June, 2017, Part 3, Political Class Insanity: Fraud And Taxpayer Waste In The Education Department, Nancy Pelosi Hypocrisy, and Millions Flee From California

As we do every month, we review the latest idiocy, lunacy, ineptness, and general insanity from the American political class. We are getting started as little late this month since we needed to review the latest global warming.climate change insanity from the likes of Al Gore, culminating in our review of the 26 reasons why it was appropriate and necessary for Trump to pull us out of the Paris Climate Agreement:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/06/june-2017-part-4-i-am-global-warming.html

But let’s quickly get into this month’s political class insanity because over the past month or so there has been a lot of it was Washington implodes into a useless pile of incompetence:

1) It is not only Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that waste and lose hundreds of billions of dollars over the years to criminals. According to Nick Bolger, writing for the Washington Free Beacon on June 2, 2017:

• An executive in the Federal Education Department allegedly received secret bonuses worth $432,000 over the past seven years.
• James Runcie was the chief operating office of the Student Aid office during the Obama administration and he apparently received secret five figure bonuses each year while his department erroneously was giving out billions of dollars in improper payments, according to an Education Department report.
• His department ran the Pell Grant program whose payments went from $562 million in 2015 to $2.21 billion in 2016 and the Federal Direct Loan Program which saw its expenses go from $1.28 billion in 2015 to $3.86 billion in 2016, certainly suspicious and likely bogus increases in just a single year.
• According to Judicial Watch, which uncovered the corruption and incompetence: "These are disbursements that either shouldn't have been made, went to the wrong recipient, were for an incorrect amount, or were not properly documented," and that "under Runcie's leadership there was pervasive fraud and corruption at the FSA."
• While Runcie received $432,885 dollars in bonuses in seven years, none of those payments appear on his official government salary records.
• Runcie suddenly resigned when the Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, told him to testify in front of Congress about the rising rate of improper payments, certainly a suspicious move on his part.

Hopefully Mr. Runcie gets what he deserves if criminal actions happen and someone, somehow plugs the dramatic wasting of taxpayer money in the student loan programs. But again, as we always say, while Runcie may have been caught for criminal and incompetence actions, how many other dozens, hundreds or thousands of Federal government employees are getting away with the same disgraceful performance? Insanity.

2) This blog would not be nearly as much fun to write if it was not for Nancy Pelosi. This is the Congressional leader who once said that we needed to pass the Obama Care bill in order to see what was in it. Yes, let’s blindly vote on legislation and then be surprised when we see what happens after it is enacted. She also ranted that 500 million Americans were applying for unemployment benefits every week, which is a pretty good trick since at the time there were only about 300 million people in the country.

Lately, she has seemed disjointed and confused when speaking publicly. Any number of times, as we recently pointed out, she seems to be in a time warp, continually referring to Donald Trump as George W. Bush, as if Bush was still President. Crazy times.

She recently hit a new low as far as ranting, according to an article by V. Saxena, writing for the Conservative Tribune website on June 10, 2017:

• Apparently, Pelosi is calling for taxpayer funds to be used to launch another investigation into the Trump Presidency.
• The reason: apparently the fact that Trump recently began his recent world trip in Saudi Arabia is enough to justify an investigation.
• Her words: “I just think it was a very strange choice to go there,” the California Democrat said when interviewed on MSNBC, according to The Washington Times. “Especially in light of having served on the committee that investigated 9/11, and knowing the suspicions that exist in our country, and among his people.”
• Her warped reasoning continued:“I thought it was unusual for the president of the United States to go to Saudi Arabia first. Saudi Arabia? It wasn’t even alphabetical. I mean, what, Saudi Arabia?” Yes, every Presidential trip out of the country should be planned alphabetically, is she crazy?

What Ms. Pelosi seems to forget that back in early June, 2009, about the same time of year that Trump visited Saudi Arabia, Barack Obama visited…..yes, Saudi Arabia. She did not seem to have any trouble with that visit so early in Obama’s reign, she did not question why Obama’s trip was not arranged alphabetically. The hypocrisy and insanity of this woman are amazing.

3) An old rock and roll song contains the lyrics, “shout it from the mountain tops, shout it from the trees, people just want to be free.” Free from being forced to do things they do not want to do, free from government overreaching into their lives and their businesses, free from onerous taxes and government regulations, etc. Freedom takes many forms and people want to be free.

Which might explain the trend going on in California recently. Keep in mind that California was very often where many, many Americans aspired to live in and move to. Great weather, great variety of geography, mountains to beaches, etc. But apparently not many people are California Dreaming as much as they used to:

• According to Michael Snyder, writing for the Infowars website on June 12, 2017, over five million California residents have migrated OUT of the state over the past few years.
• The top out of state destination for these Californians is Texas, a state famous for lower taxes and business regulations, much more permissive gun laws that allow citizens to more easily defend themselves and their freedoms, i.e. more freedom.
• Over 25% of new Idaho residents are from California.
• Adrien Koch, a retired Californian, moved to Idaho with her husband because it reminded them of “the California she knew in the 1970s.”

Why the mass migration? Well the article reminds us that:

• California has some of the the highest state income tax rates in the country.
• California has been ranked the worst state for business for 12 straight years.
• Many California cities have the worst traffic in the country.
• California sanctuary cities and that kind of attitude is sucking up taxpayer resources to provide all types of welfare support to illegal immigrants and to fight the gangs and crime that come with illegal immigration.
• Insane and stupid government regulations (e.g. the recent state law that requires farmers to force their cows to fart less methane by 80%) stifle economic growth and new business formations.
• Now some California politicians want to pass through a so called single payer health care system in the state that will cost state taxpayers an estimated $400 billion a year.
• This previous piece of insanity is especially laughable since if the true number is $400 billion a year (and we all know that every government cost estimate has always been way under estimated), than every man, woman, and child in the state would be paying, on average, $10,000 a year in healthcare costs...every year.

As we have always claimed, there cannot be personal freedom if there is not economic freedom. High income taxes, costly business regulations, insane healthcare program actions, etc. all rob state residents of their economic freedom and thus, their personal freedom. And thus, millions of them are leaving, looking for that essential thing called freedom elsewhere since they cannot find it form the political class and the burdensome government in California.

That will do it for today’s insanity: people freedom political oppression in one state to find freedom in other states, Nancy Pelosi’s blatant hypocrisy, and fraud and corruption in yet another Federal government operation. More insanity sure to follow.

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

The Failed Presidency of Barack Obama, Part 6: Missing the Opportunity to Fix Government Functions

Over the past five days we have discussed the various failures of the Obama administration across various components:

1. The many lies and deceptions that he has thrown in our faces over the past six plus years.
2. The abusive and illegal use of private email account across his administration despite his promise to have the most transparent Presidential administration ever.
3. And his abuse of the Constitution, existing laws, and the general concept of the rule of law.

Although these acts that we have documented are despicable, illegals, and un-Constitutional, one might have been able to make the case that some successes have come out of the Obama administration if he had just cleaned up government functions. We are currently paying more taxes to government entities in this country then we have ever paid but the returning government services have been ineffective, inefficient, wasteful, and often counterproductive to problem resolution and freedom itself.

If Obama had streamlined and made government more efficient, than at least some good would have come out of his White House years. But….

• According to independent and government sources, Medicaid still loses $30-40 billion a year to waste and outright criminal fraud, a number that is likely to increase substantially as Obama Care dumps more and more Americans onto a failing and wasteful government program. (Culprit: Health and Human Services)
• According to independent and government sources, Medicare still loses $40-60 billion a year to waste and outright criminal fraud, a number that is likely to grow substantially as more and more Baby Boomers enter the Medicare arena. (Culprit: Health and Human Services)
• Social Security loses at least $100 billion a year across its various components due to waste and outright criminal fraud. The extent of the fraud was recently and uniquely identified by an inspector general report that showed an whopping 6.5 million Americans, who are officially all over the age of 112, are still on the Social Security records, indicating that they are still alive. Obviously, many millions of people are using the Social Security numbers of dead Americans to defraud the American taxpayer. (Culprit: Social Security Administration)
• The Defense Department, which spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year, has an accounting process that is so screwed up that even trained, professional auditors have given up trying to make sense of the spending, spending that most likely involves billions and billions of fraudulent and wasteful spending. (Culprit: Defense Department)
• The IRS readily admits that it fails to collect upwards of $400 billion a year from taxpayers that are evading their tax responsibilities while at the same time using resources to deny First Amendment freedom of speech rights to Americans who have a different opinion from this administration.
• The National Science Foundation, a Federal government entity, wastes millions, if not billions, of dollars every year on stupid projects and research including estimating when dogs became man’s best friend, do moms love their dogs more than their kids, developing a computer program to simulate prlm week, and other nonsensical studies. (Culprit: National Science Foundation with a special shout out to the National Institutes of Health which also conducts inane and useless research)
• The Energy Department gave away billions and billions of taxpayer dollars to political connected alternative energy companies, most, if not all, of which took the money, went bankrupt, and returned no societal benefit in return. Additionally, even though the Department has been in existence for decades, spending tens of billions of dollars every year, it still has never come up with a coherent and effective national energy strategy. (Culprit: Energy Department)
• The Education Department, despite spending tens of billions of dollars every year for decades, has failed to come up with any kind of coherent and effective strategies or tactics to help the nation stop under educating American kids. (Culprit: Education Department)
• The war on drugs has been a losing proposition since the Nixon administration and continues to be a losing proposition under the Obama administration, with billions and billions of dollars having been spent over the past six years with no discernible drop in drug usage, continued drug cartel growth, and no drop in prison enrollment for drug usage, making the U.S. the most imprisoned population in the world. (Culprit: DEA among others)
• Our borders still leak, opening us up to the infiltration of terrorist-related individuals into the country with the ability to inflict serious terrorist violence on American citizens. (Culprit: Department of Homeland Security)
• Despite recent news reports that found many Federal employees pass their days mostly viewing pornography on their government issued computers, it is still almost impossible to fire such employees, or others who commit similar acts of wasting taxpayer wealth. (Culprit: Most, if not all, Federal entities)
• Despite many promises to take care of our veterans’ medical needs, those veterans are still poorly served by the Federal government relative to medical treatment despite large annual Veterans Administration budgets. (Culprit: Veterans Administration)
• The State Department still appoints political cronies vs. seasoned, experienced international State Department veterans to high profile foreign ambassadorships, insulting the host country and minimizing the success of American interests in those countries. (Culprit: State Department)
• Top executives across many Federal entities apparently routinely break existing laws by using private email accounts, and in one case a private email server, to conduct official government business. (Culprit: State Department, Health and Human Services, EPA, Justice Department and probably others)
• Health care costs continue to rise much quicker than inflation in this country despite billions and billions of dollars spent on the failed Obama Care legislation. (Culprit: Congress, the President, and Health and Human Services)
• Billions of dollars are wasted every year across the many Federal government welfare programs including housing subsidies, food stamps, farm subsidies, and others. (Culprit: Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture Department and others)

There are probably many other examples but you get the idea. Despite his other failures that we have documented over the past week, if the President had just fixed what is broken across every Federal department and organization, cleaned up the fraud, the waste, and the inefficiencies, he could have made a positive name for his administration. If he had resolved some long standing issues, if he had cut unnecessary spending, if he had focused the Federal bureaucracy on a few hardcore issues, vs. spending money on when dogs became man’s best friend, he would have left a positive legacy.

But like most of his predecessors, he did none of that. He allowed the Federal government to continue to devolve into a Jabba The Hutt caricature, a sad character from the Star Wars movies, that was a huge blob that burned resources without returning any benefit to anyone. In this case, another failed component of the Obama administration.

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

United States of Purple - Solving Our Public Education Disaster

Consider some statistics that were researched in the development of our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government:"

• In 2006, the Program For International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted their tri-annual study of educational attainment by fifteen year old kids from fifty seven nations.
• In science literacy, the United States finished below the overall average and trailed the scores of kids from twenty two other nations.
• In mathematics literacy, the U.S. finished well below the overall average and trailed the scores of kids from thirty one other nations.
• Countries such as Estonia, Slovenia, and Macao finished higher than the U.S. in both categories.

A December 26, 2010 issue of the St. Petersburg Times also addressed the poor performance of our public school system. The main feature in the article was a bar chart that displayed the percentage of 15 year olds performing at the advanced level in math proficiency many countries, including the United States, and every one of our fifty states.

The output from the graph was based on the work of Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and two others. They were very careful to accurately adjust and slice the raw data from the testing that was done to exclude the impact of the following factors, factors that had been used as excuses for the poor performance of American kids in the past:

• They only looked at math test scores since math is math, it is not affected by language or culture, as much as language skills.


• They adjusted for household income and wealth using reliable proxies.

• They adjusted for whether or not the there was a college educated parent in the child's household.

• They adjusted for whether or not there was a race impact.

• They adjusted for how much each state spends per student in their states' public schools.

The bottom line conclusion after trying to look at the data from every conceivable angle? Now matter how you cut it, the United States does a horrid job of preparing public school students for proficiency in math. How bad is it:

• Only 6% of U.S. 15 year olds performed at an advanced proficiency in math.

• This places them behind 30 other nations including Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Slovakia, far poorer countries.

• The top three performing countries, Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, had about four times as many of their students performing at high math proficiency.

• Only two states, Massachusetts and Minnesota, had more than 10% of their kids performing at high levels which were behind sixteen other nations.

• New York state, which spends the most on public education per student, $17,000 per year per student, had only 6.3% of their students perform at high proficiency, trailing 30 countries and 15 other U.S. states.

• A 2010 study found a very high correlation between how well teachers are trained and how well students perform. In the United States, researchers tested 3,300 middle school math teachers-to-be in almost 40 states. They found that these future math teachers performed at about the same levels of would be teachers in Oman and Thailand and far behind teachers in Taiwan and Singapore. (Note: for Thailand, only 1% of their 15 year olds perform at a high proficiency level in math; for Oman, it was not even listed in the graph discussed above).


Pathetic, much like other parts of our government and political class, we spend and waste a lot of taxpayer dollars for very mediocre results. And I know of no plans by the Federal Education Department to fix any aspect of this poor performance and none was mentioned in the lengthy article.

But these poor test results should not be a surprise to anyone in the political class or in the industry if educating our kids. Consider a quote from a Reagan expert panel from 1983, the National Commission On Excellence In Education, that was commissioned to study the failure of public education in American almost three decades ago:

"The education foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a tide of mediocrity that threatens our future as a nation and as a people."

The commission produced a detailed blueprint on how to remedy the deficiencies in public education, circa 1983.

Fast forward ahead to 2012 and we see that the entire Federal political class and the Federal Education Department has failed miserably to fix a thirty year old crises, even though they had a custom, detailed blueprint on how to do it. After three years, it is also pretty apparent that the Obama administration will be no better or more motivated to fix this national disgrace than all of the Congresses and Presidents since 1983.

The nation cannot afford to wait another thirty years to see if the political class can eventually get around to solving the problem with a top down, Washington-centric approach. The rest of the world is advancing faster and faster when it comes to modernization and education. We cannot expect to remain a world leader across the board if we continue to allow countries like Estonia, Slovenia, and Macao to out educate our kids.

Thus, we need a serious, coherent upheaval to the education process in this country if we expect anything to change and we stop wasting about $70 billion a year via the Federal Education Department. Such an upheaval would include the following principles:

• Within four years, the Federal government would be totally out of the education process in the United States. After thirty years of failure, the Federal political class, government, and Education Department no longer deserve to spend $70 billion a year with nothing in return.
• In year one, most of the $70 billion budget would be directed to each state in block grants to improve their state and local education processes. In the second year, the $70 billion would be reduced by one third to about $46 billion which would also be block granted to the states. In the third year the states would get one third less, or about $26 billion, to improve their local and state education processes.
• After the fourth year, the states would be on their own, but in a much better position to improve their own schools and education processes.
• The savings from eliminating the Federal Education Department would be set aside to either reduce the national debt or would be rebated back to taxpayers. Under no conditions would the savings be allowed to flow back to the political class in Congress and the White House to be wasted like the sitting politicians would almost certainly do.
• In ten years, the Federal government's spending would be reduced by more than half a TRILLION dollars under plan, reducing our deficit spending habit. In the next ten years, we would have permanently removed about $700 billion from the government's expense stream.
• The state and local school officials could use the block grants for any number of purposes including updating education supplies, updating and enhancing current teachers' teaching abilities, enhancing and improving the education curriculums at the state's universities, exploring non-traditional teaching approaches (home schooling, remote teaching, charter schools, etc.), updating technology capabilities, and refurbishing school infrastructure.
• The conditions of receiving the block grant money would include 1) the elimination of traditional teacher tenure programs (i.e., jobs for life regardless of teaching ability and effort), replacing it with an approved performance review process, 2) the money could not be used to increase teacher salaries since this effort is to improve the teaching environment, not the teaching salary structure, 3) the money could not be used to increase the salaries of current administrators or increase the number of administrators and 4) the number of non-teaching staff in a school would have to be below approved thresholds before the money would be granted.
• High performing domestic schools and foreign countrys' schools would be extensively benchmarked and investigated to identify why successful schools, both in the United States and across the world,  are successful while most of our pubic schools are not. These benchmark studies would be compiled into a blueprint for success and be made available to local and state school entities for incorporation into their  respective teaching processes.

How would these processes be implemented? The political class has already forfeited their right to be involved, given their lack of success and expertise in this field over the past three decades. Step 27 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" would provide a vehicle for such a task. This step establishes a panel of education experts from a series of diverse fields of study, much like the successful expert panel that President Reagan put together in 1983, which would implement the benchmarking findings, tenure replacement programs, curriculum updates, etc.

These are definitely radical changes. But what other approaches are viable? Business as usual just continues the current process of under educating our kids. Business as usual wastes of $70 billion for little in return. Business as usual allows the political class to have another political football to pass around and eventually fumble. Business as usual does not work.

This approach makes for better trained teachers, better training of teachers, better teacher performance reviews, better teaching facilities and equipment, better curriculums, and benchmarks for excellence against the best in the United States and in the rest if the world. The nation's resources are much closer to the source of the problem without the inefficiencies, waste, ineffectiveness, and bureaucracy of the Federal government.

Taking the Federal government and the politicians that operate it out of the education equation has to be better than what we have today. The above plan gives us at least a fighting chance of catching Estonia, Slovenia, and Macao when it comes to giving our kids a better education.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein

We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, "The United States Of Purple," at

http://www.unitedstatesofpurple.com/

The United States of Purple is a new grass roots approach to filling the office of President of The United States by focusing on the restoration of freedom in the United States, focusing on problem solving skills and results vs. personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just one United States Of America under the banner of Purple.

The United States Of Purple's website also provides you the formal opportunity to sign a petition to begin the process of implementing a Constitutional amendment to impose fixed term limits on all Federally elected politicians. Only by turning out the existing political class can we have a chance of addressing and finally resolving the major issues of or times.

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