By The Numbers, Part 2: Obama's Numbers Sink Further, Poverty Numbers Rises Despite Trillions of Dollars And More

This is our second post in a three part series themed, “by the numbers.” In this series, we look at the reality of the numbers facing our country, whether they are polling numbers, government statistics, or from other sources. By looking at the numbers, it is easier to determine the reality of our world and the issues that we face rather than using the hatred, prejudices and lies of our political class. Their purpose is not to resolve issues using reality but to ensure their perpetual reelection chances by stoking emotions rather than understanding the numbers. 

So let’s continue our analysis today using the real world’s numbers to determine our real world situation, a situation driven by our politicians’ bad decisions and selfishness.

1) According to reputable sources, we have previously discussed the fact that all levels of government within the country spend about a trillion dollars a year to help the less advantaged in this country, a spending level that has been increasing steadily over the years. At this level of expenditures, you would think that our politicians would have eliminated poverty long ago.

And you would be so wrong, at least according to a recent analysis by the U.S. Census Bureau. According to their analysis, over one in five kids in the U.S. today are living in poverty. In 2012, there were 15,437,000 children under 18 years old, or 21.3%, who were classified in the “below poverty” threshold, according to the Census and a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report entitled, Poverty in the United States: 2012.

When President Johnson declared “war on poverty” back in 1964, the percentage of American kids living in poverty was 22.7%. Fifty years and $22 TRILLION later, the American politician class has only been able to reduce the level of kids living in poverty from that 22.7% to the current 21.3%. And even though the percentage has decreased slightly, I would bet that the absolute number of kids living in poverty is much higher today than in 1964 given that the population of the United States is so much more 50 years later.

Einstein once said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. After 50 years and TRILLIONS of dollars with no substantial improvement in the number of kids in poverty, I would say that our politicians fit that definition quite well. Insane. 

2) Consider what the we spend for national defense in this country, as estimated by the Cato Institute:

• On average, every American spends about $1,900 every year for national defense.
• $1,900 figure is roughly four and a half times more than what the average person in other NATO countries spends on defense even though these countries boast a collective GDP of approximately $19 trillion, 18 percent higher than the United States. 
• South Koreans spend about a third as much on national defense than Americans even though we spend billions of dollars every year protecting that nation from its northern neighbor.
• Americans also outspend people in Japan by more than four to one even though we have troops and military assets posted in that country to help with its defense.
• Thus, despite having a national debt that is fast approaching $18 TRILLION, we continue to pay for the defense of our allies as if the Cold War never ended.
• While the United States spends 16.8% of the budget on the military, Japan spends a measly 2.4%. 
• South Korea’s share of military spending is only 11% of their GDP, and they having a crazed and hostile regime on their northern border. 

As Cato points out very well: “The U.S. Constitution stipulates that the federal government should provide for the “common defence.” But the document never talks about providing for the defense of other nations. We could have revisited our alliances after the end of the Cold war. We could have paid more attention to the culture of dependency we created among our allies. Instead we continued to spend vast sums on the military, discouraging others from developing their capabilities, and removing their will to use their militaries in ways that could have advanced both their and our security. Today, our wealthy allies are little more than wards of Uncle Sam’s unending dole, and they will remain militarily irrelevant so long as we continue along our present path.”

Well said, we are providing military welfare for allies that are more than capable of paying their own way while many in this country suffer for the exporting of wealth to wealthy and underpaying allies around the world.

3) Where do logical people want to live? Most of then tend to migrate to areas within the country where they get to keep more of their hard earned wealth and income. Usually, this means living and working in states where there are lower and fewer taxes, as shown by the following graphic from the website www.howmoneywalks.com:

















The states with the highest income taxes have had a net loss in taxpayer Adjusted Gross Income of $107 billion, and the states with no income tax have had a net gain of $146 billion. In other words, there’s been an exodus from high tax states to those with no taxes. 

Thus, even though the politicians in those red states above thought they could get more state government revenue by having a higher tax burden, on average those states shrunk their tax base by about $12 billion per state in the past 15 years, probably wiping out any benefit of raising taxes on a continually shrinking tax base. Back to Einstein's insanity observation.

4) According to a recent Fox News poll, the country’s citizens do not have a really good feeling about Obama’s performance in office relative to his predecessors:

• A majority of those polled say the Obama administration is less competent than Bill Clinton's administration. 
• And in what has to be an ego deflating finding, a plurality of those polled say it is less competent than George W. Bush’s administration.
• Sixty-eight percent say the Obama administration is less competent that the Clinton administration. 
• Forty-eight percent say it is less competent than Bush's, compared to 42 percent who say it is more competent. 
• Seven percent judge Obama's and Bush's administrations the same.
• Fifty-five percent say that the Obama administration has made the country weaker; 35 percent say his administration has made it stronger.

Now I am sure some of my liberal friends will dismiss the findings out of hand since they saw the word “Fox” associated with the poll. That’s fine but understand that this is not the only poll out there or that we have discussed that shows how poorly Obama’s performance is being perceived. Just yesterday we showed that according to a CNN poll, he receives approval ratings for major issues that never exceed fifty percent on any of those issues, a finding consistent with this Fox polling. 

That will do it for today. But we will need one more day to do our “by the numbers” analysis to show that we are living with the worse and most inept set of politicians in our history, as measured by the numbers. That is our reality, politicians that do the same thing over and over at every increasing spending levels but never resolve any major issue of our time.

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

May, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 5: Tapxayers Pay For A Congressman's Crimes, Making Tanks Nobody Wants,The Illinois Fiscal Cliff and More

This is our fifth post this month in our monthly series nonpolitical class insanity. Every month we spend more and more time trying to keep up with the wasteful spending, idiotic programs and laws, and general ineptness of the American political class. This is a task that seems to get harder and harder to do every month as their incompetence seems to be growing exponentially.

1) There are still over twenty million Americans who are either unemployed or under employed throughout this nation. One reason might be because of what the following graph illustrates, as presented in a recent Independent Journal Review article:



Since 1978, the percentages of businesses being created every year (‘firm entry” rate) has generally been declining while the percentage of businesses being terminated every year (“firm exit” rate) has recently been increasing. These two trends crossed over in 2008 when the rate of business creation fell below the rate of business termination.

One could try and fine tune the data to their own political views and by blame patterns. However, the bottom line is that over the past 36 years, a time period when Democrats and Republicans controlled Congress and the Presidency at different times, no one in the political class was able to reverse the two negative trends illustrated in this graph.

Their economic incompetence as created a death spiral of business the business failure rate increasing and the business creation rate decreasing, getting us into the position where over 20 million Americans can not find a good job for themselves and their families. 

Einstein once said the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Our political class has been doing the same lame economic dance for 36 years, raising existing taxes and creating new business taxes, expecting different results but proving Einstein right after all: pure insanity. 

2) All parts of the Federal government are big wasters of taxpayer wealth but the Pentagon has to be one of the biggest black holes of waste. Recall in past posts that we have discussed the fact that government auditors have thrown up their hands trying to get their arms around the wasteful spending in the Pentagon and actually gave up, contending that Pentagon spending is so out of control that it is not possible to even audit and document the waste.

A recent example of how bad and insane Pentagon spending is concerns the production of the Abrams tank, a tank that is only made in one location in Ohio:

• The Army currently has more than 2,300 in active use around the world to serve its needs.
• Unbelievably, it also has another 3,000 in storage that it does not need or use.
• In the most recent budget agreement in Congress, another $181 m illion was authorized to continue production of more tanks that the Army does not need into the next year or so.
• Even those in the actual Army do not want more unused and unneeded tanks: “If we had our choice, we would use that money in a different way,” Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army’s chief of staff, told the Associated Press in April.
• Even the Pentagon’s assessments estimate that holding off on tank production and refurbishment for just three years would save the taxpayers $3 billion.
• But there are Ohio jobs and political careers at stake along with the financial results of General Dynamics who makes the tanks so the combination of corny capitalism and political cowardice in thousands of tanks being produced but never used.

So rather than restore the reductions in military benefit packages that Congress and the White House recently approved, rather than divert some of this wealth back to the taxpayer wallets or some other worthy cause such as job training, feeding the hungry, treating the addicted, housing the homeless, etc., our political class in Washington would rather just continue making unused and unneeded tanks. Pathetic.

3) Now this is a nice racket if you can get it. Unfortunately, you have to be a card carrying member of the Washington political class so god luck with that. Jess Jackson. Jr. was convicted of a number of financial felonies in connection with and his wife’s misuse and abuse of campaign contributions he was sentenced to two and half years in jail for his crimes. Remember those two words: “convicted” and “crimes.”

Despite having no mental problems for his entire life and his seventeen years in Congress, the former Congressman has suddenly developed a “mood disorder,“ allegedly happening as the Feds started closing in and examining his crimes. As a result of this sudden trauma to his odd, he has somehow been approved to receive a whopping $8,700 MONTHLY payment in Federal government disability pay. Remember those words, convicted and crimes, but still eligible to get $8,700 a month of taxpayer wealth for his mental state.

But it gets better. Despite him being “convicted” for his “crimes,” he is somehow still elibigle for an annual Federal pension of $450,000 a year. Thus, between his monthly $8,700 in disability payments and his annual $45,000 Congressional pension, he will be earning almost $150,000 a year despite having been :convicted for felonious “crimes.“ Again, great work if you can get it.

Thus, for doing nothing in the future, he will earn almost as much as if he was still a Congressman ($150,000 in pension and disability vs. a Congressional salary of about $170,000.) Even worse, at $150,000, he will be making about three times as much as what the median U.S. household earns in a year even though the members of that household have to go to a job everyday to get one third of what this convicted politician will earn. It does not get much more insane that this.

4) But it is not just rich Washington politicians that stick it to working Americans and taxpayers. Consider a recent, in-depth analysis done by the Taxpayer Union of America (TUA) relative to the horrid financial condition of the state government of Illinois:

• Just the pension liabilities for government workers in Illinois is an unreal $187 billion.
• This means that every Illinois household would have to write a check for over $35,000 just to pay for the current liability of the Illinois pension system.
• And that $187 billion is the estimate today, but given that the state political class and state government has not put any true reforms into place, that number is highly likely to grow in the coming years.
• The real insult is when you get underneath the $187 billion number and find 11,054 Illinois state pensioners now get more than $100,000 per year in pension payments, twice what the median U.S. household income level is. 
• By the year 2020, number will more than double to 25,000. 
• There are over 78,526 state pensioners receiving annual pension payments over $50,000. The TUA pointed out in their analysis that these robust pensions are funded by taxpayers who get an average Social Security pension of about $15,000.
• Funding those impossible pension liabilities is even more difficult since Illinois has the second highest unemployment rates at 8.4%, the second highest property taxes in the country, and the lowest rating in the country for its general operating bonds, making it difficult to raise more taxes when taxes are already so high and so many citizens are unemployed and contributing nothing to the tax revenue.
• Getting even further down into the TUA analysis on finds that someone named Tapas das Gupta has annual pension of $452,843, about nine times more than what the typical U.S. household earns in a year. 
• His estimated lifetime pension payout of $5,276,384 makes him a millionaire five times over.
• Edward Abraham has an Illinois state annual pension of $439,965, or $9,073,587 in estimated lifetime payouts according to the TUA. 
• Larry K. Fleming retired from Lincolnshire-Prairie View District 103 at the age of 55 and is now receiving $258,163 per year while only paying in $326,507 into the system during his career. In other words, he recoup his payments into the system in less than 16 months of pensions payouts. Disgraceful.

Again, nice work if you can get it as long as you and your union keep supporting the same crooked politicians in office.

Something has to break at some point. You cannot keep rewarding Washington politicians for non-performance and criminal performance and expect no consequences. 

You cannot keep having exorbitant pension payouts to your union supporters and not expect the entire Illinois financial system to crash at some point in time. 

You cannot keep building Army tanks that never get used and which contribute nothing to society except any ever increasing national debt burden without the Federal government eventually crashing under that burden.

And you cannot keep increasing the tax burden on businesses, both existing and new, and expect them to continue creating jobs and economic vitality as they did in the past.

Our politicians are taking us to the edge of a very steep cliff in so many ways and one day, probably sooner than later, we are all or some going over that steep cliff for a nasty fall. That is why we call it insanity, going over a cliff even though we see it ahead of us in so many ways.

To avoid that cliff, please consider joining our term limits effort at:

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