The incompetence and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars and government programs, be it Covid, voting, or over staffing continue to waste taxpayer dollars while never resolving any major issue facing the country. We call it political class insanity so here is today's dose of recent insanity:
1)We have often discussed the reality that the Biden administration illegally and morally weaponized the Federal government to go after their enemies and those with a different position on issues of the time. They went after Trump, they illegally spied on dozens of Republicans in Congress, they tracked hundreds of thousands of Americans who bought MAGA hats, they sent FBI agents and sometimes FBI SWAT teams to the homes of anti-abotion advocates who did nothing illegal, they forced banks to not do business with conservative and Republican organizations and businesses, etc.
And unfortunately, they took one of the few Federal government agencies that had a reputation for integrity and turned it into a political weapon, the FBI. And the ramifications of that abuse of power were recently in the news again:
Two former FBI high ranking officials were recently arrested on charges of lying to Congress while under oath.
Nikki Cole Floirs was a deputy assistant director in the FBI in charge of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force.
Bradley Benavides was section chief of that task force.
Their alleged lies to Congress revolved around the Hunter Biden investigations.
Both testified in front of Congress that themselves and the task force were not involved in the Hunter Biden situation.
But according to FBI Director, Kash Patel: “Documentary evidence, contemporaneous communications, and witness accounts contradict their testimony.”
Recent declassified government documents allegedly show that the task force and the former agents had worked hard to protect Hunter Biden from the allegations involving corruption in Ukraine.
Those documents also allegedly show Floria bragging about how she was “running a shadow government” inside the FBI.
“Running a shadow government,” chilling words to be said by a high ranking law enforcement officer that had sworn to uphold the laws and Constitution of the country. And the integrity of the FBI, and the government in general, takes another hit as far as being unbiased and free from political hanky panky.
2)The Federal Department of Education has been around since the Carter administration in 1980, over 45 years ago. Since the current 2026 budget for the Department is $79 billion, it is probably a safe bet that the American taxpayer has paid over a trillion dollars into the Department over the past four and a half decades.
Unfortunately, even with spending a trillion dollars, the education of our kids has gotten worse over time:
In testing the education achievement levels of kids across different countries, there are usually about two dozen or so countries that educate their kids better than we educate ours and they usually do it at a lower cost.
We have previously discussed the reality at a Baltimore inner city high school where 70% of the graduating seniors were reading at a third grade level or below.
We have also previously discussed the reality that in Chicago there were dozens of schools that did not have a single kid that was proficient at grade level testing for math and reading.
And recent reports out of California confirm that the situation, despite a trillion dollars, is not getting any better:
Across the entire University of California university system almost 20% of freshment students enrolled in introductory math classes failed to pass those classes.
This is double the failure rate from just five years ago.
This is obviously a black eye to the high school and elementary education attainment of these failing freshmen.
One of the state universities, UC Merced, had a whopping 36.4% of their freshmen failing to pass introductory math classes.
This failure rate was more than double the failure rate from five years ago.
UC Riverside saw its failure rate jump 150% over the five years, going from about 8% to about 20%.
Joel Hass, a math professor at UC Davis had these insights: “There is a wider range of interest and preparedness. We still have a good number of highly qualified students, but also many who are unprepared for college. The preparedness gap between these groups is large.”
But this should not surprise us since California grammar and high school students are not doing well with only 49.3% meeting or beating English arts standard testing and only 38.4% being proficient in math in standard testing.
And yet, the state taxpayers via the state government spent $134 billion on K-12 education in 2025-2026 or about a whopping $26,450 per student, certainly not a good investment.
Given that California state universities do not use SAT or ACT scores when considering admission, it should not be surprising that kids getting into these colleges are not ready for college level learning since their poor SAT and ACT scores would have shown that reality.
Einstein once said that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Spending billions and billions of dollars every year and expecting different education results without changing the approach to education is a prime example of Einstein’s observation.
3)Biden’s Presidency was marked with numerous failures that we will not go into today. Previous posts examined the failed economic, Constitutional, military, immigration, and diplomatic failures. One of his most prominent failures was the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan where his evacuation plan resulted in the unnecessary death and wounding of dozens of American service people.
A recent book by Azadeh Moavani, which was excerpted in a recent Vanity Fair article, shows how panicky Jill Biden's staff was because of her husband's botched Afghanistan withdrawal:
As the withdrawal disaster proceeded, there was an emergency call where Jill Biden’s staff scrambled to protect the First Lady’s exposure to the disaster.
The call included discussions about suspending Jill Biden’s “Joining Forces” initiative for military families so that she would not face tough questions or anger from military families.
They also discussed curtailing her public activity for the same reason.
According to the article: “They had a huge fear of doing anything at bases, they were just petrified. Even though this was when military communities needed support.”
While she did visit one military base during this timeframe, her staff forbade the press from accompanying her, probably to make sure there would not be negative press.
Another and unexpected proof that Biden really put together a fatally flawed and fatal plan to withdraw from Afghanistan.
4)We have previously discussed the ridiculously stupid plan out in California that would impose a 5% “wealth tax” on billionaires living in the state. The plan is on the ballot for next month’s elections. As a result of just the thought of such a tax, many billionaires and other wealthy California people have fled the state to avoid the potential tax on wealth, not income.
This out migration will reduce the expected take from a wealth tax if it is passed since a lot of the billionaires that were assumed to be liable to the tax have left the state already to avoid it. Also, not only will the wealth tax not deliver what has been promised but other tax revenue streams will also suffer.
Billionaires who left the state because of the wealth tax idea will no longer be paying state income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, etc. so that the entire state government tax stream has already taken a hit. Thus, the wealth tax may not happen but the threat of it has had major negative effects on tax revenue.
An unforeseen negative impact of such a tax has recently arisen as it concerns Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of Meta/Facebook:
Zuckerberg lives and works in California and is a billionaire many times over.
If the wealth tax becomes reality, there are estimates that he would have to pay over $12 billion.
As a result, he has publicly stated that he may move his residence out of the state to avoid the tax.
But high ranking Meta executives and the board of directors want to keep him in the state and close to the Meta operations.
So they have come up with a plan to shield his personal wealth and keep him in the state because they feel that having Zuckerberg close to the Meta operations in California is “critically important” to the company's future success.
Thus, the board has approved a new class of nonvoting stock shares that they would create and give to Zuckerberg who could then sell to cover his personal wealth tax amount.
As a result, Zuckerberg has committed to staying in the state for eight more years since his wealth tax liability is now covered by the gift of nonvoting shares that he can now sell to cover the tax liability.
However, while Zuckerberg suffers no financial downside, millions of Americans that own Meta shares will take a financial hit. It is a simple matter of basic economics: with the creation of news shares, current shares are less valuable since the value of the company did not increase, but the value is now spread out over more shares in the market when Zuckerberg sells his nonvoting shares.
A simple matter of supply and demand: increase the supply (stock shares) and the demand, and the resulting price, goes down. Thus, an unintended bad consequence of the ridiculous wealth tax idea is that average Americans will see a decrease in their wealth via Meta share ownership while Zuckerberg pays nothing in additional taxes.
A stupid idea gets even more stupid. But kudos to Zuckerberg on avoiding the wealth tax impact on his financials.
Enough insanity for today: more negative wealth tax fallout, more proof that Biden blew the Afghanistan withdrawal, more failing education results in the country and more FBI corruption and loss of integrity.
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If you agree that we need to deseat every member of Congress for their lack of success and accomplishment, then please consider going to the following petition link to help the cause:
https://www.change.org/p/deseat-congress-reset-freedom
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