Tuesday, April 14, 2026

April, 2026, Part 3, Political Class Insanity: Obama Fesses Up On Obama Care Failures, Voting Irregularities In Colorado, and A Governor's Approval Rating Tanks Quickly

 We have been spending a lot of time lately dissecting the race to bankruptcy court,  i.e. what state government or city government will go bankrupt first. Many  Democratic states and cities have already entered into financial death spirals as their taxpayer base erodes but the politicians running these cities and states cannot or will not reduce government  spending or make government operations more efficient to cope with the shrinking tax base. 


The last two posts on this topic can  be found at the following links:


https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-race-to-bankruptcy-court-proof-that.html


https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-race-to-bankruptcy-court-california.html


However, we will take a break from this bankruptcy race and discuss some good old fashioned political class insanity for the next few posts.


1)Long ago we had extensive discussion on  how flawed and stupid the Obama Care legislation and process was and still is. Those supporting Obama Care tenets were trying to solve a public health problem with economic solutions and, of course, that all failed. Americans are overweight, they do not exercise enough, they eat too much of the wrong kind of food and their addictions (tobacco, alcohol, drugs) are the public health causes of high health care and high health insurance costs. 


If you do not address those underlying causes, any solution is doomed to failure.  If Americans lost weight, exercised more, stopped smoking, and  ate better, there would be no need for economic voodoo solutions to try and  tame rising health  care costs.


But that did not stop Obama from making many grandiose proclamations on how Obama Care was going to cure the ills of the American health system:


  • EVERY American would be able to  afford and be  covered by affordable health  insurance under Obama Care.

  • You would not have  to give up your current doctors under Obama Care.

  • Obama Care would “bend the health  care cost curve" to reduce the growth in health insurance and health care costs.


Of course none of  this came true:


  • Millions of people  lost access to their favorite doctors.

  • According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health  care advocacy organization, almost 27 million Americans still do not have  health insurance coverage.

  • Almost 62% of those uninsured told Kaiser that they could  not afford the coverage.

  • And total  cost of health care in the country rose about 41% from 2010, the year Obama Care took effect, until 2023, hardly bending the cost curve since this increase in healthcare costs was higher than  the increase in  overall  inflation over those years which was under 40%.


Not surprisingly, Obama Care flopped and  did not deliver  any results close to what was promised. But that did not stop Obama from trying to dress up the Obama Care pig in a recent interview when he proclaimed that Obama Care was a “first step” toward expanding and improving affordability of health  care and health care insurance in the country. He cited protections for individuals with pre-existing conditions,  allowing kids to stay on their parents’ health plans longer, and expanding Medicaid.


However, absent from  his remarks was his promise to get every American  affordable health  insurance (27 million Americans today do  not have health  insurance with cost being the major factor), was his promise to bend the cost curve (Obama Care did not bend any curves), and Americans are just as unhealthy today as they were in  2010 since the economic solution to the problem did not reduce obesity, improve exercise habits, improve eating habits or break addictions.


And it seems Obama knows it was a flop since he went from grandstanding  promises in 2010 to this is a good “first step.”  We said it would  be ineffective and a financial  disaster 13-14 years ago and we were correct.


2)One of the most important functions in a free country is the principle of “one person, one vote.” Every citizen of a country should be able to express their opinions at the voting booth and know that their vote will be treated with  integrity and that the process is an  accurate reflection of what  voters want.


Obviously, the 2020 Presidential  campaign was anything but that, as we have discussed dozens of times. That election was corrupt, out of integrity,  and an insult to democracy and the voters who honestly thought their votes would be fairly counted and treated. We will not go into the dozens of instances where we showed how the voting process was stolen and corrupted and as a result, Joe Biden got an amazing 81,000,000 votes, the largest, and most corrupted vote total  by far, from a historical basis. Go back to our posts in late 2020 and early 2021 for the many ways we proved voting  corruption.


But over time more and more evidence has come out showing how shady  and corrupt that election was with the following just the latest news about shady dealings in  the voting counting areas:


  • We recently reported on how a Georgia audit of the 2020 voting for President in that state found over 300,000 votes that should have never been  counted in the election results given how shady and illegally counted they were.

  • And now we have a similar situation out in Colorado.

  • A lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch has forced the state government of Colorado to remove 372,000 ineligible voter registrations from its voting rolls.

  • The lawsuit showed how the Colorado Secretary of State, Jena Griswold, and  other state voting officials, violated the National  Voter Registration Act of 1993 by allowing voter registration rates to exceed the number of eligible voters actually living in various state counties, incurred delays in identifying and scrubbing out of state moves by voters, and identified thousands of inactive voters in  eight counties.


Operating incompetence relative to voting registration  and monitoring processes does not mean  that elections were rigged and biased because of voting improprieties. However, the potential  for voter fraud, especially via  mail-in  voting, is huge when hundreds of thousands of people are on the voting rolls who  should not  be. Another example of  political  class and  government bureaucrat incompetence that endangers a very basic tenet of freedom, clean and  honest elections and election processes.


3)After a politician is elected to office their favorability approval ratings almost always start to  slide slowly downward since they usually cannot fulfill their campaign promises. However, the recently elected governor of Virginia has possibly set the record for the quickest slip in approval ratings by any politician…ever:


  • Abigail Spanberger was recently elected as Virginia governor.

  • Keep in mind that she campaigned on a number of voter friendly issues like making the cost of living in the state more affordable, being against extreme gerrymandering of Congressional  districts, and other generally centrist issues.

  • Shortly after taking  office, she and her cronies in the  legislature proposed a whole slew of new taxes that will make living in the state much more expensive and supported a radical gerrymandering plan that is likely un-Constitutional.

  • Her flip flop on illegal immigration control has led to a series of recent murders in  the state, the majority of which likely were committed by illegal  immigrants.

  • Thus, within a few months her  approval rating did not  slip a little, her   favorability rating dropped to 47%, a level that is 13% lower than the average of all new Virginia governors going back  to the 1990s.

  • Her favorability rating is a whopping nine points below what her predecessor Glenn Youngkin, was pulling at the same time in his term.

Again, a newly installed politician  usually sees a drop in popularity shortly after taking office.  But her bait and switch effort from her nice sounding campaign issues to her real  actions while in office show that the people in Virginia have quickly realized they may have  made a big mistake in their voting preference. And it is going to cost them from a tax, cost of living, crime rate, and gerrymandering perspective.

It will be interesting to see how far and how fast her approval rating falls, she certainly has done a great job destroying her credibility in a very short time already.  Wait until those many, many new taxes take effect. Gonna be a fun, downward ride to watch.

That will do  it  for today: a record-setting decline in popularity in Virginia, more voting incompetence  and/or shenanigans , this time in  Colorado, and Obama tries to hedge his bet when it  comes to the disaster that is Obama Care.

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If you agree that we need to deseat every member of Congress for their lack of success and accomplishment, then please consider going to the following petition link to help the cause:


https://www.change.org/p/deseat-congress-reset-freedom



**********************


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:


Saturday, April 11, 2026

April, 2026, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: California's High Speed Rail Line Is Still Not Running, The Post Office Is Still In Decline, and Minnesota Politicians Still Do Not Understand Economic Principles

 We have been spending a lot of time lately dissecting the race to bankruptcy court,  i.e. what state government or city government will go bankrupt first. Many  Democratic states and cities have already entered into financial death spirals as their taxpayer base erodes but the politicians running these cities and states cannot or will not reduce government  spending or make government operations more efficient to cope with the shrinking tax base. 


The last two posts on this topic can  be found at the following links:


https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-race-to-bankruptcy-court-proof-that.html


https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-race-to-bankruptcy-court-california.html


However, we will take a break from this bankruptcy race and discuss some good old fashioned political class insanity for the next few posts.


1)We have  often proven  that American politicians are very good at over promising results and delivering results that are either over budget, behind schedule, and sometimes never completed. In the process, massive amounts of taxpayer dollars are wasted for little or no benefit in return.


And out in California there is a government project that hit the trifecta: it is over budget AND behind schedule AND is unlikely to ever get completed:


  • Long ago California politicians promised to build a modern high speed rail  line that would run almost the entire length of the state.

  • Back in 2008, the state government  and the politicians that operated it proposed and approved a plan that would build the high speed rail  line for $33 billion and would be operational by 2020.

  • However, 18 years later, the cost is up to $126 billion and not a single piece of track has been laid yet,  six years after the project was supposed to be completed.

  • The schedule now predicts only a short piece of the plan will be completed by 2033, 25 years after the project was proposed and 13 years after the entire eight of the line would be completed.

  • Recently, Anthony Williams, a  member of the authority overseeing the development of the rail one and who also was governor Gavin Newsom’s former legislative affairs secretary, was interviewed by CBS correspondent Jon Wertheim.

  • When asked by Wertheim if the  money for the project was ever there to complete the project when this whole effort started, Williams actually gave an honest answer: "It wasn't. Let's be real.”

  • Following up on this confession that the estimated money required was never real, California Transportation Secretary, Toks Omishakin, confessed: "There were mistakes made. Some of the criticisms on this project, I think, are very fair. I don't think the voters fully understood, and neither did we in the public sector, what it was going to take to actually get this project delivered."

  • In other words, people in charge of the  project knew early on  and  over the years that this project was a farce and yet never told the taxpayers.

  • For context, the transcontinental railroad was built in the 1860s in six years, it ran 1,776 miles, and ran  through 15 tunnels that were blasted through mountains.  

  • The California politicians have built nothing after 18 years and they did not have to blast through mountains.


A failure for the ages: over budget, over due and likely to never be  completed, a perfect trifecta failure.

2)We have discussed many, many times relative to our theory that a major city and an entire state government is heading towards bankruptcy court in a relatively short time. One of the common failings of these cities and states is that they continually raise taxes on their residents and businesses. At some point, these residents and businesses pick up and move to other areas where the tax burden is far less.

This out-migration of residents and businesses reduces the tax base which reduces the government tax revenue stream. Rather than reduce government spending or  make government programs more efficient, the politicians usually take the easy, and wrong, approach and just raise taxes. This drives more tax dollars out of the state or city and eventually the bankruptcy occurs. As we discussed, this financial  death spiral dance is already playing out across the country.

But despite the warnings of what happens when you continually raise taxes, apparently the politicians in  Minnesota did not get the message:

  • Some Democratic politicians in Minnesota have proposed that a wealth tax be imposed on state residents worth over $10 million in total assets..

  • The wealth tax would be 1% of total wealth,  not income.

  • Thus, someone worth exactly $10 million a year would pay a wealth tax of $100,000 a year, independent of any other state taxes.

  • Concerns have been  raised that this could be a slippery slope that today the threshold is $10 million but once millionaires move out of the state and take all their  tax  revenue with them that amount could be dropped to $5 million or $1 million, or who knows how low?

Seriously: why would anyone continue to live in  Minnesota that was wealthy? We have seen it in California and New York: as the tax burden on the wealthy has gotten higher and higher along with more taxes under consideration on the wealthy, the wealthy simply pick up and leave and move to more favorable financial  locations such as Texas and Florida.

And the same phenomenon will happen in Minnesota if this wealth tax idiocy becomes law. People will leave, depriving the state government not only of wealth tax revenue but also state income tax, property tax, sales tax, and economic growth since wealthy people are  more likely to spend and expand the state economy. That all  goes away when the wealthy leave. The concept is simple but apparently too complicated for the simpleton Minnesota politicians to understand.

3)There are not a lot of projects, programs, and efforts that the American political class operate that actually work efficiently. Medicare is  going bankrupt, Social Security is going  bankrupt, Medicaid is fraught with fraud and corruption, projects that get started and financed but never get completed (e.g. California high speed rail  line), taxes and crime keep  going up, many state and city government budgets are in a death spiral because of government overspending and under performance,  the list of failures of American politicians sometimes seems endless.

And to this list of government

 failures we may have  to add the United States Postal System (USPS):

  • The USPS recently announced that it would temporarily stop making financial  contributions to the Federal retirement annuities for USPS employees and retirees.

  • The USPS needs the cash that is diverted from retirement accounts in order to continue paying for current workers, suppliers, and keep mail deliveries functioning.

  • The USPS chief financial executive, Luke Grossman, has described the current postal  situation as an “ongoing, severe financial crisis.

  • He also said that USPS could run out of cash as early as February, 2027 unless severe corrective actions are taken.

  • Grossman stated that keeping day to day operations going has precedent over long term pension and retirement funding.

  • As a result, current short term plans call  for raising the price of first class mail, post cards, and international  mail which in turn will reduce mailing  volumes and make the situation worse.

  • None of this should be  a surprise since the financial crisis has been boiling up for decades.

  • The amount of annual mail volume that was 220 billion pieces in  2006 is now about 110 billion a year now, a 50% decrease.

  • This has resulted in the operation losing over $18 billion over the past two years.

You have  to  feel sorry for retired postal workers since it looks  like they are the first ones that will suffer the inability of the American political class to fix a problem that has been growing for decades. The industry and business has been in a steep decline for twenty years. It is not going to revive itself, people are paying  bills online, they are sending christmas  and  birthday wishes online, businesses are advertising more  and more  electronically, first class and  other mail options are a dying business.

Personally, I have two observations. First, every time I am out of town for a while and my held mail  is  delivered, I sort it into two piles: personal mail such as bills, correspondence with friends and  family, etc. go into one pile to be  counted and  advertising pieces of mail, the vast majority of which I never asked to receive, go into another pile. When both piles are counted, consistently 90% or so of mail  received is mailings that I could do without. My life would actually be  simpler since almost all of the non-personal mail I receive has to be walked over to the recycling bin.

And second, the service provided by at least my local post office has been pretty atrocious lately. The mail piece I send out never gets delivered to the addressee. Mail pieces sent to  me never get delivered. Mail  pieces mailed four weeks ago via  first class mail finally get delivered. I have gone out  of my way to avoid dealing with  my local post office, even traveling to the next town over whenever I have to mail  something of importance.

The bottom line to my mail experience is that I do not want to pay more and more for a government  service that does less and less in an inefficient and  sloppy way, a  service that is in severe  decline. Go to an everyday other mail delivery calendar (e.g. who cares if the car dealership ad shows up two  days later than usual), shut down low performing and unnecessary post office locations, etc.  Nothing is going to reverse the declining market for post office services, best to reduce the bloat, reduce the taxpayer expense and let it eventually die a natural death like other products and  services have done throughout history.

But we know that will not happen. The political class will wait until the situation  hits a severe crisis mode and then will act hastily and irrationally due to the time crisis which always means the taxpayer will pay more and get less benefit.

That will  do it for today' s insanity: the USPS continues to implode with  no plan to  fix it, Minnesota politicians’ economic  ignorance and  stupidity, and the California high speed rail line is still  not up and running.

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If you agree that we need to deseat every member of Congress for their lack of success and accomplishment, then please consider going to the following petition link to help the cause:


https://www.change.org/p/deseat-congress-reset-freedom



**********************


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: