August, 2018, Part 2, By The Numbers - Murders and Financial Suicide In Chicago and Massive Street Cleaning In San Francisco

On a semi-regular basis we do a post under the theme, “By The Numbers.” Under this theme we analysis the crazy ways that politicians use numbers, from making them up outright, to using them inappropriately, to using them to lie to us. The problem for them when they do that is it is so easy to show how either stupid they are or how conniving they are. 

As an FYI, as you read my analysis of the misuse of numbers, keep in mind that I have a masters degree in statistics and for most of my life have been involved in analyzing numbers and stats. Politicians misuse of numbers and statistics is taken as a personal and professional affront to me and my profession.

1) Walter Williams, writing for the Heritage Foundation earlier this month, listed out some very distressing numbers coming out of Chicago, a gang and violence infested city. Mr.Williams, by the way, is an economics professor so he probably has a pretty good handle on numbers:

• During the weekend of August 4 -5, 12 residents of Chicago were shot to death and over five dozen were wounded.
• In the first seven months of 2018, 1,718 Chicago residents had been shot and 306 had died from their gunshot wounds.
• The law enforcement authorities in the city have cleared only about 15% of all of the shootings which means that if you are a violent criminal you have pretty goods odds (85%) of getting away with your crimes in Chicago.
• As of early July this year, 626 people had been shot by police officers this year of which 114 (18%) were black and all of last year, 987 people were shot by the police of which 223 were black, 23%.
• While these percentages were higher than the percentage of blacks in the U.S. (12%), in Chicago in 2017 there were 674 homicides of which a whopping 80% were black residents.

So while people are getting bent out of shape because Tiger Woods recently refused to denounce Trump and protesting NFL football players show such “bravery” on the football field every Sunday but contribute nothing to bringing down these Chicago shooting numbers, the killing and maiming numbers continue to march on in Chicago.

2) Let’s stay in Chicago because the financial numbers are just as disastrous as the murder and wounded numbers. We have previously discussed the reality that the financial situation in Chicago, and the state of Illinois also, is horrible. There are unfunded future liabilities, the schools are in terrible shape, and the most productive citizens continue to move out of the city as taxes go higher and higher without a commiserate drop in city expenses. Things are so bad that the city bonds have basically been dropped in value to junk bond status.

The local CBS outlet recently dropped two distressing numbers on the politicians in Chicago. The city apparently has unfunded future liabilities of about $28 BILLION. A single city that is short an amazing $28 billion. 

And rather than do the right thing, reduce city spending to cover this future shortfall, the city plans on issuing additional debt of $10 billion. Yes, great strategy, dig yourself an overwhelming debt hole and the proposed solution is to take on more debt! According to the report: “[Mayor] Rahm Emanuel suggested the city issue billions in obligation bonds. The plan aims to inject more cash into the pension system now in order to leverage a higher rate of return to exceed the interest that will accrue on the bonds, the Illinois Policy Institute says.”

Think about these numbers. Why would anyone want to own any of these new city bonds worth $10 billion when it still leaves the city short $18 billion? Does anyone really think that the $10 billion would ever be completely repaid when more city debt continues to pile up? And if Chicago is serious about issuing more debt, how high will the interest rates have to be to attract anyone to by basically junk bonds? 

Thus, it is obvious from these numbers that Chicago is in a financial death spiral: to pay off current debt they need to create more and more debt which drives up the interest rate they have to issue for the latest bonds which increases debt even more, etc., and the death spiral is underway.

3) We have previously discussed the reality that San Francisco has been turned into a third world hellhole. The streets are overrun with human defecation, urination, and illegal drug usage and needle use. So much so that the city actually has both a hotline for citizens to report human feces on the streets of the city and a five person full time pooper squad that goes around the city scooping up human feces from the street.

The numbers are unbelievable:

• The city has received a whopping 20,000 reports of human feces on the street.
• The five person city pooper squad costs almost $1 million a year just in salaries for the squad since each person on that assignment makes an obscene $185,000 a year.
• According to the San Francisco Chronicle: “San Francisco Public Works has a $72.5 million-a-year street cleaning budget — including spending $12 million a year on what essentially have become housekeeping services for homeless encampments. The costs include $2.8 million for a Hot Spots crew to wash down the camps and remove any biohazards, $2.3 million for street steam cleaners, $3.1 million for the Pit Stop portable toilets, plus the new $830,977-a-year Poop Patrol to actively hunt down and clean up human waste.”
• But beyond the popper squad, the city has budgeted $700,000 for a 10 person needle cleanup squad to cleanup the drug needles strewn about city streets.

Would one ever expect to see numbers like this in a modern American city? Pretty disgusting numbers with no relief insight. What is the great idea that the incoming mayor, Landon Breed, wants to implement to combat this problem? She wants to ask non-profit organizations serving the 7,500 homeless souls in the city to ask their constituents to stop pooping in the streets. Yeah, that will work.

As always, the numbers show just how ineffective and useless our politicians. Numbers do not lie but politicians do. More numbers 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:

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

June, 2016, Part 5, Political Class Insanity: Scrounging For MIlitary Spare Parts, More Chicago Violence, Fast And Furious Still Killing, and More

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. In fact, last month we set a record, needing ten full posts to cover it all.

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.

It looks like our politicians have been especially insane over the past month or so let’s get started with the latest insanity from today’s American politicians:

1) Venezuela has been a classic socialist country for a long time. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has spoken highly of the country’s political system which is not a surprise since Mr. Sanders is a socialist himself. 

However, Venezuela is sinking into a financial and economic morass and human disaster. Food is scarce, medicine is running out, and black markets are thriving, given that the socialist economic system cannot provide sufficient consumer goods for the population (e.g., citizens cannot even find toilet paper in the stores). And the latest financial disaster from this country according to the LA Times: it now costs $150 to buy one dozen eggs. This comes out to about $13 an egg, assuming you can find eggs. I can get a dozen large brown eggs in my local supermarket for the cost of one egg in Venezuela.

Somehow, Sanders things this is a good economic system to bring to this country. Oppressive taxation, destruction of individual freedoms, rampant inflation, and shortage of consumer goods. Insanity.

2) Let’s stay in Venezuela and talk about an article that was in the May 27, 2016 issue of The Week magazine. It is not only the price of eggs that is being destroyed by excessive and socialist government policies in that country: 

• The medical infrastructure in the country is in tatters also.
• Power shortages means that patients and infants die because the respirators cannot be powered up.
• Water shortages reduce the amount of hygiene that can be practiced by doctors and nurses.
• Doctors struggle to work without medicine, gloves, and soap.
• The nation’s death rate for mothers is up fivefold and the death rate for infants is up 100 fold.

Although the parliament has passed legislation to get international healthcare and medicine aid, the socialist President has vetoed the legislation with the following insane quote and logic: "I doubt that anywhere in the world, except Cuba, there exists a better health system than this one.”

And this is the chaos that Bernie Sanders and others in the political class want to bring to this country. Insane.

3) The Heritage Foundation recently reported that Obama’s Fast and Furious campaign, an illegal and un-Constitutional Mexican cartel gun running operation, has resulted in at least 69 Mexicans being killed with the weapons that Fast and Furious operation put in the hands of Mexican drug cartels. This information comes from actual Justice Department documents that were obtained under Freedom Of Information Act requests by Judicial Watch.

Not only have at least 69 people been killed using Obama administration’s Fast and Furious guns, the documents showed widespread use of the weapons across different cartels. Twenty two people were killed by Fast and Furious weapons in a single gun fight. Approximately 2,000 weapons passed through the program and into cartel hands. Only 94 of these weapons have been recovered and no drug cartel personnel have been arrested as a result of the program.

According to Hans Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation: “These revelations confirm just how dangerous this reckless law enforcement operation was that happened under [former Attorney General] Eric Holder’s watch—and that the administration has tried to hide by refusing to turn over internal documents and communications about it. There have been many political scandals in Washington over the years, but this is the only one that led directly to the murder of many individuals because of the irresponsible and thoughtless political decisions of the president, the attorney general, and their political appointees.”

Just another example of the lawlessness of the most lawless administration ever. Unfortunately, the lawlessness in this setting has gotten dozens of people, many of them innocent, non-cartel Mexican civilians, killed using U.S. weapons paid for with U.S. tax dollars in a U.S. program that failed miserably.

4) While Obama has been busy finding ways to allow men into girls’ and women’s rest rooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms across the country, his home town of Chicago has not been doing real well on many fronts but especially the violence front. According to reporting by Monica Davey and Mitch Smith, writing for the New York Times on May 28, 2016: 

• Homicides and shootings in the city are up over 50% vs. the same time period last year.
• 233 Chicagoans have been killed already in the city.
• Reverend Corey Brooks, a pastor in the city’s south side states the obvious: “If something doesn’t change, if we don’t get jobs for these kids, if we don’t change the economic situation, I’m worried that we could be looking at a bloodbath. If something doesn’t happen, I fear that we’re potentially looking at one of the worst summers we’ve ever had.”
• Much of the violence is due to gang violence and drug dealing activities.
• Over a recent weekend 64 people got shot and six of them died.
• Although Chicago’s population of 2.7 million is nearly equally split among whites, blacks and Hispanics, most of the shootings occur in black and Hispanic neighborhoods on the city’s South and West Sides, and the majority of the victims have been African-American.

So yes, as the first African-American focuses on bathroom issues, back in his hometown, African-Americans are trying just to survive the violence that surrounds them everyday, bathroom issues really not being on top of their minds.

5) Yesterday, we discussed the reality that the majority of the aircraft used by our Marines for combat are not airworthy. This sad fact exists in the reality that over the past seven years of the Obama administration, the American taxpayer has probably spent well over four TRILLION dollars on the Defense Department. Over $4 TRILLION and we have Martines defending us with very inferior equipment and aircraft.

But according to Justin Johnson, writing for the Heritage Foundation on May 17, 2016, the Marines are not the only arm of our armed forces who are not getting optimal use out of the TRILLIONS of dollars we spend on our military:

1. As we discussed earlier this week, our Marines have had to pull parts off of aircraft that are sitting in museums to keep their F-18 fighter jets in operation. Despite raiding museums, only about 30% of our Marines’ aircraft are able to be flown. Even with that drastic action, only about 30 percent of their F-18s are ready to fly. This has caused average Marine pilot training time to drop from 25-30 hours a month to around 4 hours a month, not giving them the experience they need to protect themselves in combat.

2. Only one third of our Army brigades are combat ready today. The Army’s size has fallen to the lowest level since World War II, leading the top Army general to predict that the Army would be at a “high military risk” if it had to fight a sustained war.

3. Not only are the Marines scrounging for parts for their aircraft, the Air Force has had to cannibalize parts from some of its F-16 fighters to keep other F-16 fighters in operation. They also have gone to museums to get parts for their planes, namely the B-1 bombers, leaving half of the Air Force’s planes not ready for combat situations.

4. The Navy claims it is about 75 ships short of what it needs to fulfill its current missions and has had to extend the deployments of the ships it currently has, wearing them and their sailors out quicker than normal.

5. Marine aircraft are so fragile that the recent rate serious crashes of Marine Corps planes is nearly double the ten year average.

6. The average age of the Air Force’s B-52 bombers is 53 years old, meaning that some of these workhorse plans are over 53 years old. The article makes the analogy that most people would not want to drive across country in a 53 year old car so why do we make our service people fly around the world to engage in combat in 53 year old planes?

Never has so much taxpayer money been spent and never have we gotten so little in return. This has lead to a weakening of our defense forces and placed unnecessary risk and strain on our brave service people. 

Another day, another set of political class insanity: wasteful military spending that weakens our national defense, more violence in Chicago as Chicago native Obama worries about bathroom policies, Fast and Furious guns still killing people at the hands of the drug cartels, and the Venezuelan experiment in socialism continues to crashdown.

That will do it for the insanity for this month. We were not able to match the record setting posts of insanity we set last month but this month’s insanity was certainly robust enough. The next few days will be used to follow a subset of political class insanity as we go “by the numbers,” using the latest government and opinion poll numbers to show how badly we are being served by the current set of American politicians since while politicians might lie, the numbers do not.

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