January, 2018, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Single Payer Horror Stories and a Rarity - Good News Relative to Obama 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, sugar, 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 copays 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.

1) We have been uncovering Obama Care disasters for years so it is good news when something good comes out of the whole mess. According to Katie Pavlich, writing for the Townhall website on January 4, 2018:

• Trump’s Labor Department recently announced a new rule proposal that would allow insurance companies to more easily sell health insurance plans across state lines.
• This is one of the root causes of high insurance costs we discussed above.
• This proposal should help increase competition and subsequently reduce the cost of health insurance.
• This rule would also make it easier for small businesses to band together to get better insurance rates from insurance companies.
• According to the article, small business would “Allow employers to form a Small Business Health Plan on the basis of geography or industry. A plan could serve employers in a state, city, county, or a multi-state metro area, or it could serve all the businesses in a particular industry nationwide and allow sole proprietors to join Small Business Health Plans, clearing a path to access health insurance for the millions of uninsured Americans who are sole proprietors or the family of sole proprietors."

Attacking root causes of high health insurance costs, a strategy that Obama Care’s creators never understood.

2) There is also another good piece of news out of the Trump administration regarding the failure of Obama Care. A provision of the tax cut legislation that was recently passed eliminates the need/requirement that all Americans purchase health insurance as required by Obama Care (the “individual mandate”) even if an American does not want any insurance to or does not want to buy the mandatory, expensive policies Obama Care requires.

Let’s take a moment to review what the mandatory purchase of insurance under Obama Care was supposed to do. Under Obama Care, insurers were required to accept anyone looking for insurance coverage even if they had a pre-existing condition. Obviously, this made it more expensive for insurance companies since these new customers with pre-existing conditions would likely be very expensive to serve. 

As a way to appease the insurers, Obama Care promised them that the Federal government would force generally younger and healthier people to purchase insurance in order for the insurance companies to get a windfall to offset their increase costs of serving others with pre-existing conditions, customers that were generally older and less healthy. And Obama Care forced these younger and healthier customers to purchase policies that were loaded with features and coverages that many people did not need or want, further increasing the windfall profits to insurance companies.

To anyone who values freedom and freedom of choice, this blunt force imposition of the government to force people to buy a product or a service is obnoxious. And it was also a failure, as Jay Cost, writing for the National Review website on December 26 2017, points out: “The truth is that the individual mandate was too modest to have any major impact. For starters, there were many exemptions — for instance, the hardship provision. Relatedly, Obamacare also allowed adults up to the age of 26 to stay on their parents’ insurance, thereby giving certain healthy, young people no reason to enroll for themselves. Beyond that, the penalty is incredibly weak, capped at 2.5 percent of income. Finally, payment of the penalty is through the annual tax-filing process, meaning that it is up to the IRS to catch those who simply do not pay it.”

Thus, as with most components of Obama Care, it was a bad idea in theory to begin with and it failed miserably in reality. With the terminations of it via the Trump tax cut legislation, now people will be free to purchase, or not purchase, health insurance that fits their needs and financial abilities without an overbearing Federal government dictating what insurance they must purchase or be considered a criminal.

3) In our previous post in this recurring theme, we discussed how bad single payer insurance systems work around the world. High costs, health care rationing, long delays in seeing a doctor, long delays for treatment, etc. The Conservative Zone website recently reviewed the latest statistics from the Canadian single payer health insurance system and it is not good, which is probably why tens of thousands of Canadians leave that country every year in order to get timely, quality healthcare:

• Lead times to get a doctor’s appointment in Canada has led to the creation of a popular Twitter account, #CanadaWAITS.
• Canadians go to the hashtag to relate their nightmares in trying to get an appointment to see a doctor or get a medical test done.
• Words used to the wait to get an appointment include frustration, insane, and excruciating.
• Angela Burgela paid $18,000 out of her pocket to get a hip replacement done in the Cayman Islands since her pain was so bad and the wait to get the procedure done in Canada was so long.
• A recent survey of waiting times by the Canadian Institute for Health Information found that Canada was dead last out of eleven developed countries when it came to wait times for non-emergency surgeries and seeing specialists.
• The survey found that Canadians also have the longest average wait times for emergency room care at over four hours.
• The average wait time to see a medical specialist in Canada is just over nine weeks which means whatever medical condition you may have that requires specialized care could be nine weeks worse on average before you even see an expert.
• These delays and long waits, according to a 2016 study by the Fraser Institute found that this type of inefficient healthcare leads “to many negative consequences such as increased suffering, mental anguish and pain. It also results in poorer medical outcomes for chronic diseases and turns reversible illnesses into irreversible conditions.”

Obama Care is bad, it is expensive and getting more expensive every day, and it rations out medical care via very narrow doctor and hospital networks. But going the route of Canada and England via a single payer system would be even worse, something that even I thought was not possible given the continual unfolding disasters of Obama Care.

More disasters to come.

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:



www.loathemygovernment.com 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

Retro 4 - George Orwell, Doublethink and Today's Politicians

Given family engagements in town this week, we will be rerunning some of our most popular posts, posts that have garnered the most attention and which showed that we are currently enduring the worst set of politicians America has ever had.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2010

George Orwell, Doublethink and Today's Politicians

I am a big fan of George Orwell's classic Novel, "1984." I think he was a great writer and a better prognosticator since many of the predictions he made on "1984" of how democracies would die are actually unfolding today, throughout the world and throughout America. One of the concepts he talks about is "doublethink" which he defines as the ability "to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them." If a leader can establish doublethink in the minds of his followers, then the credibility of that leader will never be questioned since whatever he says is right, doublethink suppresses free thought and free will.

I was thinking of how proud Orwell would be of our current day political class. Many examples abound of how our politicians and the government they run can implement two contradictory programs and never once stop to consider the incongruity and disconnect between the two programs. Consider:

- One of the leading drivers of escalating health care costs in this country is the poor eating habits and exercise habits of many Americans, leaving them overweight and susceptible to many diseases. In fact, one of the main activities of Michele Obama since coming to Washington has been to work hard to reduce the obesity problem plaguing many, many kids in this country. One of the efforts that both Ms. Obama is pushing, along with other parts of the government, including the Agriculture Department, is to reduce the amount of saturated fat that Americans eat, encouraging us to move towards low fat milk and other low fat dairy products.

This all sounds good. However, consider an organization called Dairy Management, as described in a November 8, 2010 New York Times article. Dairy Management is financed by a government mandated fee on the dairy industry and receives millions of dollars a year directly from the budget of the Agricultural Department. The Agriculture Department sits on Dairy Management's board, approves its marketing campaigns, and interfaces with Congress on its work. But Dairy Management recently worked with Domino's Pizza to develop a new line of pizza offerings. These new pies had 40% more cheese and Dairy Management helped develop and pay for the associated $12 million marketing campaign.

But wait. Each slice of these new pizzas contains as much as two thirds of a person's daily recommended amount of saturated fat, which has been linked to heart disease and other diseases. Thus, our government is telling people to eat better and reduce the amount of unsaturated fat in their diets while they are funding support for private companies to put more saturated fat back into Americans' diets. The particularly ironic part of this Domino's example is that I would assume that kids are high pizza eaters, the same type of Americans that Michele Obama is trying to get healthy. Doublethink in the Agriculture Department - eat healthier but don't eat healthier.

- There has been a lot of hype lately regarding all electric cars, some of which will be available shortly for consumer use, e.g. General Motors' Volt. The hope behind electric cars is that they will not spew out pollutants like the gasoline internal combustion engine, improving the environment, and will help wean us from dependency on foreign energy sources. Our political class is so excited about the future of electric cares that, according to an electric car article that was in the October 9, 2010 issue of The Economist magazine, you can get up to a $7,500 subsidy rebate from the U.S. government if you purchase one.

Sounds like a great deal. Get taxpayer money to buy a new car while helping the environment. But, are these vehicles really helping the environment? While the car itself is less polluting, the energy creation needed to generate the electricity to power these cars will increase. In the United States, we get a lot of our electrical power from coal electric plants, which are not the cleanest producers of electricity from an environmental perspective. Thus, we need to find a way to reduce the amount of coal created electricity if the potential of electric cars is to be fulfilled.

But, according to a Washington Post article from May 14, 2007, the government's National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, another Agriculture Department effort, plans to spend $35 billion over the next decade to help build conventional coal electricity plants. More doublethink in the Agriculture Department - the government hands out taxpayer funds for the purchase of electric cars to clean up the environment but uses other taxpayer money to dirty up the environment with coal electricity plants to power the cleaner electric cars.

- Over the past sixty years, the United States has probably spent hundreds of billions of dollars supporting the security and prosperity of South Korea. We fought on South Korea's side, defending them from North Korean and Chinese troops in the Korean war, we provided aid for the recovery, and have stationed tens of thousands of troops in the country since the end of that war. As a result, the South Korean economy has grown into one of the strongest in the world. Besides providing a security cover for their economy to blossom, we are also an important trading partner and market for their companies.

Recently, our State Department has been working to generate support for economic sanctions against the Iranian government in retaliation for the Iranians supposedly developing a nuclear weapon technology. The State Department strategy is to make life so uncomfortable for the Iranian people and government that they will become less likely to develop a nuclear bomb capability.

So what do the South Korean do relative to Iran? According to an article in the October 9, 2010 issue of The Economist magazine, South Korea still wants to protect its annual $10 billion trade volumes with Iran so it recently signed a deal with Iran so that Korean and Iranian business partners could settle trade accounts via a special facility established in two Korean banks and in Korean currencies. State Department doublethink: South Korea is our ally even though they go out of their way to bypass the very sanctions the State Department wants to impose on Iran.

- For years now, the Federal government has subsidized American corn farmers, recently to the tune of $7 billion a year, enticing them to grow more corn, which is eventually turned into ethanol. The ethanol is then added to our national gasoline supply to theoretically extend our gasoline supplies, reduce our dependency on foreign oil and clean up the environment by burning more ethanol and less gasoline.

But the inconvenient truth is that none of the benefits never really materialized and additional problems were created. Since ethanol contains significantly less energy potential than gasoline, more gasoline has to be burned to make up for the energy loss when burning ethanol. According to Robert Bryce of the National Review Online, studies have shown that ethanol use as a motor vehicle fuel increases nitrogen oxides and other key pollutants by 7% over gasoline and also corrodes the fuel lines of older cars and other engines.

According to Cornell Professor David Pimentel, as covered in the energy policy section of "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," corn ethanol is a terrible fuel. It diverts corn crops from the food chain to the energy chain, increasing food costs, it takes a terrible toll on the soil environment, and it is a net user of energy, i.e. it uses more energy to produce than it creates.

Sounds horrible: bad fuel economy, air pollution, soil pollution, bad economics, etc. So what is the political class about to do? According to Mr. Bryce, President Obama recently announced that his administration was going to allow the blend of gasoline to ethanol, currently 90/10, to rise to 85/15. He did this as a favor to the corn industry which has more ethanol distillery capacity than it needs. Energy Department doublethink: using ethanol in a 90/10 mixture is a bad thing to do but moving to an 85/25 mixture is a good thing.

- According to a November 8, 2010 Associated Press report, our war effort in Afghanistan faces a dire shortage of 900 trainers and not enough Afghan officers in the race to build up a viable native Afghan fighting force, which would allow NATO and the United States to get its troops out of the country as soon as possible. According to the recent report, the head of the training operation in the country said that if these trainers are not brought on board soon, the July, 2011 pulldown date of American forces is not going to happen.

Training challenges include a high illiteracy rate among Army and police forces (over 90%), high corruption among the officer ranks, and high levels of attrition (which I think is the code word for desertion.) Nine years after we entered Afghanistan, these elementary problems have not been addressed.

Since this situation is critical to successfully ending our occupation and expense of Afghanistan, one would have hoped that every effort and resource would be used to fill this training need. However, a November 4, 2010 article in the St. Petersburg Times reported that the U.S. government will spend over a half a billion taxpayer dollars to expand its embassy in the Afghanistan capital of Kabul. How many trainers do you think $511 million could buy? How many Afghanistan police officers and soldiers could be made semi-literate, enough so that they became good soldiers?

Thus, we have some Obama administration doublethink going on: we want to get out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible, our number one priority, we need a 50% increase in military trainers, 900 additional trainers, to make that happen, but we will lavishly spend resources to expand a single building complex in the capital. This is a major disconnect in logic: if we cannot produce a viable native fighting force via training, who cares how big or how nice the U.S. embassy is? It will eventually be occupied by the Taliban. Fix the root cause of the problem, the Afghan military, don't try to convince yourselves that both the military readiness and a single building are equally important. A non-doublethink approach would devote some of that $511 million to the training issue since that would recognize the vastly different priorities and importance at play here.

I am sure that you can find government and political class doublethink examples all around you. Sometimes doublethink happens because we have allowed the a Federal government to get so large that one part of it does not know what the other parts of the government are doing. One part wants to reduce pollution by promoting electric cars while another part subsidizes coal burning electric plants that dirty up the air. One part of the government wants Americans kids and adults to get healthy by eating low fat foods while another part, in this case within the same Cabinet Department (Agriculture), helps Domino's Pizza get more fatty, cheesy pizza into Americans' diets.

Sometimes doublethink happens because no one in the political class prioritizes needs and importance, e.g. the wasting of millions of dollars dressing up an embassy when military trainers, vital to our military success, go wanting. Other times politicians do doublethink to please their election campaign donors, e.g. corn farmers who get favorable treatment from the political class, even though those in the political class know that the favorable treatment is not good economically or environmentally.

Whatever the reasons underlying the doublethink situation, you can bet that the American taxpayer is footing an unnecessary bill. That is why Step 1 of "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" is so important. The Step itself calls for an annual 10% reduction in the federal government budget for five years. One way to accomplish this reduction, according Step 1, is to do a bottoms up, zero based budget review. Every government program, law, department, expenditure, etc. would be on the table, stripped down to it's core function and mission in order to look for redundancies and doublethink situations, like the Dairy Management situation described above.

Only then can we rationalize what we are paying for, why we are paying for it, should we be paying for it, and not paying for it if not worthwhile. Hopefully, once our politicians had far less government to think about and to track, they could focus much more closely on a smaller set of priorities, identifying wasteful doublethink quicker and more efficiently. Think about that wonderful goal: a quicker and more efficient government run operation. A government that has retired Orwell's concept of doublethink from our world.

March, 2015, Part 2, By The Numbers: Out Of Control Spending By Washington and Its Economic Ignorance

On a semi-regular basis we revisit the theme ”by the numbers” just to check in on the state of the country and political class using actual realities and their underlying numbers, not the spin or lies from our politicians. You see, politicians usually have nothing to gain by looking at reality and the numbers since they are more than likely to have screwed up reality and our lives in the first place.

That is why they would rather lie and deceive than tell the truth. But that approach can be destroyed by looking at the hard numbers behind the mess they have created. I once worked for a boss whose favorite saying was: There is nothing more devastating to an opinion than the right number.” And that is what we try to do with this theme is devastate politicians’ opinions by looking at the right numbers.

So let’s take a look at the numbers that have recently cropped up and again prove that the political class in America continues to be one of the worst set of people to ever hold office, given the state of the country, the many ways they screw up our wealth and government functions, and their inability or non-desire to step up and tell the truth.

Today we finish up our discussion on “by the numbers” today using the latest analysis of government numbers and other numbers as done by the Heritage Foundation:

1) Anyone with a smidgen of math and number analysis abilities already realizes that government entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare are growing much faster than the economy. Simple number analysis show us that as the Baby Boomers retire and start using the promised benefits the political class promised them long ago relative to retirement income and retirement medical care, the cash crunch on the Federal government gets more and more unbearable and unpayable.

Using government data from the Congressional Budget Office and Office of Management and Budget, and assuming that the Federal government’s tax revenue stream will be equal to the long term average of 18%, by 2013, just 16 years from now, government entitlement programs and the interest that has to be paid on our $18 TRILLION national debt (which is growing every day), will be equal to the Federal government’s revenue stream.

This means that before the national defense is funded, before the EPA is funded, before the Departments of Energy, Transportation, Commerce, Education, and dozens of other government entities are funded, the Federal budget is already accounted for. And the situation gets worse after 2031 with government revenue failing to cover the entitlement and interest payments.

Sources: Congressional Budget Office and Office of Management and Budget.

The numbers do not lie: unless radical changes are made to the national debt and the promises embedded within the Federal government’s entitlement programs, there will be an unprecedented budget crisis very soon: the Federal government and the national economy cannot withstand business as usual in Washington.2) As we showed yesterday with Bill Gates wealth, there is no way to overcome the national debt hole that the Washington political class has dug for us. The Federal government spends too much, it does not tax too little. The above number analysis and the impending 2031 doom verifies that reality. But let’s get away from Bill Gates and talk about the debt burden on average Americans. Heritage did another analysis to show what the national debt burden is today and in the future for every American if each one took responsibility for a fair piece of that debt:

• Just for the public part of the country’s debt load, a child born today will have a debt burden at birth of about $41,000.
• By the time that child is 18 years old, their share of the national debt burden will more than double to $91,000.
• Just six years later, their share of the national debt burden will be up over 50% to $142,000.
• And these depressing numbers include only the so-called “public debt.” As non-public debt is converted to public debt, which has to happen at some point in the future, these numbers are much too low to capture the total and real devastating debt effects on future American generations.

Really depressing numbers for today’s youth. They get to pay off the wasteful and fraudulent spending of today’s politicians without any of the benefits from that debt. This is the number legacy we are leaving for our kids and grandkids unless we take immediate and drastic action to get Federal government spending under control.And make no mistake, the current set of Washington politicians are the most culpable. Our total national debt is up about 80%, eight TRILLION dollars just since Obama took office six short years ago. And that will be his numbers legacy to our kids, our grandkids and our history going forward, uncontrolled spending with no societal benefits in return.

PUBLIC DEBT PER CAPITA



Sources: Congressional Budget Office, Office of Management and Budget, and U.S. Census Bureau.

3) We have previously pointed out several examples where state politicians raised tax rates on the highest earning state residents, fully expecting to see those higher tax rates result in higher state government tax revenue.The most classic example was written up in the Wall Street Journal relative to the state of Maryland. That state raised the tax rates on the state’s highest earning residents but ended up getting LESS revenue from the same higher earning residents than prior to the tax rate.What happened with this line of reasoning? In all likelihood those state residents, faced with paying more in taxes, simply moved out of state to avoid the higher Maryland tax rates. Thus, rather than seeing the tax revenue stream increase when tax rates were raised, the state ended up with less overall revenue despite the higher rates. People are not stupid, they will make the decisions that give them the most freedom, economic and political.Which gets us to the final number analysis from the Heritage Foundation. Over the past 50 years, the top Federal government income tax rate has varied from 91% to 28%. However, despite the wide range, Federal income taxes received as a percentage of the nation’s GDP has remained relatively constant. For example, according to IRS data, in 1990, the top Federal income tax rate was 28% which resulted in Federal income tax revenue to be equal to about 79% of the country;s GDP. In 2014, the the top Federal tax rate had jumped up to 39%, about 40% higher than in 1990, but the percentage of GDP was about the same, a smidgen higher at only 8.0%. Thus, despite Obama’s obsession with soaking the rich with higher tax rates, the bottom line is that there were not substantially higher tax revenues generated, as the IRS data below shows.
TOP TAX RATES AND TOTAL RECEIPTS



Source: Internal Revenue Service.

In other words, the top tax rate is inelastic economically compared to tax revenue as a percentage of GDP. Thus, why raise tax rates and reduce the economic freedom of Americans when lower tax rates results in about the same revenue as higher tax rates? Because the political class would rather try and control our lives, despite what the data, numbers, and realities tell us.That will do it for this brief, two post update under our theme, “by the numbers.” What did we learn today from the numbers:

1. Unless Washington changes its spending ways, soon the country will not be able to afford anything but interest payments on the national debt and entitlements.
2. Unless Washington changes is spending ways, a child born today will be faced with a national debt burden of over $140,000 by the time they are 24 years old.
3. Higher tax rates rarely, if ever,at both the state and Federal level, result in higher tax revenues.

The numbers do not lie, the numbers devastate opinions and spin of the political class. And unlike today’s politicians, starting in the White House, the numbers do not lie.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:

www.loathemygovernment.com

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:

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

January, 2015, Part 8, Political Class Insanity: Stifling Debt and The Incest Of Polticians and Bankers Have For Each Other

It is the beginning of both another year and another month which means it is time to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. For regular readers of this blog, you know that as 2014 progressed, the insanity, stupid quotes, ineffective governing and legislating, and general incompetence of our politicians seemed to accelerate as the year grinded on.

No major issues got addressed, never mind resolved. Obama Care’s implications across the entire country and entire economy continued to unfold in disaster after disaster. Our foreign policy, or what was passed off as a foreign policy, was in tatters. Terrorism was on the march across the world. Veterans were dying because the Federal government could not fulfill the medical and health care promises those brave veterans were promised. The national debt hit a mind boggling $18 TRILLION.

And our President continued to play golf and go on political campaign swings like no other President ever did. Congress narrowly missed becoming the least productive Congress of all time. Billions were spent and wasted on the November elections to elect people that did not deserve the time of day never mind billions of dollars. Racial division spread across the country, a division that was fomented and spread by those in office with something to gain.

And guess what? Over the past week or so, we have seen nothing has changed except the calendar. The political class is still out of control, the government entities that they rule over are bloated and ineffective, and the quality of life and freedom in this country continues to deteriorate.

I though yesterday would be the last post in this month’s insanity series but it requires one more day to tidy up the following disasters from the American political class, at least until next month. Today then will definitely be the last post in this series of political class insanity so enjoy one last day of the many ways that the political class wastes your tax dollars, screws up our freedoms and liberties, and generally messes up everything it touches.

1) Our insanity focus today will be on economic mismanagement and crises that the political class have dropped on us and the country. The following information mostly comes from a Heritage Foundation article that was published on November 29, 2014 by Stephen Moore. He is the chief economist at the Foundation.

He takes a stab at estimating the impact and burden that “Obamanomics” has placed on our economy and country:

• Since the day that Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in late 2008, a few months before Obama took office, the Federal government has added about $8.3 TRILLION to our national debt.
• This is about $72,000 of debt for each U.S.household.
• The Federal Reserve has devalued the dollar by the $3.5 TRILLION that it has played with through its so-called monetary policy and three rounds of quantitative easing.
• That debasement comes out to about $30,000 for every U.S.household.
• The Obama administration spent about $830 billion on its failed economic stimulus program or about $7,200 for every U.S.household.
• If we add these expenditures up with get $12.6 TRILLION or about $110,000 per U.S. household.

As Mr. Moore points out, all of those trillions have been spent and already “flushed through the economy.” What do we have to show for this flushing:

• U.S. median household incomes have declined year over year for the past six years even though the recession ended five years ago at the same time that banks and bankers have gotten much richer.
• There are about 15 million unemployed or underemployed Americans throughout the country.
• Labor force participation rates are at their lowest levels since the 1970s.
• While the official unemployment rate has declined over the past few years, that has as much to do with discouraged job hunting people leaving the workforce as it does with economic growth.
• Minority unemployment rates are still much higher than the overall unemployment rate.
• An amazing and depressing 45 million Americans are still receiving Federal food assistance every month despite the recession having ended years ago.
• The national debt burden is now trending above 100% of GDP, a ratio that puts it up in the distressed economic realm of Greece, Spain, and other distressed economies.
• According to a  2014 Brookings report, we are currently living in an economic time when more companies are closing and going out of business than than new businesses are  starting up for the first time in a quarter of a century.
• Just about every major expenditure of this administration, from Solyndra and dozens of other failed alternative energy investments to the horrific Obama Care website, have crashed and burned with no societal benefit in return.

So basically, we have flushed TRILLIONS of dollars away and have very little to see in return.

These conditions are bad enough but Mr.Moore points out even worse news. That additional national debt is being paid off today at very low interest rates. But how long will those low rates be in effect? He estimates that if interest rates eventually get rational from a historical perspective, say 3% or so, an additional $5 TRILLION in national debt will materialize solely because of increased interest payments or about $43,000 for each U.S. household.

This would increase the individual household burden to over $150,000 per household. This would make the interest payments on the national debt the biggest expense line in the Federal budget. These TRILLIONs of dollars of interest payments are TRILLIONS that cannot be spent on infrastructure improvements, education, improvements, etc.

Economically and financially as a country, the political class has taken us to a point where we have never been. And while things are not too bad today, higher stock market returns, lower gas prices, tame inflation, etc., he does conclude his article with a history-based warning relative to easy money, deficit spending, and printing money: “When other nations have tried to print their way to prosperity, the story hasn’t had a happy ending. For Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico and others, easy-money policies have crashed state economies and ended in misery. The poor have been hurt the most.”

If untreated, personal insanity will eventually kill. If untreated, financial insanity will also do the same and the American political class is part of the disease and the insanity, not the doctor and certainly not the cure.

2) So if the economy is so bad, why is overall economic growth starting to pick up and why is Obama talking about good economic news so much? Well, one source of insight into that disconnect comes from a recent article that appeared in the Guardian newspaper, ”Seven Years Ago Wall Street Was The Villain. Now It Gets To Call The Shots.”

The article was written by Joel Kotkin and it shows how the cozy relationship between the banking industry and the Washington political class has paid off handsomely for both parties at the expense of the rest of America. Mr. Kotkin points out that both major political parties are at fault here, not just the Republicans and the fault covers a wide range:

• Recently proposed legislation will gut much of the financial controls that previous legislation placed on financial and banking institutions, “new rules, written largely by Citibank lobbyists and embraced by the Obama administration,” allowing them to go back to some very dangerous investing schemes with little additional oversight from the government.
• Mr.Kotkin went onto explain why the Obama administration has endorsed this more lax oversight principles: “The ultra-rich so backed the president [Obama] that, at his first inaugural, noted one sympathetic chronicler, the biggest problem for donors was finding parking space for their private jets.”
• Obama’s first Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, came from Goldman Sachs and ended up back on Wall Street in a high paying job while his successor came from Citibank.
• Staying with the Citibank theme, Jamie Dimon, CEO of Citibank, has been called Obama’s “favorite banker.”
• Despite the banking and financial shenanigans of the industry that directly led to the “Great Recession,” Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, has not gone after any major banking figures for prosecution, unlike previous Presidential administrations that put thousands of bankers in jail for their criminal acts.
• In this tepid economic recovery, a period when Democrats controlled most of the Federal government,  the top 1% of earners  saw their incomes rise by 11% while the rest of America experienced stagnant or declining incomes.
• Or as a writer at the Huffington Post summarized it: “The rising tide has lifted fewer boats during the Obama years – and the ones it’s lifted have been mostly yachts.”
• As a result of cozying up and coddling to large banks, in 1995, the assets of the six largest bank holding companies accounted for 15% of this country’s gross domestic product; by 2011 the political class had helped raise that percentage had to a sky high 64%.

Wow, talk about scratching each other’s back. Everyone wins but America and most of its citizens. Woodrow Wilson once warned us: “The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.” One hundred years later this piece of insanity has come true, we as a nation have allowed the political class to sell our souls to the banking industry bosses to our detriment and their advantage.

3) While the financial management of the Federal government has been insane, the state governments and the state politicians that operate those state governments have not done much better. According to a recent NewsMax article, state governments have unfunded liabilities of about $4.7 TRILLION, or about $41,000 for every American household.

Combine this estimate with the worse case scenario from the story above and the total government debt load for every U.S. household is about $200,000. In other words, every household would have to write a very large check, i.e. give up $200,000 of their personal wealth, just to pay off the debt the American political class has racked up.

The state debt load of $4.7 TRILLION comes from a new report by State Budget Solutions: "This spells trouble for the millions of baby boomers who are quickly approaching retirement age and expect to collect the pensions promised to them by government officials," writes Joe Luppino-Esposito, author of the "Promises Made, Promises Broken 2014" report. "State taxpayers who are not government employees will also feel the pinch, which could result in reduced government services as larger and larger portions of the states' budgets must be allocated to cover the public pension shortfall."

California carries the largest unfunded liability, an amazing $754 billion, followed by Illinois ($331 billion), New York ($307 billion), Texas ($296 billion), and Ohio ($289 billion). Certainly large liabilities but the report also looks at the liabilities from a funding ratio perspective, which compares state government assets to to state government liabilities.

Using this measurement, Illinois is in worst shape, with a funding ratio of just 22 percent — it has assets of $95 billion, about 22 percent of its liabilities of $426.6 billion. Other states with pathetically low ratios are Connecticut (23 percent), Kentucky (24 percent), Alaska (25 percent), and Mississippi (27 percent). Wisconsin, the state with the best ratio and financial picture is still at only 67% when you calculate their funding ratio.

The report found that most often the problem is that the political class in each state cut its financing of its liabilities such as state employment pensions in order to spend tax dollars elsewhere. Over time, this starving of pension funds and such has resulted in these anemic funding levels and ratios. Thus, state politicians are just as short sighted and economically ignorant as their Federal government brethren.

That will do it for the political class insanity for this month. Today was a little heavy on financing and economics but still insane how the political class at both the Federal and state levels is burying this country, our wealth, and our freedom in debt and how  the politicians and bankers in this country have developed a symbiotic relationship at the expense of our economic well being.

We will return to the insanity early next month where I am sure we will talk about more debt, more stupid political quotes, more failed government programs, and other pieces of political class insanity.

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:

www.loathemygovernment.com

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:

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