It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc.
To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity posts we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history.
1) Chicago and its violent and criminal epidemic have often been a topic in this blog. Every year, it seems, the city sets records for the number of people wounded, maimed, and killed by an ever increasing violent crime rate. Multiple politicians at the city and county level of Chicago have been clueless when it comes to stopping the violence and crime.
The latest, and possibly the biggest political failure, is the current Chicago mayor, Lori Lightfoot. Under her leadership, the city seems to set new records for crime and violent deaths every week or month. And she continues to be clueless on how to reduce the carnage and crime:
Not only is killing and wounding of citizens on the rise, other types of crime are rampaging through the city with retail stores being the favorite target of violent gangs of criminals.
Not knowing how to get the criminals under control, the mayor recently blamed the retail stores for not protecting themselves from being looted.
Since a very, very basic function of any government entity is to protect the lives and property of the people that the government entity serves, failure to do so is a failure of that government entity, not the victim of the crimes against those businesses and citizens.
This is like blaming a rape victim for the rape because she/he did not protect themselves.
Specifically, Lightfoot recently stated that, “We still have retailers that won’t institute plans like having security officers in their stores, making sure that they’ve got cameras that are actually operational, locking up their merchandise at night, chaining high-end bags. These purses can be something that is attracting a lot of organized retail theft units.”
So, in her world, paying taxes to support a police and judicial system is not enough, these businesses should pay even more of their limited expense and revenue dollars to hire guards, install security systems, and incur more expenses because the local government cannot do their job.
So pathetic and such a failure, no wonder people and businesses are fleeing death traps like Chicago and going where government entities actually do their job, protecting lives and property.
2) Probably hundreds of times over the years we have pointed out how inept, inefficient, and ineffective the American political class is when it comes to spending our tax money. Programs never fulfill the promises that politicians promise and the vast majority of government programs in this country are riddled with fraud and criminal activity. From the local town hall to Washington D.C., our tax dollars are almost always wasted at astronomical levels.
The state of Colorado recently reinforced this observation::
The state of Colorado likely paid out about $73 million in fraudulent unemployment benefits to undeserving people during the first year of the pandemic.
In addition, it also failed to resolve most of the customer complaints related to unemployment fraud.
These conclusions come from a recent state government audit.
These screw ups included paying $3.9 million in unemployment benefits to dead people, $5 million to people who were in prison, and over $100,000 to kids under the age of 18.
The state may now be liable to paying money back to the Federal government because of its incompetence.
And this may not be the total amount of waste and fraud:: “(I)t might take years before (the state) has final statewide and nationwide totals for fraudulent payments, as we continue to investigate and verify.”
But according to audit report, Colorado is not that bad relative to other states when it comes to criminal fraud robbing taxpayer money since about $4.4 billion in fraud is believed to have happened in Arizona, more than $600 million in Washington, $462 million in Ohio, $20 billion in California and $380 million in Kansas.
Colorado government entities responded that they are taking steps to fix their incompetencies but this is after at least $73 million walked out the front door.
As we are prone to do, consider:
There are about 10,000 homeless citizens in Colorado.
Using national meal averages, that $73 million lost to fraud could have paid for about 25 million meals.
Which means. theoretically, that money lost to fraud could have bought 250 meals for each of the 10,000 homeless Colorado citizens.
Imagine how many meals could be created using the whopping $20 billion that the state of California lost to pandemic fraud. Or how many drug addicts could be treated or homeless who could be sheltered for the tens of billions of dollars the polticiains across the country lost to fraud because of their incompetence. So disgusting and insulting to taxpayers.
3) We have also covered this topic many times but let's do it again with the latest population data:
It is no surprise, based on any number of data sources, that Americans are leaving high crime, high taxation, and high government regulations to states that allow them more freedom to do what they want with their lives by keeping more of their hard earned money and being safe from the ever increasing violent crime going on in certain states.
As we have shown before, states like New Jersey, New York, Illinois, and California are losing population like never before because of the failure of the state politicians to do their job.
Their failures include higher and higher taxation while government service quality deteriorates, the inability to curb sky high crime rates, the higher than normal cost of living, oppressive and unnecessary pandemic measures, and running up huge future unfunded government liabilities.
The states that always fall into this category include New Jersey, Illinois, New York, and California.
Recent studies published by the Yankee Institutes show that 770,000 Americans and legal residents moved from around the country to mostly southern states from April, 2020 thru July, 2021.
California lost the most movers, losing just over 429,000 residents.
Texas and Florida saw the largest population increases over the above time period, with Texas gianing 170,000 people and Florida gaining about 221,000.
Keep in mind that these two states have much lower taxes (including no state income tax), lower crime rates, less government regulations, and a higher quality of life.
These two states also had a much more freedom based, liberal approach to pandemic lockdowns, using much more common sense and strategic plans than the dictatorial approach of states like New York, California and other population losing states.
People want to be free.They want to keep as much of their hard earned wealth as possible which allows them more freedom to live their lives the way they want. They want freedom to be able to leave their house and not be scared they are going to be a victim of a crime. They want to be free of government regulations that include overly oppressive lockdowns, mandates, and rules that the politicians themselves often ignore.
America was built on the concept of freedom and Americans will look for that dream wherever it is, even if it means moving themselves, their families, and their businesses to another location. Somehow, though, the politicians in New York, New Jersey, and other states like these do not understand this basic premise and desire. As a result, their states are heading into an inescapable financial death spiral as taxpayers and businesses flee for freedom.
Thus, today we learned that government continues to misuse taxpayer wealth, losing it to fraud and crime, Chicago politicians are still clueless about how to rein in crime, and people want to be free and are fleeing to states that allow them to do so.
