August, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 6: Graft In Virginia, Ignroance in Kentucky, Corruption in New York, and Economic Ignorance Everywhere

This is our sixth and hopefully last post on this month’s update on political class insanity. This monthly series covers the wasteful spending, the idiotic quotes, the effective government programs, the selfish greed and other sins of the current set of American politicians. It is through this series that we contend that we are currently being served by the most inept and greedy set of politicians America has ever had to endure.

1) Let’s start off today on the greedy angle. According to a recent Associated Press report, a Federal prosecutor has accused Virginia's former governor and his wife of illegally accepting gifts from a businessman who sought their influence to promote his company.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica Aber opened the trial of the former governor and his wife, Bob and Maureen McDonnell, a trial that charges the couple with accepting more than $165,000 in gifts and loans from Jonnie Williams, the CEO of dietary supplements maker Star Scientific. They are accused of accepting the gifts in exchange for helping promote his products.

Which just goes to prove that politicians at the state government level may not be any different than corrupt and now jailed politicians at the Federal level. Innocent to proven guilty but disgraceful nonetheless that this former politician and his wife acted so greedily that the Federal government thinks it has enough to put them away for their actions.

2) The Iron Dome system is a missile defense system that shoots out missiles with the intent of destroying incoming missiles from an enemy. It has been in the news a lot lately because the Israeli deployment of its Iron Dome System, has probably saved hundreds, if not thousands, of Israeli lives, by intercepting the thousands of rockets that Hamas has shot into Israel over the past months.

Pretty simple concept: anti-missile shot up in the air to intercept and destroy incoming missiles. Simple, but apparently not simple enough for a politician who is running for a seat in the U.S. Senate from Kentucky. Democratic Kentucky Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes says Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system prevents Hamas terrorists from tunneling into Israel.

Ms. Grimes was asked about the war going between the Israelis and Hamas during a recent interview with the Lexington Herald Leader: “The Iron Dome has been a big reason why Israel has been able to withstand the terrorists that have tried to tunnel their way in.”

Makes you wonder where she gets her information about life from. The Iron Dome is a MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM. It is not a giant iron cage or dome that is buried in the ground that prevent Hamas terrorists from tunneling into Israel. This is a quote and view of reality that is quickly moving up the charts as one of the dumbest quotes from a politician in recent times. 

According to an article in the Washington Beacon: the Iron Dome is a joint U.S.-Israeli missile defense system that is able to track terrorist rockets as they enter Israeli territory and destroy them in mid-air. The system has saved scores of Israeli lives and protected the Jewish state during Hamas’s latest terror campaign, in which some 9,000 rockets have been fired at Israel.

How out of touch can one be to not know this? How out of touch and inept is your campaign staff that they would allow you out in public so knowledge impaired? And you want to be a U.S. Senator? I don’t think so. Not if you are that naïve and out of touch with what is going on in the world.

3) A few days ago we reported on a New York Times article that reported on how New York governor Andrew Cuomo had shut down his own corruption investigation commission once the commission started investigating the potential wrong doings by one of companies he used for his election campaign.

Well, it seems that might not be the only shady dealings going on up in Albany. According to a recent Bloomberg report, the governor’s election campaign collected at least $650,000 in campaign contributions from companies or people whose companies were granted tax credits to redevelop industrial sites according to research done into state government data.

Related Cos. was the biggest donor, donating at least $262,700 to Cuomo’s campaign. Syracuse shopping-mall businessman Robert Congel, members of his family and executives at his Pyramid Cos. contributed $143,250.

According to Bloomberg, critics of the incentives, which have cost taxpayers more than $1 billion since 2006, claim they benefit wealthy developers and have done little to clean up contaminated industrial sites. Bloomberg cites a research study found that 94 percent of these tax credits have been used for redeveloping properties instead of fixing polluted and contaminated land.

Again, innocent until proven guilty. But as we have often said, the appearance of a conflict of interest is just as bad as a real conflict of interest. Deals and arrangements like this just smell bad, regardless of intentions, good or bad. 

That is why Step 7 from “Love My Country, Loathe my Government,” is needed in this country. Step 7 would allow only individual citizens to contribute to political election campaigns. Businesses, unions, PACs, Super Pacs, etc. would be prohibited form contributing and possibly buying influence and political favors. While it might not get rid of all the political hi-jinks and rip offs of taxpayers, a properly implemented and policed, Step 7 would go a long way to getting rid of even the appearance of conflicts of interest and might actually protect taxpayer interests in the long run.

4) According to a recent Bloomberg report that was summarized in the August 1, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, former secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made $12 million in speaking fees since leaving that position in February, 2013. That comes out to an amazing $750,000 a month. She is making in a MONTH, on average, fifteen times as much than what the average American household earns in a YEAR. I am sorry, nobody is worth that much money whose track record of accomplishment is next to nil.

5) More secrets about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) out of control spying on American citizens was made public recently. In an interview in the Guardian newspaper in England, former NSA analyst and whistleblower, Edward Snowden, made it known that NSA employees circulate ‘sexually compromising images” among co-workers that they came across when spying on innocent American citizens.

This type of behavior was “seen as sort of the fringe benefits of surveillance positions,” according to Snowden. We are getting oh so close to 1984 and Big Brother when the type of behavior is allowed to go on, secretly exploiting the lives of innocent American citizens using these same taxpayers’ wealth to do so.

6) According to a CNN.com report that was summarized in the August 1, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, a whopping 48% of the Dodd-Frank financial industry reform legislation’s regulations and rules have not be formulated or written yet. This is four years after the legislation was passed. 

What good is passing legislation if four years later the Federal government is just about half way to getting the guidelines put together never mind having that legislation having an positive impact in the market? I cannot imagine the IRS letting any citizen get away with similar behavior, e.g. granting a four year extension to file income taxes. But somehow, politicians can get away with idiotic legislation that never really gets implemented. Insane.

7) We often make the case that the current set of American politicians have no economic background, no economic experience, no economic sense, and no economic training, resulting in economic programs and strategies that often to more harm than good in growing the economy. A recent article from Bloomberg, summarized in the July 18, 2014 issue of The Week, magazine reinforced this opinion.

Despite spending about $830 billion on a failed economic stimulus, trillions of dollars in Federal Reserve “quantitative easing," record low interest rates, and an energy boom, the political class has screwed up the economy so much that around 15% of all Americans, about 45 million people, still live below the poverty level in this country. The poverty level is defined as earning less than $23,600 a year. 

If we had taken that $830 billion from the failed economic stimulus and written a check to each of those 45 million Americans, a family of four living below the poverty line would have gotten a check for over $70,000 or at least three times their annual income. That would have been the far better economic decision rather than squandering the money like Washington did on stupid programs and crony infested programs, none of which stimulated any economic activity.

That will wrap up the political class insanity for this month. A depressing but necessary exercise that shows once and for all that we are living under the worst performing, most inept set of politicians in the history of this country. If you would like to help change this status, please visit the following term limits website and help us change out the current Washington insanity because, really, how much worst could it get:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

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.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Fun With Math - Making Our $16 Trillion National Debt Easy To Understand...and Fear

Sometime this week the U.S. Federal government exceeded the $16 TRILLION threshold of national debt. I found it ironic that the Presidential administration that has added more to that level of debt than any other previous administration, increasing it by about 50% in less than four years, is also having its Presidential convention this week. I would bet that these debt "accomplishments" will not be part of the agenda or any of the speeches.

$16 TRILLION is a lot of money, a whole lot of money. Let's play with some math to put $16 TRILLION in perspective:

1. $16 TRILLION is the number 16 with TWELVE zeroes behind it.
2. If every American household chipped in the same amount to pay off that debt, each household would have to write a check for about $140,000. Not going to happen.
3. Since the average household income is about $50,000 a year, every household would have to work almost three years, on average, to retire the debt and forego eating, leisure activities, buying clothes, going on vacation, paying taxes, paying for heat, etc.
4. Since the richest four hundred Americans have a total net worth of about $2.4 TRILLION,  even if the Federal government was able to seize their entire wealth and somehow liquidate it to pay off some of the debt, only about 15% of the national debt could be paid off.
5. Since the 400th richest American had a total wealth of about $1 billion, even if you confiscated the entire wealth of the next richest 400 Americans, you would still end up with considerably less than $400 billion or, at best, only another 2.5% of the national debt. In other words, even if you confiscated and liquidated the entire wealth of the richest Americans, you could not come close to paying off the national debt, a moving target that grows by a TRILLION dollars a year under this administration.
6. If you spent $20 million every day, beginning with the day Jesus Christ was born, you still would not have spent $16 TRILLION.
7. If you have 16 TRILLION one dollar bills and laid them end-to-end, you would circle the globe just over 60,000 times.
8. If you have 16 TRILLION one dollar bills and laid them end-to-end, you would stretch back and forth from Earth to Mars about 2,100 times.
9. If you have 16 TRILLION one dollar bills and stacked them into four equal piles of 250 billion bills each, each stack would reach from the Earth to beyond the moon.
10. 16 TRILLION seconds is over 500,000 years worth of time

You get the idea, I do not want to trivialize the dire economic straits the political class has put us in with more simple math examples. Not only are we in dire straits today, the $16 TRILLION has not made life any better for most Americans:

• Our health care costs are still going ever higher so the $16 TRILLION did not curb runaway health care costs.
• Our government is still fighting a lost war on drugs so the $16 TRILLION did not find a way to successfully address this losing war. We still have over 40,000 Americans who die from drug overdoses every year and we probably still spend more for incarceration than we do for treatment and prevention.
• We still do not have a sane, affordable, and environmentally friendly national energy plan so the $16 TRILLION did not solve our ever present energy problems, the latest manifestation of which is that the pump price of gas has doubled in less than four years, or since Obama took office.
• Our public schools, for the most part, are a disgrace when it comes to educating our kids relative to the rest of the world so the $16 TRILLION was not used to fix our dysfunctional public school processes.
• Many parts of our country are living with crumbling bridges and pothole scarred roads so the $16 TRILLION was not used to fix our infrastructure problems.
• We still have a major illegal immigration problem so the $16 TRILLION was not used to legally, fairly and compassionately integrate the current illegal immigrants into our society or was used to seal our leaky borders, giving the Mexican drug cartels virtually unfettered ways to smuggle drugs, guns, humans, and who knows what else into the country.

So, despite the Federal government confiscating and overspending our wealth to the tune of $16 TRILLION, we can safely say that they have not used that wealth to even begin resolving any of the major issues facing the country. This conclusion was also reached by an actual member of the political class who eloquently stated the reality of this farce a few years ago.

Colorado Senator Michael Bennet stated the obvious in the Washington Post on September 3, 2010: "We have managed to acquire $13 TRILLION of debt on our balance sheet. In my view, we have nothing to show for it." He is right, we had nothing to show for $13 TRILLION worth of national debt and two years later, we already have $16 TRILLION worth of debt and nothing to show for it. 

But it gets worse! If you go to the official White House budget website, $16 TRILLION is nothing compared to where the current administration's budget plans will take us in the next several years:

• According to the latest official White House budget numbers, another $3.44 TRILLION will be added to the Federal national debt by the end of year 2017.
• If this estimate holds true, every American household would be theoretically burdened with another $30,000 share of the overall national debt.
• However, this estimate requires that the economy and the resultant government tax revenue stream have annual growth rates of 17%, 11%, 7%, 7%, and 6% over the next five years.
• Given that the long term, average annual growth rate for the U.S. economy is about 3%, it is highly unlikely that these rosy tax revenue growth rates will hold and we will not add $3.44 TRILLION to our national debt by 2017, we will add significantly more.
• If we assume a much more realistic economic growth rate of 3% annually over the next five years and that the economic growth rate will generate the same growth rate in government tax revenue, than the actual increase in the national debt could more realistically expected to be about $7 TRILLION, or an additional $60,000 or so to each household's share of the overall debt.
• Thus, by 2017, each American household could be on the hook for about $200,000.
• This also assumes a most unrealistic assumption, namely that we do not suffer another recession between now and 2017 which would increase the additional debt even more.

An old saying goes: "When you are in a hole, stop digging." Obviously, the Obama administration, as illustrated by their current, official budget outlooks, have no real plans or ability to stop digging deeper into this national debt sinkhole.

These are scary, scary numbers. And what are our politicians likely worrying about today? Probably the following:

• Their five week vacation is already coming to an end.
• How can they get more money for their reelection campaigns.
• What do Romney's tax returns look like.
• What do Obama's sealed college records look like.
• When is my next five week vacation.

The case for implementing Step 39 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" has never been stronger. Step 39 would implement term limits for all Federal politicians immediately. It is obvious to people even within the political class establishment, see Senator Bennet's observation above, that the current people sitting in the White House and in Congress do not have the will, courage, ability, desire, or understanding/intelligence on how to fix this national debt disgrace. Their inaction and inattention will pose a potentially fatal blow to our democracy, our freedom, our careers, our retirements and our futures and our children's futures.

We are in deep trouble. We need new blood and new leadership very, very soon or we will never climb out of the $16 TRILLION hole the political class has thrown us into. We will explore this hole again next week, hypothesizing what could happen if the hole continues to deepen and review out plan to fill that hole in with at least $9 TRILLION in debt savings over the next ten years, with minimal pain to most Americans.

Please check back then for the details. Oh, by the way, keep in mind that the $16 TRILLION does not include the trillions and trillions of dollars worth of unfunded liabilities and future debt stalking within the Social Security and Medicare programs! 

We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, "The United States Of Purple," at:

http://www.unitedstatesofpurple.com/

The United States of Purple is a new grass roots approach to filling the office of President of The United States by focusing on the restoration of freedom in the United States, focusing on problem solving skills and results vs. personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just one United States Of America under the banner of Purple.

The United States Of Purple's website also provides you the formal opportunity to sign a petition to begin the process of implementing a Constitutional amendment to impose fixed term limits on all Federally elected politicians. Only by turning out the existing political class can we have a chance of addressing and finally resolving the major issues of or times.

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.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment