January, 2013 Political Class Insanity, Part 2: Over regulation, Stupid Regulation, Tax Evading Federal Employees, and More

Today is the second in this month’s series on political class insanity in America. As the months go by, we have needed to expand our monthly one day post into multiple posts to cover all of the idiocy, lunacy, and bad priorities of our politicians. This month is no exception. Yesterday we covered the fact that the American political class bought an armored car for a rural town in case they ever have problems at their annual pumpkin festival, the Pentagon  spent taxpayer wealth on a string of Star Trek themed meetings that had nothing to do with national defense, and several other total wastes of money.


So what did we not get to yesterday:

1) This piece of insanity and hypocrisy did not occur in the past month but I just found it last week. According to an ABC News report from January 27, 2012:

• At that time, the IRS released its Federal Employee and Retiree Delinquency Inventory.
• That report showed that a whopping 36 of Obama’s White House aides owed a total of $833,970 in back taxes to the IRS.
• And White House personnel were not the only Federal employees not paying their taxes.
• At the Environmental Protection Agency, 413 people owe more than $19 million, at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC), 185 employees owe more than $3 million; and five people at the U.S. Tax Court owe $62,508.
• I am assuming these are not the only tax evading Federal employees but they are only the ones cited as examples by the ABC article.
• The ironic thing about the FDIC tax evaders is that the FDIC is supposed to “maintain stability and public confidence in the nation’s financial system.” Tough to have confidence in the nation’s financial system when those responsible for that integrity flaunt its requirements.

A few observations:

• The President’s call for some Americans to pay more in taxes rings hypocritical and hollow when he cannot even get his own personnel to comply with existing tax laws.
• No wonder the IRS fails to collect over $380 billion from tax evaders, many of them actually work for the same Federal bureaucracy. If the IRS cannot find the tax evaders within the government, it is doubtful it will find them out in the hinterlands.
• Shouldn’t there be a law that if you are evading taxes, and it is obvious they know who these Federal employees are given the specificity of the numbers, that their Federal pay checks be confiscated until those back taxes are paid?
• Maybe they are just following the example of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and other top ranking political class members who did not pay their “fair” share of taxes in the past.

Why was ABC the only member of the main stream media to carry this story? Isn’t this a major discussion point in the tax debate going on in this country today?

Final question: if you or I evaded over $23,000 in taxes (the average amount the 36 White House aides evaded), wouldn’t we be in jail and if so, why are these White House aides not in jail?

Hypocrisy abounds.

2) Fiscal cliff. $16.3 TRILLION national debt. 23 million Americans either unemployed or under employed. Failing public schools. Leaky borders. High gas prices with no national energy strategy and plan. Escalating health care costs.

Some serious issues facing country and its citizens. So what did a Congressional committee concern itself with recently, according to a December 12, 2012 Associated Press report? Whether or not the National Football League Players Association was trying to get out of its agreement with the NFL to subject its players of Human Growth Hormone (HGH) drug testing:

“Hopefully as we move down the line, players will see how incredibly ridiculous it looks for them not to ... straighten this thing out," said Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's ranking Democrat. "We're now getting ready to go into a third season, and it does not look very good."

No, Congressman Cummings, this is not ridiculous. What is truly ridiculous is that a Congressional committee and its staff are worried about this insignificant piece of reality when there are so many other real issues facing America today. Pathetic priorities.

3) During this holiday season, from Thanksgiving through Christmas, American families will be eating a lot of turkey. Did you ever wonder how turkey producers measure and document the size of their turkeys? Probably not.

Well, some Federal government bureaucrats sure did. While reading the following LABELING specifications for turkey, consider whether or not our tax dollars need to be spent paying someone in the Federal bureaucracy to come up with such detailed specs for just turkey LABELS:

Federal labeling requirements for turkey include “affixing in conspicuous and easily legible boldface print or type, in distinct contrast to other matter on the container, and on the principal display panel within the bottom 30 percent of the area of the panel, in lines generally parallel to the base: Provided, Not less than one-eighth inch in height on containers, the principal display panel of which has an area of more than 5 but not more than 25 square inches; Not less than three-sixteenth inch in height on containers, the principal display panel of which has an area of more than 25 but not more than 100 square inches; Not less than one-quarter inch in height on containers, the principal display panel of which has an area of more than 100 but not more than 400 square inches; Not less than one-half inch in height on containers, the principal display panel of which has an area of more than 400 square inches. The ratio of height to width of letters and numerals shall not exceed a differential of 3 units to 1 unit (no more than 3 times as high as it is wide). This height standard pertains to upper case or capital letters. When upper and lower case or all lower case letters are used, it is the lower case letter ‘o’ or its equivalent that shall meet the minimum standards. When fractions are used, each component numeral shall meet one-half the height standards.”

Some relatively high paid government employee actually spent time and taxpayer wealth actually writing this down. It probably went through many iterations. It was probably read and modified many times by this employee’s superiors. It requires much unproductive time by turkey producers to comply with such specificity.

And the sad thing about all this waste, I would bet that over 99% of turkey consumers never read the darn label anyway. They buy the turkey because of how it looks and about how big it is. This is just one reason why we have a $16.3 TRILLION national debt.

4) Continuing on this expensive, overregulation theme of turkey labeling, the following overregulation information arose in just one week in November, according to investigations by the Bankrupting America Project:

• RealClearPolicy noted President Obama introduced more regulations in two years than President Bush did in eight and twice as many as President Clinton did in his last three years in office.
• According to the American Action Forum, as of Nov. 2, “At the current pace, the published regulatory burden for 2012 will exceed $273 billion. Since January 1, 2012 the federal government has imposed $231.7 billion in compliance costs and more than 134.9 million annual paperwork burden hours.”
• The American Action Forum also notes there were three Dodd-Frank rules issued in the last two weeks that would “increase regulatory costs by $774 million … with more than 7.4 million associated paperwork hours.”

$273 billion a year in regulations comes out to well over $2,500 a year per average U.S. household. Ask yourself if you are getting your money’s worth for that $2,500 every year. Ask this question in the light of now knowing that one of those many, many regulations concerns itself with the labels on turkeys? I think most Americans would agree that $2,500 is way too much to spend based on what return we get from the federal bureaucracy.

5) Now, the following numbers will not cure our $16.3 TRILLION national debt problem, it will not feed the homeless. But it is symptomatic of how idiotic our Federal government can be when handing our taxpayer wealth in a willy-nilly manner.

The December, 2012 AARP Bulletin covered the findings from a Congressional Research Service which found that almost 2,400 IRS tax filers had annual income over $1 million in 2009 and…. were still able to collect unemployment benefits. This cost the American taxpayer almost $21 million.

Again, $21 million is a spit in the ocean of our national debt. But these kinds of atrocities go on thousands and thousands of times every day. Unemployment benefit programs were implemented to help a struggling citizen get past a rough past in their employment situation. Someone who made over a million dollars in one year do not need an additional handout from the American taxpayer. At one million dollars, these people earned at least twenty times what the average American household earned in 2009. With that kind of income advantage, they do not need a taxpayer payout to get over their rough spot.

Senator Tom Coburn has introduced legislation in the Senate to prohibit anyone earning over a million dollars from collecting unemployment benefits and checks. While I applaud his efforts to erase this disgraceful waste of money, I would make the legislation more stringent:

1. I would not put the cutoff at over a $1 million but much lower, say $500,000 which is still more than ten times what the average American household earns in a year.
2. I would also put a wealth measurement and requirement in place. It should not be enough to just look at the previous year’s income. In these high national debt times, I see no reason why anyone should be eligible for unemployment benefits who has a net worth, not an annual income, of over a million dollars. A millionaire with millions in his or her bank, mutual funds, bonds, etc. should not need a few hundred dollars a month from Federal unemployment funds.

It is such a shame the Washington political class took so long to recognize this stupidity.

That should do it for today. Tax evading Federal employees and executives, over regulation, stupid regulations, bad priorities and subsidizing millionaire earners. Just another month 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

http://www.reason.com/http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.co
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Report Card On This Generation's Political Class

As the first decade of this century comes to a close, I thought it would be a good idea to look back over the past twenty years to see how this generation's politicians have managed the affairs of the Federal government and the country. Twenty years is a good measure since it a reasonable amount of time (not too short to see emerging trends, not too long to be irrelevant), it covers a time period when the Democrats and Republicans each controlled the White House for ten years, it covers a time frame when both parties either controlled parts of Congress or had split control, and the actions taken by these politicians will impact the nation for years to come.

Given this back drop, how did our so-called leaders perform relative to the vital issues facing the country? Unfortunately, the final report card is not pretty:

• Social Security is hurtling towards insolvency with no rational plan in the works to fix it.
• Medicare is hurtling towards insolvency with no rational plan in the works to fix it.
• Our public education system fails to adequately education vast numbers of our children while consuming more and more resources.
• We still have no rational national energy plan, which has caused us to become more and more dependent on the whims and energy pricing of foreign countries.
• We have not figured out how to manage the issue of drug addiction that has led to the evolution of a violent narco state just south of our border and left many our citizens that want to kick their drug habit untreated
• Our borders are still not secure, resulting in over 10 million illegal aliens in the country with a high probability that some of the 10 million are bent on terrorism aims.
• We are fighting two wars that have drained our Treasury, resulting in over 34,000 Americans being killed or wounded, but has not destroyed the terrorism threat that it set out to do.
• We continue to deny basic rights to the American gay and lesbian community, whether it is the right to marry or the right and privilege to serve in our armed forces.
• While the political class has passed a massive health care reform law, this law is likely to fail while substantially adding to the national deficit.
• Speaking of national deficit, we now have an outrageous national debt of over $13 TRILLION, burdening every American household with over $100,000 worth of government debt.
• Government reaction to national disasters such as 9-11, Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill, etc., while heroic at the individual level, have been inefficient, ineffective, and expensive at the government bureaucracy level.
• Government entities responsible for the banking and housing industries (e.g. Treasury Department, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, FDIC, Federal Reserve Board, Senate and House of Representatives committees, etc.) failed miserably in foreseeing and managing the economic disaster of the past few years, with confirmed reports that some SEC employees, at all levels of management, spent most of their working days surfing the Internet for downloadable pornography.
• Not to be outdone by the SEC employees, Gulf of Mexico Interior Department employees have also been found to be spending much of their working time surfing for Internet pornography while ignoring safety issues that eventually caused the BP oil spill disaster.
• Through the gerrymandering of Congressional districts, the expansion of earmark volumes, manipulating the primary election system, and the passing ineffective campaign reform financing laws that allow big corporate, union, and PAC contributors to drown out the voices of ordinary Americans, this political class has rigged our voting processes to ensure that the incumbents are always re-elected despite their in office performance.
• Despite massive bureaucracies concerned about consumer safety, failed government processes to foresee the Toyota safety problems and the failed over sight of stopping the import of lead and cadmium laced toy products, probably resulted in American fatalities.
• Moral and ethical behavior have not been a strong point of this generation's political class, whether it was outright/convicted corruption (Traficant, Cunningham, Ryan, Rostenkowski), alleged corruption (Rangel, Walters, and possibly a dozen others), or alleged immoral corruption (Spitzer, MacGreevey, Edwards, Clinton, Foley, Ryan, Sanford, Ensign).
• Intelligent political dissent has degenerated into name calling with those opposed to the invasion of Iraq as unpatriotic, those opposed to Obama Care being likened to racists of the civil rights era or being called un-American, knuckle dragging Neanderthals, or terrorists.
• Never has the country been so divided with politicians using the differences in cultural, racial, sexual, religious, or geographic orientations to "energize their base" while belittling other Americans that may have legitimate, differing views.

Unfortunately, given the above report card, I think we would all have to give the political class a failing grade for their performance over the past twenty years (despite the fact that they reward themselves with automatic pay raises every year). Wherever you land on the above issues, it is pretty obvious that no real progress and, in many cases, no real effort, has been made in successfully resolving these issues.

The focus of our politicians has been very simple: to get elected and stay elected, using whatever financial and government resources (e.g. earmarks) they can get their political hands on or demonizing one group of Americans (gay vs. straight, pro life vs. pro choice, red state vs. blue state, one race vs. another race, poor vs. rich) in order to get the support of another group. Nowhere in this list of political priorities do you see the solving of issues or the uniting of the country as important to the American political class.

And this is not only the Democrats' fault and it is not only the Republicans' fault. It is the fault of all politicians and the American voters who allow both parties to separate and divide us against ourselves while they continue their failing performance relative to the problems facing the nation today.

The time has come to move beyond this petty and ineffective leadership we have endured for the past twenty years. We need to enact the fifty steps, as outlined in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" as soon as possible. These steps include downsizing government functions to be smaller in number, smaller in size, and more effective in serving. These steps include campaign finance reform to take the overpowering allure and temptation of money out of the election process. These steps include political accountability (including term limits) so that politicians actually behave ethically and morally, and become focused on problem solving and not solely their re-election. These steps include national, independent efforts to fix our schools, our drug problem, our energy problem, and our health care problem, independent in the sense that politicians and lobbyists are excluding from the problem solving process.

Otherwise, twenty years from now, our kids will still be undereducated, our national debt will be insurmountable, government functions will be more dysfunctional, politicians will be more entrenched, more corrupt, and less likely than even now to solve important issues, and the freedoms and liberties we should be enjoying, as guaranteed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights will be just distant memories.

A recent article in Newsweek magazine rated the top countries in the world in which to live. Twenty years ago, the United States would have been the hands down winner. Our economy was strong, the communist threat was ending, we were probably the freest nation in the world. We were the economic, cultural, military, moral, and athletic powerhouse of the world. Today, according to the Newsweek article, we rank 11th out of the best places to live in the world. While other nations have probably accounted for a lot of the improvement, at our expense, on this list, I would also reprimand our political class for not improving our country and our lives as quickly as the rest of the world. From first to 11th in twenty years. Imagine where we will rank in another twenty years if we allow this generation of politicians to propagate further.


Our new 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.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:

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

Is The Federal Reserve System Nohting But A Wild Guess?

Sorry about that last post, hit the send button prematurely. I was intrigued by an article written by Al Lewis that appeared in the Wall Street Journal insert to last Sunday's Tampa Tribune. He was talking about the Federal Reserve Board and System and had some interesting observations.

But before we see what Mr. Lewis was talking about, I decided to do some back ground on the Federal Reserve Board. From various online sources I came up with the following information:

• The Federal Reserve System was formed by an act of Congress, the Federal Reserve Act, in 1913 after a serious of severe bank panics.
• The Board appears to have four major functions:

1. Conduct the nation's monetary policy.
2. Supervise and regulate banking institutions.
3. Maintain stability of the financial system.
4. Provide financial services to depository institutions, the U.S. Government and others.

• Monetary policy usually involves manging the supply of money through interest rate manipulation to achieve a set of economic goals, which usually include low unemployment and stable prices.

Given these functions and background information, how well has the Federal Reserve System performed:

• Given that it was formed in 1913, it apparently did not perform very well in the 1930s, the time of the Great Depression, or the past few years, the time of the Great Recession.
• It does not appear that it has historically done a great job at regulating and supervising banking institutions since the high number of bank failures and banking instruments were the prime causes of both the Great Depression and Great Recession.
• It obviously did not do a good job at maintaining the stability of the financial system since it belatedly forced Congress to quickly pass the poorly written, poorly implemented and very expensive TARP legislation because the Federal Reserve did not foresee the gathering storm clouds leading up to the Great Recession.
• Regarding monetary policy, while prices have been relatively stable in the U.S., unemployment continues to be very high, earning the Fed a failing grade in this area of its responsibility. The scary aspect of their monetary policy management is the fear from both sides of the economic spectrum, those that say inflation will explode at some point in time and those that say we are facing a deflationary period. In either case, the Fed could be very close to missing on their stable prices responsibility.

Thus, I always felt that the Federal Reserve Board and System performed just as poorly as every other government entity when it came to the latest recession (FDIC, HUD, Fannie Mae, Freddie MAC, the Treasury Department, House of representatives banking and housing committees, Senate banking and housing committees, SEC, etc.). When you look at what we have been through over the past two years and compare it to the charter responsbilities of the Federal Reserve Board, you see that they have indeed been less than stellar in managing the economy.

But Mr. Lewis' column this past Sunday puts it all in perspective. He reviewed the following timeline in the Federal Reserve's position on our economic condition:

• In January, the Fed said that"economic activity has continued to strenghten and... the deterioration in the labor market is abating."
• In March, the Fed said that"activity has continued to strenghten ... and the labor market is beginning to improve."
• In April, "the labor market is beginning to improve."
• In June, "economic recovery is proceeding and...the labor market is improving gradually."
• But in August, "the pace of recovery in output and employment has slowed in recent months."

What does this all mean? Let Ben Bernanke, the Fed Chairman explain to us, according to Mr. Lewis: "My best guess is we will have a continued recovery but it will not feel terrific." The key words in the Chairman's statement is "my best guess." Given that the economy has continued to get worse since the fourth quarter of 2009 and the unemployment rate is just as bad now as it was in January, nothing has strenghtened, nothing has improved, nothing has abated, nothing. And now, the leading economist and bank regulator in the country has been reduced to giving his best guess as forecasts. We are not paying high taxes for guesses, we need foresight. I can get someone to guess for far less money that what we are paying the Fed.

Just another government entity that has not done its job. Whether it was the SEC staffers that were surfing the Internet for porn during the lead up to the Great Recession, the Interior Department employees that did not do their required due diligence in supervising oil drilling rigs in the Gulf, Federal consumer safety organizations that missed the Toyota and lead laced toys problems, etc., we pay high taxes for low performance across the board when it comes to the Federal government.

That is why Step 1 and Step 34 from "Love my Country, Loathe My Government" are so important. Step 1 would start downsizing government by reducing its size and reexamining the entire government structure to find ways to make it more effective, including the semi-independent Federal Reserve Board. Step 34 would remove those politicians that sit on Congressional committees from their post if those committees allow lax or sub par performance from government functions to continue. We can all do better than guessing when it comes to the business of the nation.

Our new 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.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:

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

Overhauling The Country's Financial Regulatory System - Another Failed Political Class Reform Effort

We have briefly commented in a recent post of how the recently passed Federal law that supposedly overhauled the nation's financial regulatory system was another failed effort of the political class. We cited two major, major shortcomings of the legislation. First, the bill does not address the two major failed Federal housing and mortgage agencies that were at the center of the housing and banking collapse, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Some experts estimate that these two agencies could cost the American taxpayer upwards of a TRILLION dollars in bailouts over the next ten years, certainly a major financial regulatory problem that this bill does not even address.

Second, the law does not do anything to regulate the consumer leasing area that concerns automobile leasing. Since both of these areas have a major impact on the majority of Americans' lives, mortgages and car loans, not including these aspects of the financial industry in the legislation dooms from being effective from the beginning.

But enough of my opinion, what do others across the nation think about the bill. An article in the July 30, 2010 issue of The Week magazine did just that, gathering opinions from experts across the country:

• The Detroit News called the bill a "shell bill," implying it had very little substance and left the details up to government bureaucrats. The paper felt that the red tape that will be imposed on smaller financial institutions will force them to go out of business or merge with existing, larger financial institutions. Thus, the bill will do just the opposite of what it was supposed to do, i.e. the "too-big-to-fail" financial institutions will become even larger.
• The Wall Street Journal said the red tape will be endless and there is no limit on how far the bureaucrats rule making will go.
• The San Jose Mercury News felt that the bill was a good start but it's success will require regulators who are "savvy enough to use the bill's powers to head off an unanticipated threat to the economy." Given that these same regulators did not see the biggest economic shock coming since the Great Depression until it happened and that a large number of SEC employees were found to be using work time and government computers to do massive Internet searches for pornography during this time frame, this is not a reassuring conclusion.
• Terry Savage writing in the Chicago Sun Times reached a similar conclusion: "The SEC was created to protect investors from scam artists like, say, Bernie Madoff. Oops. The FDIC was created to stop banks from feeding a speculative mortgage frenzy. Never mind. If all those agencies and regulations could not keep this massive bubble from building then bursting, will the new regulations do it?"
• Ezra Klein did see some good in the bill, writing for the Washington Post, but felt that this reform bill really doe not fix "the weaknesses and imbalances that led so many consumers to borrow beyond their means. The bill is medicine, it doesn't dramatically change the conditions that made you sick in the first place."
• The Philadelphia Inquirer was the only source that showed unbridled support for the legislation, seeing that it created a much needed "framework for tougher monitoring and regulation of a system that spun out of control" and that regulators now have the power "to dismantle failing institutions before the harm spreads through the financial system."

Apparently, the Inquirer still has this quaint notion that the political class can administer the government and the regulations that it operates. This was a faulty assumption in the past where regulators were caught totally unaware of the coming economic collapse and the scams of Madoff and others. What makes the Inquirer think that the SEC personnel will get off the porn sites long enough to use this new legislation to cure the problems before they start, problems that may infect the now much larger financial institutions that are too-big-to-fail that requires a government bailout and we end up right where we started?

Remember, the bill was spearheaded by Senator Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, the very people who headed up the key Senate and House of Representatives finance and banking committees responsible for making sure that things like the economic collapse did not happen in the first place. This is like taking the captain and helmsman off of the Titanic and putting them in charge of the next cruise that goes along the same route. They screwed up the first time, do we really think they understand how to fix the problem they never saw coming until it overwhelmed them back in 2008? If the principles from "Love My country, Loathe My Government" were in place, Step 34 would have removed both Dodd and Frank and their other committee peers from their post and replaced them with others, hopefully people who actually understood the financial market.

So let's review. The new law relies on the same regulators to write and enforce the bill's rules but these are the same people that missed the economic collapse the last time around. The new law's red tape requirements will overwhelm smaller financial companies, resulting in the big financial institutions getting even bigger and more dangerous to the health of the economy if one of them should fail. The people that actually wrote this bill proved they did not understand the financial markets prior to the Great Recession became a reality, why would we think they got so smart all of as sudden?

This is why the November elections and Step 39, term limits, are so important. We need to get smarter people involved in solving this problem. People who actually understand the root causes of our financial malaise and are able and courageous enough to make the hard decisions, both in writing a good law and making sure that the Federal bureaucracy actually fairly enforces the good law. Keeping the current buffoons in office results in "shell bills" that do not solve anything and may actually make the situation worse, e.g. the big get bigger and the red tape wastes time and resources of American businesses.

Remember, the Sarbanne-Oxley bill did the same thing. It required an outrageous amount of data to be created by American businesses that was never examined by the regulators and failed to identify companies with faulty financials leading up to the lastest economic recession, including the ones that failed quickly or needed to be bailed out in 2008 (AIG, Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, etc.). While "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" calls for the repeal of this useless bill (Step 48), if the book was being written today it will also call for the repeal of this financial industry reform bill. It will not work and it will just waste American business resources.

Our new 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.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:

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

Exposing The Myth: "I'm from the government and I am here to help you."

I am assuming that at some point in our nation's past, this was a true statement. That was when government was much smaller and more focused on a limited set of functions. So limited, in fact, that it was actually good at getting problems solved. However, given the behavior of today's government functions, personnel, and the American political class these past few years, it is probably true that this statement is not longer a fact, it is just a myth. Consider the following myth busting behaviors:

1. The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) is responsible for overseeing the integrity of the accounting processes and accuracy of public companies financials. They were obviously asleep at the wheel when many of Wall Street's largest financial firms either went bankrupt or dove into deep financial stress at the onset of the greatest financial collapse in this country since the Great Depression. How did this economic and financial fiasco occur with almost no advance warning by the SEC? A possible answer was published in an April 23, 2010 Associated Press article which reported on the findings of an SEC Inspector General analysis. The analysis found that more than two and half dozen SEC employees were found to have used their government issued computers to search the Internet for pornography during the time they should have been hard at work protecting the interest of Americans who invest in public companies. As examples of their findings, one SEC attorney spent up to eight hours a day downloading pornography, burning his findings to CDs and DVD discs once his hard drive filled up with the pornographic material. An SEC accountant was blocked over 16,000 times in one month (or about 800 times a day, 10 times an hour) from visiting pornographic websites yet he was able to eventually collect a collection of pornographic material on his government computer by using a method to bypass the SEC filters. Seventeen of the pornography seekers at the SEC were considered "senior level" employees, earning salaries up to $222,000 a year. These government employees were obviously too busy to help protect the interests of the American investors, people who lost untold billions of dollars as a result of the financial crisis that the SEC staff never saw coming.
2. In January of this year, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a report that concluded the $150 billion that the Federal government had spent on the Head Start program since 1965 has no long lasting benefits to the children that had been enrolled in the program. Another analysis, this one conducted by the Heritage Foundation found similar results: "Head Start has little to no effect on cognitive, socio-emotional, health, and parenting outcomes of children participating in the program." Thus, rather than delivering the benefits that Head Start is supposed to deliver, we are left with an annual multi billion set of early education government programs that are little more than a government subsidized baby sitting service.
3. In the April 26, 2010 issue of Newweek magazine, an article by Dan Stockman exposed the fact that the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) is not doing a lot of protecting, at least relative to the Clean Air Act. According to research done by Mr. Stockman, his analysis of the EPA's public database of enforcement records showed that on a national basis, more than 750 companies have been in continuous violation of clean air laws since 2007. Included in these 750 companies were over two hundred companies defined as high priority because of the severity of their offenses. What good is having a law and identifying offenders if there are no consequences or changes in behavior? Not very helpful.
4. In the April 9, 2010 issue of The Week magazine, there was a short article about how shoddy the work at the Energy Department is relative to classifying products as deserving of a high energy saving appliance rating within the EnergyStar program. A company who gets an EnergyStar rating can market the energy efficiency of their product, as approved by the government, and theoretically sell more products and/or sell them at a higher price. Consumers would look for the EnergyStar designation with the false assumption being that these are good deals from a cost of energy perspective. One problem though. The article reported on a sting operation by Federal regulators that sent bogus designs to the people running the EnergyStar testing program. These bogus products included a gasoline powered alarm clock (certainly not a very efficient way to tell time) and a feather duster attached to a space heater that had been called an "air filter" by the regulators. Unfortunately, both of these bogus products and most of the others were awarded the EnergyStar status by the Energy Department. Obviously, the Energy Department is not here to help you distinguish energy efficient products from those that are not if these somewhat outrageous fake products can pass muster with the inspection process.
5. Most people probably know that Toyota has been having a spate of safety problems with it's cars over the past few months, with accusations that these safety problems have resulted in traffic fatalities. What most people do not know, as reported in the March 1, 2010 issue of Businessweek, the government had opened, and shortly thereafter closed, eight inquiries into the problem with Toyota products, starting back in 2003. In all eight cases they found no significant problems and closed all probes with no action taken. It was not until the past year or so that the government finally recognized that maybe there is a problem and Toyota was finally forced to take remedial action on its vehicles. The article points out the fact that the two government interface executives at Toyota used to work for the very government agency responsible for automobile safety, implying that the government might have gone easy on their former co-workers. Given that upwards of a hundred Americans may have died as a result of faulty Toyota products, it does not look like the government is helping anyone here either.
6. Several years ago the government belatedly pulled a series of imported toy products from China off of the shelf because the products were made using lead based materials that could seriously hurt a child if the the child put a toy in their mouths and the lead entered their systems. While the good news is the government safety organization finally got the products off of the shelves, it would have been much better if they had never entered the country in the first place, Even worse, according to a May 20, 2010 Associated Press article, the overseas producers simply replaced their lead laced products with cadmium laced products which are just as dangerous. One would have thought the government would have been a little more alert to these types of products since they had just gone through the lead based experience. Alas, they were no better the second time around as the cadmium products came ashore.
7. A May 17, 2010 Associated Press article reported on the many oversights and incompetence that Federal employees of the Minerals Management Service (MMS) Federal agency, the agency responsible for overseeing the safety of oil rigs in the Gulf Of Mexico. According to the article and an internal report, not as many inspections were done as required, many MMS employees received hunting and fishing vacations along with other gifts from the same companies they were supposed to keep in line from a safety perspective, some MMS employees were inspecting oil rigs of companies at the same time they were in negotiations for employment by those companies, and some MMS employees admitted being addicted to illegal drugs while being responsible for safety inspections and compliance. These Federal employees were obviously little help in preventing the devastating Gulf oil spill.
8. The Department Of Homeland Security has certainly not been helpful. This past December, a would be terrorist traveled from Somalia to the skies over Detroit and would have blown up the airliner he was in if his underwear bomb had not malfunctioned. In the spring, another would be terrorist almost blew up a car bomb on the streets of Time Square which failed to explode only because of a defective bomb. Unknown numbers of illegal aliens and drugs continue to flood over our southern border with Mexico. Are we feeling secure yet?
9. In a related non-helpful effort, an article in the June 11, 2010 issue of The Week magazine recalled a resolution from the House of Representatives in 1986. At that time, the House demanded that the Pentagon seal our borders within 45 days against illegal drugs. Looks like they missed that deadline.
10. The No Children Left Behind legislation from the Bush administration has proven to be unsuccessful in raising the lower than expected learning levels of American children relative to the education of children in many other countries. Thus, nothing has changed since the Reagan administration issued its scathing report on American public schools in 1982, "A Nation At Risk." Thus, the American political class and its government processes have been unhelpful in at least twenty eight years in raising education standards and output of the country.
11. Finally, the biggest non-help in the past sixty years was obviously related to the financial crash and economic downturn of the past few years. Numerous government agencies were absolutely no help in foreseeing and managing the housing and banking crisis that caused the so-called "Great Depression." These Federal government entities include Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, SEC, Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, House of Representatives housing and banking committees, Senate housing and banking committees, the FDIC, the Bush administration, the Obama administration, and any number of other unhelpful government organizations.

Did we leave anyone out? We need to get over the myth that government is somehow an efficient and effective ally in our lives. The above examples should be proof of that. Many Americans still think that once a law is passed or a program established that the battle is over and everything will be great: government workers and agencies taking care of things in a super efficient manner at a reasonable cost. Given the above list of incompetencies and the record, sky high national debt levels we have, we are getting the worst of all possible combinations - high cost, low quality.

That is why Step 1 of "Love my Country, Loathe My Government" is so important. Step 1 would start a five year systematic downsizing of government in order to reduce our national debt and get government smaller and more focused on just the important, major issues of our times. The logic is if the political class and government agencies have less to worry about, they may actually get good at a few things. It makes no sense to continue to support a government bureaucracy when all we get is the low performance or non-performance described above. Drastically downsize and focus, that is what must be done to get us out of the high cost/low quality zone into the low cost/high quality zone. Then, and only then, might the myth "I'm from the government and I am here to help you" might actually become a reality again.

Our new 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.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/

The Blame Game - Part 1

Let's look at the blame game that the political class loves to play on the taxpayers. The blame game involves blaming the other political party's members for the woes of the country, absolving themselves of getting anything done. We decide what "team" we want to be on in the blame game, feel good about ourselves that our team was not responsible, and nothing ever gets done since the politicians spend so much time trying to blame others or duck responsibility for their own incompetence:

1) The latest instance of the blame game comes from Howard Dean who somehow always gets press coverage despite losing his bid to run for President and currently holding no elected political office. He recently stated that the free market and capitalism was the cause of the recent economic meltdown and that regulations were needed to avoid future problems. His specific quote was "I think we had quite enough of capitalism." Blaming capitalism may get him points with his left leaning friends but this blame game does not stand up to any logic:

Consider a few Washington agencies: FDIC, SEC, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, HUD, House of Representatives committees on housing and banking, Senate committees on housing and banking, Treasury department, Federal Reserve Board and lord knows how many other Federal and state regulatory and oversight political entities exist. Given all of this oversight, no one in the political class had the smarts or the guts to stand up and say we had a banking and housing problem brewing. Howard Dean is wrong, capitalism did not fail and is to blamed, the political class and its associated government bureaucrats failed to see the biggest economic tsunami coming until it hit them in the face, they are to be blamed. We paid dearly for this extensive government oversight as taxpayers and got nothing in return except a deep recession. How Dean can blame the free markets when the markets were not free and were oversaw by everyone, show either a pandering to the left and its socialistic tendencies or just plan stupidity.

2) The market did exactly it was supposed to do so you can not blame capitalism. Over leveraged banks and overpriced real estate is not the blame, it was simply reality. It is a reality that many banking executives ignored. In a new book, "A Colossal Failure Of Common Sense", Lawrence McDonald, a former vice president at Lehman Brothers presents an insider's view to the crisis. According to McDonald, as early as 2005, some experts at Lehman's were sounding the warning about a coming crisis. These experts even correctly identified the companies that were likely to get pummeled when the market correction came. Despite their expertise, they were ignored and some were even fired for speaking up. If this was happening at Lehman, it was also probably occurring throughout the banking industry. Thus, these high paid executive are to be blamed for the horrible wreckage that occurred to their companies, some of which, including Lehman's, went out of business despite being told what was likely to happen. In this version of the blame game, these same idiots that ignored the warning signs, are rewarded with multi-trillion dollars worth of bailout money. Sometimes the blame game is not logical: everyone is pretty aligned with the fact that the bankers and such brought this on themselves and the country, i.e. they are to blame, but many of them are still in the same positions and enjoying their taxpayer fueled bailout.

3) The Democrats love to avoid responsibility for the economic downturn by blaming Bush. Now, I am not defending Bush. The origins of the crisis festered and grew during his time in office. However, let's remember that the Democrats controlled Congress for the two years before the crisis erupted and did nothing to address the pending disaster. The Democrats ran all of the relevant banking and housing committees in Congress and NONE of them saw the problem coming until it exploded in their face. The chairperson of the Senate Banking Committee, Chris Dodd (seems we heard his name in less than flattering circumstances in a previous blog) was the biggest recipient of campaign donations from Freddie Mac. A little conflict of interest here possibly? The very housing entity that he was supposed to oversee was paying him more than $100,000 for his re-election campaign. Despicable. By the way, Obama was the second biggest recipient of campaign funds from a Federal agency that he should have also been overseeing as a Senator.

Do not get caught up in the blame game. In "Love My Country, Loathe My Government". several steps would address all of these blame issues including term limits, campaign finance reform, and a severe streamlining of government since having a lot of government (see the list of failures in point one above) do0es not seem to work. By limiting the government and the political class to a much smaller set of duties and responsibilities, maybe they can get something right for once and avoid a future economic crisis.

Tomorrow: The Blame Game Part 2 - Who Knew What and When Did They Know It?