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Please note: Nancy Pelosi recently made the outrageous comment that there was no waste to be cut in the Federal govnerment, i.e. EVERY dollar the Washington political class spends is essential to our country. Keep this insanity in mind as we go through this month's polticial class insanity, you will quickly see that she is very much out of touch with the reality of today's wasteful federal government.
This is our fourth post this month that documents and identifies the massive political class insanity and incompetence of our ruling politicians. From idiotic programs and laws to massive fraud and wasteful spending, every month reveals a whole new set of antics that bankrupt the country and its taxpayers while leaving major issues of our times unresolved.
1) Our first piece of insanity today comes from News 11 television in Baltimore. One store in Maryland, that changed its name to “Second Obama Express,” was one of nine convenience/grocery stores in the Baltimore area involved in a massive food stamp fraud operation. The dishonest, store owners illegally scammed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka SNAP) out almost $7 million in cash.
Nine retailers have been arrested for conspiring with customers to redeem food stamps illegally for cash. The customers then got a cash kickback from the transaction. No actual merchandise, food or otherwise, changed hands. The indictment gives a brief overview of how the scheme worked:
The indictments allege that the defendants exchanged EBT benefits for cash, in violation of the food stamp program rules. The indictments allege that the defendants typically paid half the value of the EBT benefits in cash. To avoid detection, the defendants often debited the funds from the card in multiple transactions over a period of hours or days. As a result of unlawful cash transactions, the defendants obtained more than $6,898,000 in EBT deposits for transactions in which the stores did not provide food.
One of the retailers indicted was Abdullah Alijaradi, 51, who was running the scam in two of his stores, one called D&M Deli and Grocery, and the other rejoicing under the euphonious name of “Second Obama Express.” According to the indictment, “From October 2010 through July 2013, Aljaradi allegedly obtained more than $2 million in payments for food sales that never occurred.”
Mr. Alijaradi and his scamming friends each face up to 20 years in jail. Sadly for the taxpayers, though, the money they stole from us is gone forever. Additional sadness since this is merely a drop in the bucket of the overall food assistance program fraid over these [ast few years.
2) This local government piece of insanity is really a lulu. Detroit is broke. Detroit has declared bankruptcy. Detroit does not have enough police to properly respond to 911 calls. Detroit public schools are atrocious. Detroit’s population has plummeted and is still dropping. Detroit does not even have enough money to keep all of its street light lit. Many, many property owners have stopped paying property taxes on the Detroit property they own. But…Detroit is going to build a $140 million, 3.3 mile light rail system in the middle of the city.
Whoa, back up to that last item: building a light rail system when so many other basic functions need to be addressed? Definitely insanity. And even worse, the American taxpayer is chipping in about $25 million to make it a reality.
Although I am not a fan of giving Detroit any aid until they make the hard decisions on how they are going to turn the city around, I would much rather hire more police, improve the schools, buy them some street lights, etc. before throwing $25 million into a useless light rail system, the history of which of similar systems around the country is spotty at best. And those cities actually had people living in their cities and working in their cities. Insane.
3) We have often made the case in this blog that the Federal government has grown so large and so unwieldy that it basically looks like Jabba The Hutt from the Star Wars movies. A large, tyrannical blob of a being that absorbs resources without any societal benefit in return. Well, an early August report from the Washington Examiner proves our Jabba hypothesis again.
The Defense Department has admitted that over the years it continued to do business with some contractors even AFTER those same contractors had previously been found to be doing unethical or illegal activities, wasting billions of taxpayer wealth in the process:
- Although only 30 defense contractors were criminally convicted of fraud over a recent three-year period, 11 of those 30 contractors have been paid a total of $354 million FOLLOWING their convictions,
- This conclusion comes from a 2011 report by the Pentagon's Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.
- The Department debarred, or banned, 164 companies but paid $15 million to a dozen of these same companies afterwards.
- The Department also reached settlements with 120 other companies and THEN paid $46 million for additional work to nine.
- Apparently, misbehavior settlements do not prohibit companies from receiving future Department of Defense work.
Nice work if you can get it. Get a lucrative Defense Department contract and if you screw up, either with illegal or unethical behavior, you can still come back to the taxpayer trough for more anyway.
Despite being in business for a few hundred years, the Defense Department has gotten so large that its different systems and coding and company identification processes do not make it possible for one part of the Department to learn from the mistakes of another part of the Department. As a result, billions and billions of taxpayer dollars have probably been wasted over the years by incompetent or unscrupulous contractors.
And even when they try to fix the situation, their incompetence rises to the surface again. In 2008, Congress approved the creation of a “Panel on Contracting Integrity,” led by the Pentagon's Inspector General and which focused on this type of contractor fraud. That effort came up lame and short, with only the following pathetic “accomplishments” to discuss five years later:
- The panel created a Defense Acquisition University training module of Procurement Fraud Indicators.
- It updated a handbook
- It created a web site to "increase awareness of procurement fraud"
- It hosted a conference
- It created a podcast about fraud
- It published an article.
Nowhere do they acknowledge that the panel actually identified the root causes of the problem, e.g. too many different systems with too many different codings, and how they remedied those root causes. Pathetic.
4) Let’s stay with the Department of Defense for a bit since they are so good at finding different ways to waste taxpayer wealth. According to an Associated Press article from September 28, 2013, a recent audit that was done on the Army revealed that the it had paid out $16 million over a two and one half year period to soldiers who were either AWOL or were actual deserters.
Good work if you can get it. Run away from the Army for no good reason but still get paid. And this audit apparently was only for the Army, it does not include any similar, additional payment errors in the Air Force, Navy, or Marines.
The really sad part of this incompetence, besides the fact that the Army wasted $16 million that could have funded public White House tours for over 16 years, is that the Army was told a similar accounting mistake was done back in a 2006 audit. That audit found at least 68 soldiers, who were officially considered deserters, were wrongly paid a total of $684,000 AFTER they were designated deserters. Apparently, the Army learned nothing from this earlier wasteful spending.
Pathetic, and Nancy Pelosi seems to think that not one dollar should be cut from Federal government spending. Here is almost $17 million that could have been cut from the budget if only Congress and government bureaucrats were doing their jobs.
5) A few pieces of lunacy from the failed war on drugs. According to a National Review article that was summarized in the September 13, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, U.S. prisons hold about 100,000 American citizens who were arrested and convicted for using marijuana on a small scale. Not dealing, not growing, small scale usage.
This costs the American taxpayer about $15 billion a year to lock up people for getting a little high in their life without doing anything to anyone else. $15 billion.
6) A similar article appeared in the Briefing section of The Week magazine on September 20, 2013. According to the article, since mandatory jail sentencing was introduced back in the 1970s, the U.S. jail population has quadrupled in size to 2.4 million citizens. We now hold the dubious honor of jailing a higher percentage of our citizens than every other country in the world including the dictatorships in China and Iran.
The cost of this prison population comes out to $80 billion a year of taxpayer wealth. I am not saying that evil and bad people should not be locked up forever. However, at a cost of $80 billion a year and having the highest incarceration rate in the world, maybe we should force the political class to reconsider some of the laws that it has put on the books at such a high cost, both financially and humanely.
7) Several months ago President Obama okayed the shipment of a about a billion dollars worth of taxpayer wealth in the form of F-16 jet fighters and many, many Abrams tanks to the government of Egypt. Many of us found this expense to be atrocious, why do we need to arm the Egyptian armed forces with a billion dollars worth of goods when there was such an economic mess in this country?
We were told at that time by the political class that we needed to send this billion dollars worth of arms to continue to have “leverage” over present and future Egyptian leaders. What makes that strategy so stupid is the news that appeared in the September 6, 2013 issue of The Week magazine. The current leader of Egypt had recently accepted a $12 billon aid package from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.
Thus, who believes that we will have any leverage in Egypt in crunch time when others have given them twelve times as much in financial support? Another billion dollars wasted for no leverage, no benefit, and not loyalty in return. Are you listening, Nancy Pelosi, another billion dollars wasted.
The waste and ineptness rolls on. More tomorrow and probably another day or so afterwards is required to get it all in.
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
This is our fifth in this month’s series on political class insanity, our monthly view of how idiotic our current set of politicians have become in their operation of American government at all levels. We are well on our way to setting the one month’s record, currently eight, of blog posts needed to cover all of the lunacy they generate in one month.
Yesterday, we examined how the city of Oahu was likely to become one of the next “Detroits” from a municipal bankruptcy perspective, with its politicians running up high expense with no way to pay for them. We learned that a former mayor of New Orleans was recently indicted, having taken advantage to growth his personal wealth as a consequence of Hurricane Katrina rather than focus on helping his city’s suffering citizens. And finally, we learned how a military weapons program refused to die even thought the Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the White House wanted to kill it but corporate lobbying and its money kept it alive.
Well, today prepare for more of the same incompetence, wasted spending, and other lunacy from our current set of politicians.
1) According to the United Liberty website on July 30, 2013, Congressman Justin Amash was able to cross party lines and combine an impressive number of supporters, from both parties in Congress, to support his amendment to keep the NSA from collecting data from innocent Americans. As you probably know, the Obama administration has been using the NSA to collect just about every piece of electronic communications of every American even though the vast majority of us are doing nothing illegal or wrong. This is a gross violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
In spite of the impressive cross party effort, Congressman Amash’s amendment failed when voted on by just a handful of votes. However, once United Liberty’s researchers, via an organization called MapLight, took a closer look at the election campaign donation data from the top defense contractors in the country, those companies that get rich helping the Obama administration execute these government spying plans, they found that House members who voted to continue the controversial NSA spy programs and defeat the Amash amendment, reportedly received $41,635 each on average from defense and intelligence firms, $12.97 million in total form these companies over a 2-year period ending in December 31, 2012.
Not surprisingly the analysis also showed House members who voted in support of the amendment that addresses the NSA’s illegal, immoral, and despicable citizen spying programs received a little over $18,700 on average from the same contractors. Thus, just another example where money talks and citizens have either their taxpayer wealth wasted or their freedom and privacy eroded, all for campaign dollars. Disgusting, and another good reason for term limits, an idea that would make reelection campaign funding irrelevant and unnecessary, freeing up politicians to vote for the good of the country and our liberty and not their own careers.
2) A quote from outspoken Texas Senator Ted Cruz that was documented in the August, 2013 issue of Reason magazine is truly amazing when it comes to politicians not acting within integrity: “We’ve had probably five or six luncheons with a bunch of Republican Senators standing up and looking at Rand [Paul] and me and yelling at the top of their lungs - I mean really upset. And they say: ‘Why did you do this? As a result of what you did, when I go home, my constituents are yelling at me that I have to stand on principle.”
What a novel thought! A politician that stands on principle rather than self serving politics. A politician that tries to do the right thing to help the country rather than the things that are most likely to get them reelected. A politician that stands in integrity rather than one that stands in the shadow of people that financially support his perpetual reelection campaign.
Is it no wonder there is never any progress on problem resolution, that politicians are always caught with their pants down (literally) rather than putting down a major problem. When principled behavior is the exception and not the norm, what we get today in the political class is all that is possible. And that is not much.
I guess nothing has changed since 2009 when Senator Joseph Lieberman, as quoted in the November 9, 2009 issue of the San Francisco Examiner stated: "I may be at a point in my career that I am going to do what is right and what makes sense." Does this mean that for all of the decades he served in the Washington political class he was only doing stuff that did not make any sense or that was not right? Is only at the end of career he starts to act with principle? Disgusting.
3) Speaking of a lack of principles, consider the actions and words of a Hawaiian politician. I am always amused when politicians, the most divisive set of people in the country when it comes to dividing groups of Americans and pitting them against each other, lectures us on how to behave and not be racist, prejudiced, or hateful. And when they have the opportunity to not divide and not be prejudiced, they turn out to be the biggest culprits.
According to a short article in the August, 2013 issue of Reason magazine, Hawaiian state politician Faye Hanohano decreed that when state government workers were hanging pieces of artwork in her office, she did not want any art made by “Haoles, Japs, or Pakes.” These are derogatory words used to describe whites, Japanese, and Chinese. Way to go Ms/ Hanohano, setting the bar for compassion and understanding among different groups of citizens that you serve. Pathetic.
4) We are constantly making our case, quite strongly if I do say so myself, that we are currently be served by the worst and most incompetent set of politicians this country has ever experienced. They waste our wealth, they insult our intelligence with their incompetent and immoral behavior, and they fail to resolve any problem of any magnitude, with their actions usually making existing problems even worse.
Data from an article, also in the August, 2013 issue of Reason magazine, shows how poorly they are managing our economy and our freedom relative to the rest of the world. According to latest Economic Freedom Index, and multivariate measure of how free a country’s economic policies are, the United States index of economic freedom, based on a scale of zero to ten, was 8.65 in 2000, 8.21 in 2005 and has plummeted down to 7.70 in 2010.
Where the United States used to constantly have the third best economic freedom performance in the world, the latest analysis puts our economic freedom at a disappointing 18th in the world. Maybe, just maybe, as the American political class has gone about reducing our freedom, raising our taxes, spending our children’s and grandchildren’s future wealth by running up $17 trillion in national debt, and over regulating the economy, contributing to our 18th place ranking, that is why our unemployment stays so high and over 20 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed.
And this performance and ranking helps reinforce our theory that these politicians currently in office, against any standard or benchmark, are quite possibly the worst our nation has ever endured.
5) The good news that is not really good news. The good news is that America is no longer the fattest country in the world. According to a blurb in the July 19, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, Mexico now has the fattest citizens in the world, with 32.8% of its citizens being classified as obese.
Unfortunately, Americans have not gotten skinny all of a sudden. The same blurb pointed out that an unacceptable 31. 8% of American adults are classified as obese. This is a main driver of our high health care costs in this country since obesity leads to all kinds of unnecessary health care maladies and the associated costs including diabetes and heart disease.
Despite its heavy influence on high health care costs, Obama Care does virtually nothing to attack and minimize this root cause, a piece of insanity we relive and review every month in the coming disaster known as Obama Care.
6) And finally for today, one last little fib from the Obama administration. An article in the May 31, 2013 issue of The Week magazine pointed out again how President Obama had promised in 2008 that his administration would be the most transparent administration ever, according to the article his administration has prosecuted twice as many whistle blowers and secret leakers than ALL other Presidential administrations COMBINED.
I would hate to se how bad it would be if his was not the most transparent administration ever (sarcasm implied).
That does it for today but not for this month’s political class insanity. More to follow at least for a couple of more days as we try to identify all of the lunacy and idiocy flowing out from our politicians. Until then, if you agree with us that we are currently living under the worst set of politicians of all time, please visit our term limits website and join our cause to rid the country of career politicians and replace them with concerned citizens:
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
One of our most popular posts of all times is at the following link:
http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2011/04/marie-antoinette-and-arrogance-of-our.html
It discussed a number of examples where members of the Washington political class were condescending, arrogant, and downright rude to their constituents. It was as if we were reliving the Marie Antoinette era where the ruling class could not care less about the challenges, welfare, and issues facing the ordinary citizens. They were more interested in their own comfort and self enrichment, making them so out of touch that when they were told their citizens had no bread to eat their haughty response was to let them eat cake.
Our political class in D.C. is not much different:
- Their annual salaries of over $170,000 a year put them in the top 3-4% of all earners in this country but they work less than half a year in session or with their constituents.
- Their lavish benefits add about another $100,000 to their annual compensation package.
- House of Representative members get the American taxpayer to lease a car for them while in office (and what they lease for themselves are not small compact cars).
- They have large staffs that look after their every need while they reside in extremely nice offices.
- Their retirement benefits are embarrassingly lavish for embarrassingly little work.
- Congressional rules allow them to participate in private company IPOs as insiders, which usually result in very profitable investments in very short timeframes.
- Up until recently, they were allowed to privately trade stocks in their personal investment portfolios which leveraged insider government information they knew but most of the world did not know.
- They have rigged their pay processes to automatically guarantee them an annual pay raise regardless of how poorly they performed their jobs during the year.
Yes, the political class has made life very good for themselves. However, in the process, they have made life very good for others that they interact with in their duties as a politician. Recent news reports depressingly illustrate how America is turning into the “Hunger Games” scenario.
In the “Hunger Games” books there is a very, very small, elitist set of people in the seat of power, far away from the common folks, both in geography and life style and options. The elitists have manipulated their government so that vast amounts of taxpayer wealth flows to this seat of power to the detriment of the rest of the country. Those in the seat of power enjoy self enrichment, status, pomposity, and gluttony, in its many forms, all on the backs and hard efforts of the rest of the citizens out in the country and hinterlands.
Let’s start with the first research report from Reuters that was summarized on their website on December 18, 2012. The details of their analysis include the following facts and trends, listing in no particular order of insult:
- The top 5% of households in Washington, D.C., had average incomes over $500,000 in 2011, while the bottom 20% earned less than $9,500 - a ratio of 54 to 1.
- This ratio is up from 39 to 1 just twenty years ago and is higher than the ratio in all 50 states and all but two major cities.
- The article observes that not only does the Federal government redistribute wealth to lower income people but it also redistributes wealth up to wealthy people, that mostly involves themselves and those that come to the political class for favors.
- In 2010, the Federal government directed $83.5 billion to contractors, lobbyists and lawyers just in the District of Columbia area, mostly as a result of our bloated defense budget.
- Even when taking inflation into account, this $83.5 billion is an increase of more than 300% since 1989.
- With the exception of the state government budgets in California and Texas, this locally distributed $83.5 billion is larger than each of the other 48 state government budgets.
- Private industry and their lobbyists spent more than $3 billion on lobbying Washington politicians to get their piece of the $83.5 billion.
- This lobbying is nearly double what it was just ten years ago.
- According to the 2010 Census, 10 of the capital's surrounding counties place in the top 20 counties across the country when measuring median household income, this is up from six counties in 1990. We can safely assume that most of this wealth has been generated in some shape or form from the Federal budget process and growth.
- But not everyone in the greater D.C. has been getting wealthier since 1990, just the wealthy are getting wealthier, as we see from the following Reuters graph (double click on the graph for a larger view):
- Direct spending by the Federal government accounts for 40% of the D.C. metro area’s $425 billion-a-year economy.
- About 15% every dollar from the entire Federal procurement budget stays in or around the D.C. area even though the area accounts for only 2% of the national population: "We're seeing an enormous transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the Washington economy," said Steve Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University.
- Since 1990, five of the top 10 major defense contractors have moved their headquarters to the Washington area, where the money is to be lobbied and procured.
- The greater Washington area has produced 385 of the nation's fastest-growing small- and medium-sized companies since 2000, more than any other metropolitan area in the country: "It's the rich getting richer phenomenon," said Dane Stangler, the Kauffman's Foundation director of research. "Because Washington has a concentration of high-growth companies, that attracts higher-skilled people to work there, which will attract more companies."
- While the average household income in the U.S. has fallen below $50,000, in Washington, area workers with incomes above $100,000 rose to 22% of the workforce, up from 14% in 1990.
- In addition, there are 320,000 Federal jobs in the Washington area and within the actual District of Columbia, 55% of those jobs pay $100,000 or more a year.
- How much taxpayer wealth is at stake in the D.C. area can be measured, to a degree, by lobbyist activity: 13,000 lobbyists registered with the Federal government last year and reported $3.3 billion in fees, about $260,000 per lobbyist; that’s 22% more lobbyists and 37% more inflation-adjusted revenue per lobbyist than in 1998.
- The number of lawyers in the greater D.C. metro has jumped 44% since, twice the national rate, to 41,000 since 1999.
- The D.C. area lawyer annual average income, adjusted for inflation, has risen 35% in that timeframe to $156,000.
- The number of organizations with a political presence in D.C, has more than doubled between 1981 and 2006 to nearly 14,000, according to a study by political scientists Kay L. Schlozman, Sidney Verba and Henry E. Brady.
The entire Reuters article, with the associated data sources for the stats listed above can be found at:
http://www.reuters.com/subjects/income-inequality/washington
Lots of depressing statistics, but really one main message: the growth of the Federal government has spawned obscene growth in Washington D.C. economy that is orders of magnitudes more than the growth of the economy in the rest of the country. The political class has set themselves up as auctioneers of our taxpayer wealth to the highest bidders and those that benefit from these oversized, bloated government budgets have migrated to this seat of power in D.C.
Now, this elitist class of people, the Marie Antoinette’s of our time, might be tolerable if they produced resolutions to the major problems facing America. But, alas, they have been too busy eating their own cake.
We have gone decades without resolving any of our major issues: our lost war on drugs, our leaky borders, our lack of an illegal immigration strategy, our escalating health care costs, our failing public schools, our skyrocketing national debt, our lack of a national energy plan and strategy, etc. We have paid a lot of money for little results.
We will continue this “Hunger Games” discussion tomorrow and beyond, much to the chagrin of us outside of the D.C. Beltway of power.
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
