you will see that the Socialism utopia that Democrats promise is not quite working out in San Francisco. Poverty, drug addiction, homelessness, and feces in the streets is what the Democrats/socialists have brought to that city when we last discussed it.

But let’s update that discussion and throw Seattle and Los Angeles into the mix, as laid out by the Freedom Outpost website, as reported by Michael Snyder on April 21, 2019:

• As we go through this discussion, keep in mind that the U.S. economy has been recession free since 2009 and that under Trump, economic conditions have been great with rising wages and very, very low unemployment and yet the following situations exist in three socialist run U.S. cities: imagine what is going to happen in these cities when the economy hits its next eventual recession.
• According to the article: “But because of their ultra-liberal policies, some of the major cities on the west coast have become magnets for drug addicts, serial criminals, sex offenders, illegal immigrants and people that have simply heard about all of the “free benefits” that are being offered. As a result, the streets of those cities have become a showcase for the social decay that is sweeping across our nation.”
• Officially, San Francisco has 28,000 homeless people living on its streets but it is generally assumed that this number is way too low relative to reality.
• Given that the city government hands out about 5.8 million free syringes every year to people in the city means that if there were 28,000 homeless and they were all drug addicts, each drug addict would be getting about 200 free syringes every year, meaning that there are more homeless than 28,000, many non-homeless have their drug addiction subsidized by taxpayers or both.
• In San Francisco, over the past 8 years there have been over 118,000 official reports of human feces piles on city streets as a result of a lot of homeless people and the reality that the politicians in power decided that it should not be a crime of any sort to relieve oneself in public.
• This means that this 118,000 leads to about 400 reports everyday for 8 years of a pile of human feces being reported in the city, 400 a day!
• And the trend is not good since there were 28,084 cases reported just in 2018, about 25% of the 118,000 reported over the past 8 years with 2019 on a similarly high pace.
• Drug addicts and other criminals have given the city a property crime rate that is four times the rate of the property crime in New York City or about 6,000 property crimes a year.
• The mayor is trying to get the homeless off of the streets but liberal, rich voters, as we have previously reported, want nothing to do with the mayor’s effort in their neighborhood: “A wealthy liberal neighborhood in San Francisco whose residents cast the most votes for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election is fighting against a proposal to build a new homeless shelter near their gated mansions. Mayor London Breed has sponsored legislation to fast track a homeless shelter that would house 200 people. However, wealthy liberals living in the affected area have set up a GoFundMe to stop the project which has already hit $80,000 of its $100,000 target.”
• Los Angeles is not doing much better with about twice as many homeless people as San Francisco.
• The homeless population in the city is up 75% in just the past six years.
• According to the article: “When I was running for Congress, one of the people that came to help the campaign had spent a lot of time in some of the worst parts of Los Angeles. He told me about the public drug use, the constant crime and the human degradation that is seemingly everywhere.”
• Seattle is not doing much better, as vividly illustrated by the video, “Seattle Is Dying”.
• The video points out that the crime rate in Seattle is now two and a half times greater than the crime rate in LA and four times higher than the crime rate in NYC.
• Taxpaying citizens in Seattle have finally hit the breaking point with 53% now supporting a “zero tolerance Policy” on homeless encampments, 62% believe that conditions in their city are getting worse, and that current politicians are wasting money, are not accountable and have the wrong approaches to resolving the homelessness and crime problems in their city.

Heavy taxation by Democrats/socialist in these cities with dismal, dangerous, and unhealthy results. Problems and issues never getting resolved, they just get worse. These problems are not Trump’s fault, they are not Republicans’ fault, Trump and Republicans have not been involved in governing these cities for decades or never. These horrid conditions exist because of Democratic and socialistic policies. And to think that Washington Democrats want to bring this same type of governing to the rest of the country.

If you think that this is a good thing, consider the best possible description from the article of what you will have to look forward to if they succeed:  “The entire video is about an hour long, but it is pretty easy to see where Seattle continues to go wrong. A heavy tax burden, regulations that push out businesses, and a power-hungry group of totalitarian sociopaths have been slowly eroding the city. The decay of Western civilization can be seen up and down the entirety of the West coast. Some say it’s by design, others disagree. But the commonality is that all of the cities are being pushed into poverty by illusions and lies of socialists. Calling Seattle anything other than a leftist’s paradise would be inaccurate. The city has all of the laws the socialists want, yet it’s killing itself because of it.”

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

American Politicians and Mass Transportation: Massive Failures, Massive Costs, Minimal Benefit

We have talked hundreds of times how the Washington political class and other American politicians are very, very poor when it comes to executing a program efficiently, effectively, on time, and on budget. Even if a project gets completed, it is always late, overly expensive, and falls short of fulfilling the original promise.

Today let’s focus on mass transportation and the projects that politicians have failed so miserably at or continue to fail:

- Several decades ago, Washington and Massachusetts got together to manage a mass transportation called the “Big Dig.” The purpose of the Big Dig was to get rid of the old, overhead roadways that hovered over the streets of Boston and build tunnels and roads under the city to bury the roads underneath the ground.

The project was supposed to cost several billion dollars but after years of delays and cost overruns, it ended up costing the American taxpayer well over $20 billion, about tenfold more than the originally promised cost. And the quality was not that good to boot since at least one driver was killed when part of the roof fell onto her car and killed her.

- Washington politicians and the government agencies they oversee have been operating the AMTRAK train system for decades. And despite that experience, AMTRAK continues to be a money losing operation every year, it has not grown its coverage for years, and has killed more people over the past few years than have died in airline crashes in the country. Expensive to operate, unprofitable to operator, and dangerous to operate, very sad.

- Early in the Obama era, Obama had this vision of building out a new high speed rail system across the country. We proved how stupid the program was in our area down here in Tampa Bay from a cost, convenience, and usage perspective. Obama’s program never got off the ground because it was too expensive and too useless to buildout.

- The state of California was going to show the country how to do mass transportation and high speed rail the right way. The governor at the time, Jerry Brown, and the Democrat controlled legislature threw all they had into the program. It was eventually going to be a high speed rail line from northern California to southern California, allowing travelers to avoid the notoriously bad and crowded California highways.

But despite extensive planning and the actual purchase of land for the right of way for the tracks, the program eventually collapsed onto itself: bad plans, cost overruns, contractor scandals, etc. Thus, a state and its politicians who were really dedicated to mass transportation found that even they couldn't do it.

But these past failures are now joined by two new failures, the first of which is in Hawaii:

• Hawaiian politicians thought it would be a great idea to build a mass transportation rail line from the western suburbs of Honolulu into the city.
• But like Washington politicians, they are failing miserably in this transportation project also.
• The cost of the project has almost doubled in cost form the original estimate of $5 billion to a current estimate of $9 billion.
• The city started the project without first having a complete set of plans for the project which required almost 100 contracts to be redone as the project proceeded, causing delays.
• A judge halted to project for over a year when it was in conflict with sacred Hawaiian burial grounds.
• An audit report in 2016 found that there were hundreds of millions of dollars unaccounted for.
• The planners built the beginning tracks too close to power lines so additional costs were incurred to move those power lines to overcome the bad planning.
• The quality of some steel cables that were inside precast concrete pieces will now have to be closely monitored for 20 years since some of them have already failed.
• The Federal Government is now withholding its share of the project expenses, given how poorly the project is proceeding.
• Another state audit concluded that officials misled the public about the effort’s shaky financials.
• A grand jury is now investigating shady contractor dealings.
• Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell has publicly acknowledged that there were “crucial missteps” but is still optimistic.
• As costs rose, politicians increased an excise tax on businesses and increased a current hotel tax.
• Ten years after the project started it is still not complete and the current boss of the operations somehow now thinks he can finish the project by 2025 without an increase than the current cost estimates, which seems doubtful given the history of the project.

What a mess, what a typical mess when it comes to politicians trying to build a simple rail line. The sad part of this Hawaiian transportation effort is that this is only a 20 mile rail line. It is not the length of California, which failed, it is not the length of what Obama wanted, which failed, and certainly doesn't have the mileage of AMTRAK which fails every day.

But it is not just rail line mass transportation efforts that politician always screw up. Consider the failure of the mass transportation electric bus effort that is failing in Albuquerque, New Mexico:

• Central Avenue is the main street going through Albuquerque, a six lane road that includes part of the historic Route 66.
• But despite being the main thoroughfare, the traffic on the road has been greatly reduced because of the failed Albuquerque Rapid Transit (ART) system effort.
• ART was originally to be a light rail line but in 2011 the city politicians gave up the rail idea and turned to a “bus rapid transit” approach that was based on dedicated bus lines throughout the city.
• The original plans estimated that there would be 15,000 daily riders using the system’s 19 stations.
• While the former mayor called ART a “game changer” the current mayor calls it “a bit of a lemon.”
• On Central Avenue, ART took over most of the street’s traffic lanes, causing car traffic to get get squeezed down to a single lane each way and resulting in shoppers and diners going elsewhere to avoid the congestion.
• A restaurant on Central Avenue, the Frontier, has seen its business drop 10% and has stopped hiring because of the decrease in customers coming by because of the reduced access caused by the bus lanes.
• An ART spokeswoman told the local newspaper that some businesses may see a 40% decrease in business because of the failed bus project.
• A car wash owner claims that his monthly revenue has dropped thousands of dollars and a burger place went out of business, causing 20 workers to become unemployed.
• The dedicated ART bus lanes got rid of left runs on many side streets making access difficult and making the drop in business described above a reality.
• The bus lanes are empty and unused today, 16 months after the first bus went on line, despite spending $23 million for a fleet of 18 all electric buses.
• Turns out the only half of the ordered buses ever showed up and those that were delivered had problems with their batteries, air conditioning, brake systems, and doors.
• The new mayor finally decided to take the electric buses off the streets, return them to the manufacturer, and buy old fashioned buses that run on petroleum.
• But those buses will not be ready for use until at least 2020, more than a year from now.
• In the meantime, even though there are no buses, the cost of the project is now at least 33% beyond its original $100 million budget,
• Without bus riders supporting the project, the city has had to take money out of its general revenue fund which has led to an overall city deficit of $20 million.

So now in Albuquerque, the costs are higher than expected, the project’s plans have made traffic worse in the downtown area, businesses are suffering because of the bus plans, and yet no buses are running, no people are using the buses, and the project is delayed at least for another year plus.

From the Big Dig to AMTRAK to Obama’s dreams to California to Hawaii to New Mexico, every mass transit project that American politicians touch become a self made disaster: under performing, over budget, safety issues, and other burdens on businesses and taxpayers. There has to be a better way, a way that does not allow politicians or government bureaucracies to get in the way and make a mockery of common sense and execution.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

The Horrors And Destruction That Donald Trump Has Imposed On America...Just Kidding! Part 21

Before we start today’s discussion, let’s review my voting history: 

• I have never voted for a Republican for President in my life. 
• Thus, I did not vote for Trump. 
• I have rarely voted for a Republican for national office in my life. 

A little over two years ago, many liberals, Democrats, and millennials were besides themselves with grief and fear because their pre-ordained queen, Hillary Clinton, was not elected President. Instead, Donald Trump was elected, an individual that these same people despised, hated, and feared, an individual they felt would endanger and possibly destroy the country and our democracy. For the past year and a half they fretted, worried and lashed out at anything or anyone that even remotely smelled of Donald Trump.

Given that Trump has been in office for a little over two years, I thought, that as someone who did not vote for him, it would be a good idea to review the horror, trauma, and terrible things that Trump has subjected the country to in just twenty seven month’s time. This is obviously a very sarcastic comment when you take an unbiased look at what has happened during the Trump Presidency.

The many previous posts we did on this topic identified well over 200 good things that have happened to America and Americans since Trump became President can found by entering the phrase “the horrors and destruction” in the search box above. Today, let’s add another dozen or so good things that are going on in the country even though the doubters hate the reality that Trump is President:

- The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits dropped to the lowest level in nearly half a century last month, March, 2019, dropping to 192,000, the lowest number since September, 1969, when the population was much smaller.

- The four week moving average of unemployment benefit filings last month was at the lowest level since November, 1969.

- National retail sales jumped by 1.6% last month, the highest growth level in eighteen months, indicating a still strong economy.

- The stock market has rebounded from a late 2018 drop and is almost back to record high levels.

- The infamous, expensive, and discredited Mueller investigation has cleared Trump of collusion, obstruction, and any other criminal activity.

- A strong March, 2019 jobs report kept the national unemployment rate at 3.8%, close to a 50 year low.

- Hispanics, traditionally a very strong Democratic voting bloc, gave Trump a 50% approval rate according to a recent McLaughlin and Associates poll, a 50% approval rate in a recent Marist/NPR/PBs survey, and a still high 45% approval rate in a recent Morning Consult/Politico poll.

- According to a recent Rasmussen poll, 41% of Americans feel America is on the right track as compared to mid-high 20s during Obama’s last full year in office in 2016.

- Another Rasmussen poll found that the overall approval rate of Trump is at 49%, a number that has been trending upwards and a rate that is higher than Obama’s at the same time of each administration.

- Trump donated his latest salary of $100,000 to immigration support, much like he has donated all of his previous salary dollars to supporting veterans’ needs, the fight against alcoholism, and other worthy causes that affect many Americans.

- The Trump administration has launched a $350 million effort to fight opioid addiction, through research and treatment, in an effort to reduce opioid overdose deaths by 40% in four especially hard hit states, Kentucky, Ohio, New York, and Massachusetts.

For those of you that have hated on Trump since day one, and given your obvious gross error in judgment relative to Trump given the well 200 accomplishments we have previously listed and the ten newest accomplishments listed above, let me ask that you to do us all a favor by implementing the following changes in your behavior and attitude:

• Chill out, tamp down your TDS affliction. No matter how much you hate Trump on a sexist, personal basis, get over it. He is the legally and duly elected President, he will be around for a while so refocus your hatred on more constructive issues and matters. You will live a lot longer if you take your hatred out of your heart and soul and devote it to something positive.
• I would really appreciate it if some of you would apologize to the Trump voters you have disrespected in some of the grossest terms possible over the past year. You have called millions of voters racists, ignorant, stupid, Nazis, KKK members, and other horrible names simply because you disagreed with their voting choice. No American should be called such disgusting names simply because they exercised their Constitutional rights to the best of their abilities. Plus, slandering over 60 million Americans is no way to unite the country and get it focused on the real issues facing us all.
• More personally, I would like, no I am demanding, an apology from some of you for your slanderous and disgusting name calling because in doing so, you insulted and disrespected my sister, my family members, my friends, and my co-workers who simply voted their conscience. I will defend their right to vote anyway they wanted and will no put up with your childish and vicious venom and bile directed at them, very important people in my life.
• And finally, I challenge you to read the following blog post, a post that shows quite clearly that it was hateful people like some of you and your silence during the Obama years that actually caused Trump to be elected. Thus, the people you hate for voting for Trump are actually looking back at you in the mirror:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2016/03/how-american-liberals-and-washington.html

If you were silent in the dozens of instances listed in this post then you were responsible for the very thing you hate: a Trump Presidency. Or put another way, a so far successful and productive Trump Presidency. Over 200 accomplishments in a little less than two years is not too shabby despite many of you wanting both Trump and the country to fail.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

April, 2019, Part 7, Political Class Insanity: Why HIllary Did Not Get Elected, Trump's Faux Russian Antics, and More Freebies For Illegal Immigrants

It is 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.

Let’s get started:

1) Let’s start off today with a little retro insanity. Hillary Clinton still probably is still in shock that she lost the election to Trump. She thought that she had paid her dues, had wired the Deep State and political class for her assured victory, and was fated to be the first female President.

But given what we know now, there are a whole lot of potential reasons why she is not President, any one of which could have turned off a voter to her in the voting booth. Let’s count the ways why she is NOT President:

1. Was it the Russian Uranium Deal and the hundreds of thousands of dollars the Clinton family made off of the deal, America’s security bedamned?
2. Was it Wikileaks and the truth they published?
3. Was it Podesta and his wheeling and dealing with the Russians for personal gain?
4. Was it Comey and the corruption he brought to the FBI and the cover up he did on Hillary's felonious misdeeds??
5. Was it having, protecting, abetting, and defending a sexual predator a husband for decades?
6. Was it Huma Abedini's sexual predator husband Anthony Weiner?
7. Was it because hundreds of thousands of government documents ended up on sexual predator Anthony Weiner’s unsecured laptop computer?
8. Was it because the Clinton Foundation ripped off Haiti?
9. Was it because the Clinton Foundation was really a front for a money laundering operation?
10. Was it the subpoena violations?
11. Was it the Congressional testimony lies?
12. Was it the Benghazi fiasco, lies and cover up?
13. Was it pay for play?
14. Was it being recorded laughing when you got a child rapist off when you were an attorney?
15. Was it the Travel Gate scandal?
16. Was it the Whitewater scandal?
17. Was it the Cattle Gate scandal?
18. Was it the Trooper-Gate scandal?
19. Was it the pillaging of White House belongings after the Clinton Presidency?
20. Was it the alleged $15 million for Chelsea’s apartment and $5 million for her wedding that was allegedly funded with Foundation money?
21. Was it the clear conflict of interest, interference, and intervention of Bill Clinton with Loretta Lynch and the many investigations that were underway?
22. Was it when you gladly accepted the stolen debate questions given to me by CNN prior to the debate?
23. Was it the own secret, unsecured server in Hillary's house, which foreign agents hacked, and your disdain for classified information?
24. Was it the 30,000 emails professionally deleted after Hillary was told not to?
25. Was it having the cell phones and computers destroyed with hammers and Bleach-it software?
26. Was it the still unsolved Seth Rich murder?
27. Was it the Vince Foster murder, suicide or both?
28. Was it the Gennifer Flowers assault & settlement?
29. Was it the $800,000 Paula Jones settlement?
30. Was it calling half the United States deplorable?
31. Was it the underhanded treatment of Bernie Sanders?
32. Was it the many lies told over time, e.g. Hillary did NOT land under sniper fire in Bosnia, all of Hillary's grandparents were NOT immigrants, etc.?
33. Was it the $10 million received for the pardon of Marc Rich?
34. Was it the $6 BILLION lost while Hillary was in charge of the State Department?
35. Was the profanity and disrespect Hillary regularly dropped on regular people such as Arkansas state troopers, Secret Service personnel, and others?
36. Was it the racism displayed when Hillary stated in public that all black men look alike….oh, sorry, that happened after the election.

Just saying, three dozen potential reasons is a lot of why Hillary is not the first female President of the United States. It is also an indictment of our entire political system that someone like Hillary got so close to being in charge. 

2) Now while Hillary had 36 reasons why people did not vote for her, consider all of the Russian scandals the elected winner, Donald Trump, has found himself embroiled in:

Remember when Donald Trump was business partners with the Russian government and his company got $53 million from the Russian government investment fund called Rusnano that was started by Vladimir Putin and is referred to as "Putin's Child?”

• Oh wait, that wasn't Trump; it was John Podesta, long time Clinton political operative and partner in crime.

Remember when Donald Trump received $500,000 for a speech in Moscow, paid for by the Renaissance Capital, a company tied to Russian Intelligence Agencies? 

• Oh wait, that was Bill Clinton.

Remember when Donald Trump approved the sale of 20% of U.S. uranium to the Russians while he was Secretary of State which gave control of it to Rosatom, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation? 

• Oh wait, that was Hillary Clinton.

Remember when Donald Trump lied about that and said he wasn't part of approving the deal that gave the Russians 1/5 of our uranium, but then his emails were leaked showing he did lie about it? 

• Oh wait, that was Hillary Clinton and John Podesta.

Remember when Donald Trump got $145 million from shareholders of the uranium company sold to the Russians?

• Oh wait, that was Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.

Remember when Donald Trump accepted millions in donations from Russian oligarchs like the chairman of a company that's part of the Russian Nuclear Research Cluster, the wife of the mayor of Moscow and a close pal of Putin's?

• Oh wait, that was the Clinton Foundation.

Remember when Donald Trump failed to disclose all those donations before becoming the Secretary of State, and it was only found out when a journalist went through Canadian tax records? 

• Oh wait, that was Hillary Clinton.

Remember when Donald Trump told Mitt Romney that the '80s called and it wanted its Russian policy back. The Cold War is over

• Oh wait, that was President Obama.

Man, Trump's ties to Russia are really "disgusting!"

3) We recently reported on how the Democrats running the state government in New York decided that they could find $27 million in their budget to give free college tuition support to illegal immigrant kids but could not find a far smaller amount of money to give the same support to the kids of Gold Star families. We found such neglect of real Americans disgusting.

And it appears that our disgust will soon extend to the Democrats running the Illinois state government: 

• According to the Greg Bishop, writing for the Illinois News Network website, the state House in Illinois recently passed legislation that would take tax money from taxpaying Americans and give it to illegal immigrants for their kids' education.
• The Retain Students Act would fork over taxpayer money under the Monetary Award Program to “noncitizen students who have not obtained lawful permanent residence", i.e. illegal immigrants.
• As we have covered many times in this blog, Illinois is likely to be one of the first states to go bankrupt, given its horrid and deteriorating fiscal situation, and yet they continue to fund programs for non-residents, a point made by State Rep. Allen Skillicorn, R-East Dundee, who reiterated that Illinois is broke: “We currently don’t have a revenue estimate, the governor predicts revenue is going to be $3 billion less than expected spending for next year and that’s without this.”

Hey, if you are going to go bankrupt anyway, might as well go out with a bang and keep those illegal immigrants happy. Taxpayer happiness, not so much.

That will do it for this month’s political class insanity: closing the book on why America was so fortunate Hillary Clinton is not President, Trump’s faux Russian scandals, and more taxpayer benefit for non-taxpaying illegal immigrants. More insanity next month for sure.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w