May, 2019, Part 12, Political Class Insanity: Finally Fixing Welfare, Americans Are Pervasively Ignorant, and Liberals Destroying Cities

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) Unfortunately, most of what we talk about in this blog is the ineptness, the greed, the stupidity and the ineffectiveness of the American political class. Thus, it is sometimes very refreshing when we get to talk about anything good that an American politician is doing. 

Consider some recent actions from President Trump, simple actions that actually enforce existing laws and protect American taxpayers (two amazingly simple concepts!):

• Trump is attempting to clean up our current welfare system by getting non-citizens, i.e. those types of people that do not contribute to the funding of the welfare system, off of the the welfare rolls.
• He has instructed the Federal government to enforce a Clinton era law that requires sponsors of immigrants to pay back the government for welfare benefits that are received by the person that is being sponsored.
• This process was established under the “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996,” a piece of legislation that was sponsored by two Democratic Senators, Patrick Leahy and Patty Murray.
• Up until this action, the law has largely been ignored, according to the reporting by the Daily Caller, which meant that the American taxpayer was stuck paying for unnecessary welfare benefits to non-citizen immigrants for over twenty years.
• According to an administration official: “This executive action will dramatically curb ‘welfare tourism’ and protect U.S. benefits for U.S. families. It will also ensure that immigrant sponsors cannot continue the practice of bringing in large numbers of welfare-dependent immigrants: because they will be financially liable.”
• Trump is also looking to enforce another existing law, one that was sponsored by Democrat Joe Biden back in 1996, the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.”
• This law requires Federal government agencies to consider the sponsor’s income when determining whether or not a non-citizen is eligible for welfare benefits.
• Since this action would be bundling the sponsor’s and immigrant’s income together, some immigrants may no longer meet the eligibility criteria for American taxpayer funded welfare payments.

I include the fact that it was Democrats that originally sponsored these taxpayer friendly and common sense piece of legislation. I am sure that some Democrat will call out Trump for being racist and against immigrants while in fact he is just looking out for the welfare of taxpayer Americans, something that many Washington politicians never do.

2) Ilhan Omar is a freshman Congresswoman from Minnesota. She hates the Jewish people and the state of Israel, based on her many public rantings against both, she has made any number of stupid and inane comments about any number of different subjects since elected, she has disrespected those Americans who were killed and maimed by the 9-11 attacks, she thinks that America is to blame for the humanity catastrophe in Venezuela, and she has shown herself to be lacking in respecting the opinions of others in this country.

This last trait was recently demonstrated again: In a recent interview, she stated that “ignorance really is pervasive in many parts of, of this country. And as someone who was raised by educators, I really like to inform people about things that they might be ignorant to, willingly or unwillingly.” In other words, if you do not agree with her views, you are pervasively ignorant.

Rather than work towards solutions that make the most sense, that take into the account the feelings, expertise, and viewpoints of everyone, she assumes that those that have a different view than her is ignorant and needs to be taught “the right way” to think. Not quite the best way to win friends and influence people. But given her disdain for many things that are American, hopefully she will eventually just go away and take her hate for Israel, freedom of speech, and the 9-11 victims with her.

3) Many times we have recently written how states and cities that have been overwhelmingly operated by Democrats have been spiraling out of control and not in a good way. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, have been beset by a plunge in living standards. Increasing homelessness, drug addiction, and crises of public urination, defecation, and drug use have turned once beautiful cities into cesspools of filth and disease.

But most of the source material for these posts has not been from the mainstream media outlets. They seem to have been ignoring the reality of these decaying cities, possibly not wanting to disparage their political liberal friends that have caused these problems. 

But finally, a paragon of liberal news reporting, the New York Times, in a recent article by Farhad Manjoo, on May 22, 2019, was finally a breath of fresh air from a news establishment not usually conducive to reporting failures by liberal politicians:

• Despite one of the longest economic recoveries ever, the politicians in California, despite being the home of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, two of the richest areas of the country, have turned the state of California into the “most poverty stricken state in the union.”
• About 20% of the state’s population is living in poverty.
• Out migration from the state has been surging since 2010 as people look to avoid the high taxes and growing poverty.
• Mr. Manjoo, who is from California, points out that “Across my home state, traffic and transportation is a developing-world nightmare. Child care and education seem impossible for all but the wealthiest. The problems of affordable housing and homelessness have surpassed all superlatives — what was a crisis is now an emergency that feels like a dystopian showcase of American inequality.”
• While one out of every 11,600 San Francisco residents is a BILLIONAIRE, and many, many people are millionaires, the city’s streets are filled with garbage, used drug syringes, and feces.
• Anecdotes of homeless veterans eating out of billionaire trash cans, wealthy residents crowdfunding efforts to keep a homeless shelter out of their elite neighborhood, a teacher with cancer forced to pay the salary of the person substituting for her classes, etc. abound.
• And Mr. Manjoo knows where the root causes of all these problems lies: “At every level of government, our representatives, nearly all of them Democrats, prove inadequate and unresponsive to the challenges at hand. Witness last week’s embarrassment, when California lawmakers used a sketchy parliamentary maneuver to knife Senate Bill 50, an ambitious effort to undo restrictive local zoning rules and increase the supply of housing. It was another chapter in a dismal saga of Nimbyist urban mismanagement that is crushing American cities. Not-in-my-backyardism is a bipartisan sentiment, but because the largest American cities are populated and run by Democrats — many in states under complete Democratic control — this sort of nakedly exclusionary urban restrictionism is a particular shame of the left.”

Now, Mr. Manjoo eventually does go off the rails by insisting that urban people have more rights than those that do not live in urban areas but that does not diminish the reality that he points out: long established political hacks, in this case Democratic hacks that have operated these cities for decades, have turned them into poverty stricken areas where the middle class has left, the rich refuse to help out those in need, and those in need continue to grow in terms of homelessness, drug addiction, and poverty.

Just another day of failure for the American political class: finally a recognition by a liberal media outlet that the liberal politicians in this country have failed miserably when they were in control and a freshman Congress person who thinks that the rest of us are just pervasively ignorant. At at least one small piece of good political class insanity: a President actually enforcing some common sense, taxpayer protecting laws. More insanity next month.

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