December, 2012, Political Class Insanity, Part 4: Making The Poor Rich, Mad As Hell, Rich People In Congress, Part Time Politicians

I had thought we would be done with the latest monthly political class sanity yesterday after the past three days of reviewing the latest antics, shenanigans, and idiocy from our politicians. However, in the short timeframe of three days, enough craziness has come out of Washington that we actually will set the record this month for the most blog posts related to political class insanity: four.

Hopefully, the following insanity will be the end of this month’s craziness and we can postpone the next wave of idiocy until after the Christmas holidays:

1) The fiscal cliff. 23 million Americans unemployed or under employed. National debt above $16.3 TRILLION. A never ending, no win war in Afghanistan. Personal freedom being stripped away by the Patriot Act, NDAA, surveillance drones overhead, FISA, etc. A never ending, no win “war on drugs.”

Boy, times are tough. The nation is facing some very dire and traumatic issues that effect every American. Thank goodness our politicians are working hard to resolve these issues.

Or maybe not. John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives recently announced that the House will be in session in 2013 on only 13 Fridays. This is actually a 30% reduction in the number of Fridays our House politicians worked in 2011 which was only 21 days. In 2013, Representatives will work only one Friday for nine months out of the year, and two Fridays for the other three months.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) released this not-so-strenuous work schedule last Friday and said part of his goal was to “insure that we never lose touch with the constituents we each represent while completing our work in Washington.”

Now, how many of you actually think our Congressmen and women will actually be spending every one of the other 37 Fridays in 2013 “ensuring they never lose touch with their constituents?” Or “completing their work in Washington? I contend they have not competed any decent work in a few decades.

Please, Mr. Cantor, do not insult our intelligence. You people did not resolve any major issues in 2011 when you worked for 21 Fridays, what makes us think you will do better in 2013 when you work only 15 Fridays?

2) News reports from last month reported on a letter that was obtained by Reuters news service, a letter that was sent from the alternative energy battery company A123 to two U.S. Senators, John Thune and Chuck Grassley. The November 4, 2012 letter from A123 informed the Senators that the company had recently received a check from the Energy Department for $946,830 of taxpayer wealth on October 16, 2012.

This payment was part of another failed Obama administration alternative energy fiasco that resulted in this company, and dozens of others, receiving billions of dollars in taxpayer funding for products and services that were never viable in the marketplace.

Why is the October 16, 2012 date important? Well, it is the exact same day that A123 declared bankruptcy. So on the day that this company decided that it was no longer a viable company and needed to go into court to seek protection from creditors because its business plan never came close to fulfilling its business promises, the Federal government cut it a check for almost a million dollars. Unbelievable incompetence.

3) Roll Call recently competed its annual analysis of who are the richest members of Congress and about how much they are worth. The top two richest members are Texas Republican Congressman Michael McCaul, who tops the list with a whopping $300 plus million net worth and Massachusetts Democratic Senator John Kerry, who comes in second with $198 plus million.

Let’s do some simple math. If memory serves me right, a U.S. Senator makes about $170,000 a year. If we did divide this number by $300 million and $198 million, we see that their annual Senate salaries is about .06% of McCaul’s wealth and about .09% of Kerry’s wealth.

Given the dire financial situation the country is in now, why are these two elected officials, and dozens of other millionaires in Congress, drawing any salary at all? Wouldn’t it be a nice leadership idea and compassionate notion to have these very rich politicians not draw a salary or donate their salaries to reducing our national debt?

But nobility, leadership, and compassion have never been in overabundance in Washington. That is why very rich people in Congress need to have their salaries curtailed, as proposed in Step 41 of “Love my Country, Loathe My Government’ and why term limits cannot happen soon enough, as purposed in Step 39.

4) In all tests of education attainment levels of U.S. kids vs. kids from other countries, we almost always fall behind the education attainment levels of dozens of other countries. In other words, for the most part, the U.S. public education is badly broken.

And it has been badly broken for decades as the Federal government and Washington politicians have wasted trillions of dollars on educating our kids for severely mediocre results. And it does not appear that it will get much better soon, if Michigan is any indication.

A new teacher evaluation system in the state miraculously found that 97% of the state‘s 96,000 teachers were rated effective or highly effective in the 2011-2012 school year. In other words, only 3% of the Michigan teachers were rated “minimally effective” or “ineffective,” the lowest two categories.

Wow, Michigan must have the best educated kids in the world if 97% of the teachers are that good. Not really. If you do a search on the education attainment of Michigan students, one measurement process indicated that Michigan ranks 23rd out of fifty states when it comes to high school graduation rates, 36th out of fifty states when it comes to undergraduate degrees, and 34th out of fifty states when it comes to graduate degrees.

Makes you wonder how a state’s schools can have such mediocre education attainment levels when its teachers are supposedly so great. Obviously, they did not read Step 27 from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government.” Step 27 is a rational, coherent problem solving approach to fix what is broken in our public education arena, a process does not involve bogus teacher evaluation processes.

5) A November 19, 2012 Wall Street Journal article reported on a new electric car that Chrysler will be selling in the near future. This new model will be its very first battery-powered vehicle, the Fiat 500e.

However, much more interesting than the fact that it’s their first electric battery-powered car is the fact that Chrysler expects to lose between $8,000 and $9,000 for each one it sell. Why would they produce a car that’s sure to lose money? Four words: the California state government.

California is one of the largest car markets in the country, accounting for about one in every cars sold in the country California also has a strict zero-emission requirement law which means that unless Chrysler offers at least one model that meets these increasingly stringent emissions standards, California could bar them from selling cars in the state. Given the size of the market, that is something no car maker would want to do.

The problem is that the vast majority of consumers do not want to buy all electric cars for any number of logical reasons:

• They tend to be smaller and thus, do not fit the needs of larger families.
• They tend to be underpowered relative to a gas powered car and no one wants to be pulling out into heavy traffic in an underpowered car.
• They tend to be much more expensive than a comparable gas powered car and usually do not appear to economically justify the higher cost over the life of the car.

Reminds one of an old saying, supposedly attributable to Abe Lincoln: If you called a tail a leg, how many legs would a dog have? Answer: Four, just because you call it a leg does not make it a leg. Just because you force auto makers to make electric cars does not mean people will buy electric cars.

Thus, manufacturers are forced to divert research, design, testing and manufacturing resources into a near useless set of products that no one wants. This sub-optimizes the capabilities and resources of the economy for no good reason, just to satisfy government politicians and bureaucrats that have nothing better to do and whom have no sense of reality and business.

The really scary part is that California politicians are not alone in their ignorance of how the world works. Ten other states, including New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, have followed California’s lead and have enacted similar zero-emission requirements.

Consider the insights of a car industry expert, Kevin Kinnaw, Toyota‘s U.S. manager of regulatory affairs: “California can make us sell a minimum amount of cars, but unfortunately, they can’t make people buy them, or even get our own dealers to order them from us.” Well said, just because you call it a leg does not mean it is a leg.

6) The fiscal cliff. 23 million Americans unemployed or under employed. National debt above $16.3 TRILLION. A never ending, no win war in Afghanistan. Personal freedom being stripped away by the Patriot Act, NDAA, surveillance drones overhead, FISA, etc. A never ending, no win “war on drugs.” Given how poorly we have been served by the recent collection of politicians, you would have thought that we would have voted these inept people out of office the first chance we got.

Well, that thought would be wrong. According to Jeff Jacoby, writing in the Boston Globe and summarized in the November 30, 2012 issue of The Week magazine, over our recent history, more than 90% of the incumbents in Washington have been reelected. It is so sad that people can perform so poorly in their jobs and still retain them as Washington politicians are able to do.

This 90% number is indictment of our political processes and how much they have been perverted to maintain inept people in office rather than producing the best and brightest people to go to Washington to resolve issues. Numerous steps in “Love my Country, Loathe my Government” address the need to retake control of our political processes with the most important one being Step 39 which would impose term limits on all Federal politicians, “one and done.” If we cannot vote them out of office, we should amend the Constitution to force them out.

7) I wanted to touch on one final piece of political class insanity this month but will follow this point with a more detailed discussion in the near future. Congressman Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s VP running mate, Americans classified as “poor,” it comes out to an equivalent of $20,000 per person.

In other words, if you could cut out all of the criminal fraud, waste, and inefficiencies in our governments’ anti-poverty programs, a typical, four person “poor family” would receive a check for $80,000 a year. This $80,000 a year is 60% more than what a typical U.S. household earns a year.

This gives you some indication of how inept and corrupt our political class has become in the management of the anti-poverty effort in this country. We spend so much money every year, now in excess of $1 TRILLION, enough to make a poor family relatively well off and yet more and more Americans enter the “poor” definition every year.

We would never put up with this kind of corruption, waste, and inefficiency from a real estate agent if we were buying a house. Or from a car dealer if we were buying a new car. Or from a supermarket where we shopped for groceries. It baffles me why we put up such insanity, idiocy, and wealth waste from our political class.

There, that should do it for this week. It was painful in so many ways but it is necessary to find our what insanity is now pervading our political processes, our personal wealth, and our personal freedoms. I hope that at some point in time, we will finally stand up and not take it any more, taking the cue from the newscaster portrayed in the following clip, and finally get “mad as hell.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WINDtlPXmmE

Might as well get mad today because if you do not, I will be back next month with more insanity but no problems resolution from the American political class.

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

The First Small Step Back To Living In A Free Country

It was refreshing to come across some good news from Washington for a change, news that is a small step towards reviving the concept of living in a free country in America. It is indeed a small step since it is not the law of the nation yet, but any step in the right direction of liberty is positive news.

The House Of  Representatives recently passed H.R. 359, a piece of legislation that has two components. The first component is the termination the funding program for the Democratic and Republican parties to use taxpayer money to fund a portion of their Presidential conventions every four years. This component is totally consistent with Step 13 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" which requires the Federal government from "funding political conventions with taxpayer dollars. All costs, including security costs, will be the responsibility of each political party.

Political conventions are basically relics from our political history. It was there that the two parties gathered their delegates and voted, often many times, to chose their Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates every four years. However, over time, the parties implemented caucuses and primary elections in each state which were used to divvy up delegate votes for the nomination. Thus, almost always, the convention attendees convene already knowing who their candidates will be. The convention then becomes nothing more than a pep rally for the party's supporters, a public relations bonanza from a press coverage perspective, and a four-five day reason to party, partly at the expense of the taxpayer.

In researching "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," I found several sources that estimated a taxpayer bill of around $100 million for the 2004 Presidential conventions.  According to the Parade magazine article cited in the book, $100 million could hire 2,400 additional teachers for a year, pay for basic health insurance for 25,000 American families, or provide 41 million school lunches for needy children Thus, in the future, if this bill is approved, there may be more teachers, more lunches, more insurance coverage, or a smaller Federal deficit. If the two major political parties still want to party at their conventions, H.R. 359 would make them pay for their party themselves.

The second component of H.R. 359 would terminate the Presidential Election Campaign Fund. This fund provides Federal tax dollars in the form of matching funds to candidates in Presidential political primaries if those candidates agree to certain spending and contribution rules and limits. This fund basically subsidizes the two major political parties and their continuing grip on the reins of government, allowing taxpayers to pay for their needs rather than have the candidates themselves prove their worth and get support on their own merits. As we all know, all but two of all contending candidates for President are eventually successful so that millions and millions of taxpayer dollars are wasted on losing campaigns.

The fund is financed by checkoffs on taxpayer income tax returns and then put into the hands of the political class who fund their own candidates with these funds. The funds rarely, if ever, go to new and secondary parties, the funds are primarily used to cement the duopoly power of the Democrats and the Republicans. However, participation in the program has dropped from 28.7% of income tax returns designating money for the fund in 1980 to only 7.3% of income tax returns designating money in 2009. Thus, even the taxpayers have realized that continuing to subsidize the low performing members of the Democratic and Republican parties is no longer a good idea.

Passage of this component would save taxpayers over half a billion dollars over the next ten years while requiring all candidates to stand on their own merits when it came to raising campaign finance donations. Elimination of this fund would not infringe on anyone's freedom of speech rights since they would still be free to contribute to any candidate they wanted. They would actually be freer since they would control where their funds went, it would not be left up to the political class. This might also help newer, smaller political parties get established to challenge the two existing parties.

So let's see what we would have:

• Less wasteful spending of taxpayer money since if the politicians want to party at a convention, they have to do it all with their own funds, not the funds of the taxpayers.
• Voters would be freer since they would control where their political donations went, it would not be put into a giant slush fund controlled by the existing political class.
• Smaller parties would have less competition for funding since the Presidential fund would be eliminated, leveling the field for fund raising across both established and new political parties.

The vote to move on this legislation was 239 for it and 160 against it. It came out of a very vibrant process that the Republicans introduced last year called You Vote. Every week over the past six or seven months, ordinary American citizens could go to the You Cut page at Majority Leader Eric Cantor's website and vote on one of several wasteful spending programs that the Federal government operates.

When Pelosi and the Democrats controlled the House, these cost cutting initiatives were either voted down or blocked from even coming up for a vote. Now that the Republicans are in charge in the House, we may finally see some sunshine be shone on wasteful government spending. This bill, H.R. 359, is the first You Cut winner to be approved. The process is an excellent way for Americans  to get involved in their government's priorities, an option that was not available under Pelosi's watch.

Reducing government spending increases your freedom by either reducing your taxes today or relieving some of the astronomical national debt the political class has piled up over the years. Getting campaign funding sources out of the hands of the established political machines also saves money but levels the funding competition between new and established candidates/incumbents and new and established political parties, increasing our freedom of choice. Having input to what the government spends our taxpayer dollars on via You Cut increases our freedom to determine how our government behaves, putting them back under our control and not allowing them to control us.

The big question is where will H.R. 350 go from here? Will the Democratic controlled Senate and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid even consider it? Will Obama sign it if it gets through the two houses of Congress? Given its downside of funding political activities of only the two major parties, the upside of increasing our freedom in many different ways, and the severely decreasing popularity of the program, there is no reason to keep this program and its two components alive any more. It's a first, small step back towards freedom. Let's see if Harry Reid in the Senate and President Obama in the White House take the next two steps towards approval and freedom.


Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at 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