Biden's Failed Immigration Policies and the Death and Violence It Has Caused To Americans - Part 2

 We have often discussed the reality that Biden’s border policies have been an unbelievable failure. Illegal drugs are flooding into the country, violent South and Central American gangs setting up shop in  U.S. cities, and local city and state budgets are being adjusted so that illegal immigrants can be fed, sheltered, and given medical attention, stealing government services from American taxpayers.

But one particularly distressing and tragic result of Biden’s failed immigration policies is the danger that have befallen innocent Americans at the hands of violent illegal immigrants who never should have been admitted to the country. This is not to say there should be no immigration into this country.  But there has to be a rigid screening process so that violent people do not get into the country and carry out heinous, often fatal, attacks on innocent Americans.

The first set of sad stories relative to the dangers to Americans can be accessed at:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2024/07/bidens-failed-immigration-policies-and.html

1)On February 22, 2024, University of Georgia nursing student, Laken Riley, went out for a midday jog. Unfortunately, she never came back since Jose Antonio Ibarra, an  illegal immigrant from Venezuela, came across her path, and that encounter allegedly led to Ms. Riley's death.

Ibarra is charged with killing her and as a result has been charged with 10 criminal charges: felony murder, malice murder, false imprisonment, and aggravated assault with intent to rape and kidnap. Her body was found in a nearby park and the cause of death was determined to be blunt force trauma and asphyxiation.

The suspect illegally entered the country in 2022 under Biden’s watch and was living in an apartment about a mile from where the body was found. He has had multiple arrests by state and Federal law enforcement authorities and at least once failed to appear in court for a shoplifting case.

So sad that a law-abiding, young lady could not go out in the  middle of the day for a jog without being brutally accosted and killed.

2)Let’s leave this tragedy in Georgia and skip up to New York City:

• Christian Inga has been arrested and charged with a violent sexual attack on a child.

• He is alleged to have come across two 13 year olds in a field, forcing them into the woods at knifepoint, tied them up and then sexually assaulted the 13 year old girl.

• Inga is allegedly an illegal immigrant from Ecuador who entered the country on Biden’s watch in June, 2021.

• To make this episode of illegal immigrant even  more disgusting, there are news stories that he allegedly recorded himself sexually assaulting the victim.

Fortunately, people in the neighborhood recognized the suspect and apprehended him, keeping him under control until police arrived.

3)Let’s keep heading north, up to Massachusetts:

• Cory B. Alvarez is an illegal immigrant from Haiti.

• He has been  charged in the suspected rape of a 15 year old teenage girl in a shelter in Rockland, Massachusetts.

• Despite facing multiple counts of rape he was released on a measly bail of only $500 despite the local district attorney wanted at least a $10,000 bail and conditions for his release.

• But the judge went with only a $500  cash  bail.

• Back in March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a detainer order for him but since Boston is a “sanctuary city,” city officials refused to honor the order and turn Alvarrez over to the Feds.

• The unnamed source within ICE opined: “The dumba– judges are the ones causing a lot of these issues by ignoring the root of the problem. California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and other blue states all do this bulls–t. If we run records checks on people out of those states, they have policies that are in place to prevent sharing of any information.”

Apparently in some areas of the country, local  politicians are more worried about protecting illegal immigrants than they are in protecting the innocent perpetrated by a sub-segment of the  illegal immigrants Biden has let walk  into the  country.

4)Back to New York:

• Illegal  immigrant, Jhon  Moises Chacaguassay-Ibis is accused of murdering illegal immigrant, Joselyn Jhoana Toaquiza, in Syracuse this past June 18th.

• He has been arrested and charged with second degree murder and concealment of a human corpse.

• Both were in this country illegally and were from Ecuador.

• He buried her body in a shallow grave and then took a bus to NYC where he turned himself in.

Another sad tale of violence from an illegal  immigrant.

5)Down in  Irving, Texas, police arrested Oved Bernardo Mendoza Argueta for allegedly shooting up a Chick-fil-A restaurant, a shooting spree that killed two people. His wife works at the fast food location and identified her husband as the shooter to police.

According to police, Argueta was under an  “ICE hold” which implies he is in this country illegally and should have been detained by the Feds. Unfortunately, before he could be detained, he killed two people.

6)But it is no just innocent Americans who have been attacked and killed by violent illegal immigrants:

• Recently, two New York Police Department officers were shot by a 19 year old  illegal immigrant from, where else, Venezuela.

• Bernardo Raul Castro Mata was driving a scooter the wrong way down a one-way street when police officers tried to stop him.

• As a result of firing a gun at them he is now in custody and facing two attempted first degree murder charges.

• News reports claimed he was a member of a local illegal  immigrant gang that was wanted for robberies in the city.

• He had been arrested multiple times previously and had two stolen credit cards in his possession when  arrested.

• According to CBS News: “According to court documents, Mata, who lived in a migrant shelter and remains in custody at Bellevue Hospital, told detectives he's a member of a Venezuelan gang and that guns are smuggled into shelters through food delivery packages to avoid metal detectors. He also said it's common practice for Tren de Aragua members to shoot at police officers because Venezuelan officers shoot at gang members for minor infractions. However, he plead not guilty, claiming the gun wasn't his and it accidentally went off during the encounter with police.”

But according to the Biden administration,, there is nothing to worry about recent, given comments by Biden’s Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas: "We screen and vet individuals.” I would bet that Laken Riley’s family and friends, and the hundreds or thousands of other American  families that have had family members killed, raped, and attacked by illegal immigrants might disagree with Mr. Mayorkas’ assertion. If Mayorkas is screening and vetting illegal immigrants, he is obviously not doing a good job.

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If you agree that we need to deseat every member of Congress for their lack of success and accomplishment, then please consider going to the following petition link to help the cause:

https://www.change.org/p/deseat-congress-reset-freedom

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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:

https://www.amazon.com/Love-My-Country-Loathe-Government/dp/1604942789/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=love+my+country%2C+loathe+my+government&qid=1607716020&sr=8-1

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com

http://www.cato.org

http://www.openthebooks.com

http://www.conventionofstates.com

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

 

Is Hilary Clinton The Most Corrupt, Dishonest Presidential Candidate Ever?

We have not talked a lot about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, the two national party candidates for President. One reason is that if you tried to follow all of the insanity, law breaking, name calling, inane quotes, and indicting-avoiding that both of them constantly do, you could write a non-stop post for years. I am obviously not a big fan of either of them.

Today, the focus will be on the nefarious doings of the Hillary Clinton camp, a camp that I find far more dangerous along every dimension imaginable than Trump. There has been some very interesting realities exposed over the past week as the Wikileaks website has published almost 20,000 emails that were hacked out of the Democratic National Committee computers that do not shine a positive light on Clinton. 

Specifically, the emails showed that the Clinton campaign staff was in close contact with the DNC executives and employees to help sabotage Bernie Sanders’s bid to become the Democratic nominee for President. Emails showed the DNC plotting to do various things to make Sanders look bad in the press, leveraging his religious beliefs against him, etc. If this were the early 1970s, we would be looking at the infamous “dirty tricks” tactics employed by Nixon as he ran for President.

,All nasty, dirty politics which shows how corrupt both political parties are today even when dealing with their own kind. But today’s focus will be on what I call the Clinton Crime Syndicate, otherwise known as the Clinton Foundation. I thought I was going to have to do a lot of research to pull together all of the nefarious, corrupt, immoral, and very likely illegal activities of the Syndicate/Foundation but I found that most of that homework had already been done by Reason magazine writer, John Stossel, on July 27, 2016. 

His entire article can be accessed at:

http://reason.com/archives/2016/07/27/clinton-cash

Highlights of his findings and research and how the Clintons’ got rich trading off of Hillary’s State Department position are listed below:

• Stossel gives credit to the recent documentary movie, Clinton Cash, which was based on the book of the same name by Peter Schweizer.
• It is Stossel’s opinion that the Clintons use “speaking fees” to get around bribery laws: "If somebody gave a politician or family member money for a favor, that's breaking the law. But if you say it's a speaking fee, and you pay double or triple the normal rate, that seems to be legal."
• The article claims, and other sources have made similar estimates, that Bill Clinton has made an amazing $126 million or more on speaking fees and giving speeches.
• If he can get someone to pay him to give what is likely a canned speech all the more power to him, it is supposed to be a free country.
• But Stossel points out how the Clintons were able to supercharge Bill’s speaking fees by coupling his speeches with Hillary’s influence peddling as the head of the State Department.
• Before Hillary was named as Secretary of State, Bill's speaking fees averaged just under $200,000. 
• But after Hillary became Secretary of State, Bill often got speaking fees upwards of over $700,00 PER speech.
• Schweizer is quoted in the article that this kind of jump in fees is "evidence that people paying him expect to get something in return. She [Hillary] becomes appointed secretary of state, a friend of the president of Nigeria suddenly offers (Bill) $700,000 apiece for two speeches. An investment firm in Moscow that's tied to the Kremlin who had never paid for him to speak before suddenly gave him $500,000."
• Stossel accuse the Clinton’s of using the Clinton Foundation to launder money and has had over $2 billion pass through the Foundation to “improve global health and wellness” even if only a meager 15% of that $2 billion was actually spent on needy causes (Source: Sean Davis of the Federalist who examined the actual Foundation accounting records).
• As an example of such nonsense, Stossel describes what happened after the Haitian earthquake that ravaged the country.
• The Foundation announced it would help rebuild the country and promised to develop an industrial park that create up to 60,000 jobs.
• That effort ended up creating a meager 7,000 jobs.
• But Clinton friends made out very well in Haiti. Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien, who runs a cellphone company named Digicel, paid Bill Clinton $225,000 to give a speech and within four months was given a Clinton Foundation grant and the job to operate Haiti’s cellular telephone operations.
• VCS mining which, according to Schweizer, "has no experience in mining, very little experience in Haiti, and it raises the question, of all the companies out there, why did the Haitian government pick this one company?"  got an exclusive gold mining contract for Haiti. Two simple answers to Schweizer’s questions: Hillary’s brother works for VCS and the chairman of the company just happens to be a campaign donor to Democratic politicians and causes.
• Maybe the most blatant form of extortion and influence peddling has to do with the Swedish telecommunications company, Ericsson.
• For a while, according to Schweizer, Ericsson had been viewed negatively and aggressively by Hillary Clinton's State Department because Ericsson sold telecommunications equipment to what the State Department considered repressive governments: "WikiLeaks cables show the State Department sort of busting up the Swedish foreign minister, saying you need to get Ericsson into line. Ericsson decides that this would be a great time to sponsor a speech by Bill Clinton. They had never done so before. They decided to go big, $750,000 for a 20-minute speech. Bill gives the speech and literally seven days later, the State Department comes out with a statement saying we're not going to take further action against Ericsson. We're going to ask them to police themselves."
• Let me repeat something that Wikileaks found: Bill Clinton got paid an amazing $750,000 to give a 20 minute speech. That’s $37,5000 a minute. 
• Soon afterwards, Hillary’s State Department basically said “never mind” when it came to Ericsson selling telecom equipment to repressive governments.

A few questions:

• Has there ever been an official candidate for President that has been so corrupt, so greedy, so criminal going into the battle for the White House than Hillary Clinton? 
• What will Bernie Sanders supporters do in November? The above activities are the very things and very corruption that they fought so passionately against.
• Why hasn’t Obama stepped in to stop this corruption since it occurred on his watch? 
• Instead, he has come out and endorsed Clinton, does she have similar corruption leverage on him that Obama needs to keep hushed up?
• How can all of this money laundering and corruption not be against some law someplace or against the racketeering (RICO) statutes? Please note, that the above discussion is not comprehensive when it comes to these kinds of Clinton antics, e.g. the selling of U.S. uranium interests to Russian interests, etc.
• And most of all, how can any American vote for Hillary, given her corruption, law breaking, greed, and lies, from the above racketeering charges, to lying in front of Congress, to breaking multiple Federal laws when it came to an unsecured email system, etc., etc., etc. Please let me know of you are one of those that are willing to overlook such slimy behavior.

Oh, an answer to that last question is that Clinton is less evil than Donald Trump is not acceptable. At the risk of overcliching, “the lesser of two evils is still evil,” consider voting for the Libertarian or Green party candidate, candidates that at least appear to have some degree of honesty and integrity. 

Write in Sanders name as a protest vote that keeps you within integrity. 

Ignore that Presidential ballot line as you vote for other, non-Presidential positions. 

Remember, never wrestle with a pig: the pig likes it and you both get dirty. Stay clean and vote for honesty and integrity, not someone who launders money and lies anytime it is self serving.

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

Part 2, August, 2013 Political Class Insanity: Jay Carney Defies The Law Of Supply and Demand, Training Haitian Prisoners With U.S. Tax Dollars, Building An Army Base That Is Never Used, And More

Yesterday, was our first post of what is likely to be many this month regarding the monthly report on political class insanity in America. Last month we set the record, needing eight days of posts to get in all of the idiocy that the politicians in this country constantly rain down on us. It is a got bet that eights days will not be enough this month as the insanity is growing exponentially month over month.

Yesterday we talked about how U.S. taxpayer month is being used to create youth job programs, not in Chicago or Detroit, but in Belize. We talked about how two members of Congress want to create a new national park, not any park where any American could go and visit, a national park on the moon. We talked about how over $30,000 in taxpayer wealth was being wasted to paint an original oil portrait of former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. And finally, we learned that roller coaster safety was a hot topic for one Congressman, high unemployment, trillion dollar deficits, failing public schools, and other trivial issues be damned.

Well, it just gets worse today:

1) One thing I always loved about politicians is that they have the lousiest understanding about basic economic theory and reality. Jay Carney, President Obama’s head press secretary reinforced that notion recently when he made the claim that Obama’s vision of immigration reform would raise wages of American workers. Somehow, allowing many more immigrant workers into this country will raise the wages of every worker.

Mr. Carney, did you never take a basic economics course? If you did, they probably covered the elementary reality of “supply and demand.”  If you raise the supply of something without a similar raise in demand, price has to go down, it is a reality of the cosmos. Adding millions of new immigrant workers to the supply of labor in this country will put downward pressure on price, namely wages, because there will be an excess of workers. Given the Obama administration’s inability to manage to a growing economy, it is highly, highly doubtful demand will go up as much as millions of new people into the supply side of the equation.

Mr. Carney’s assertion on higher wages is so inane that many in the press briefing where he stated such started laughing at this ridiculous assertion:

http://www.libertyfirstnews.com/obamas-paid-liar-jay-carney-says-immigration-reform-will-raise-wages-as-press-busts-out-in-laughter/

Unfortunately, Mr. Carney is not alone in his ignorance of basic economics. If this was not the case, our economy would not be trudging along at such an anemic rate. In “Love My Country, Loathe My Government,” we proposed via Step 36 that all members of Congress and the White House take and pass a course on basic economics before allowed to legislate. Unfortunately, that suggestion has not been implemented, as illustrated by  Mr. Carney’s ignorance of the supply and demand theory.

2) Yesterday we reviewed how our political class in Washington was sending half a million dollars to the country of Belize to help create jobs for youth in that country, the high unemployment rate for younger Americans in this country be damned. Well, that is not the only taxpayer funded program that is sending money overseas to train foreign workers.

The Federal government’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs is sending $95K to JAILS IN HAITI to help train prisoners on textile production. As with the Belize disgrace, this money is being sent with the hope these HAITIAN prisoners will be able to learn skills, so when they are released back into HAITIAN society, they can contribute to that society.

One government official defended the HAITIAN program by stating: “Inmates targeted for participation should be convicted prisoners with remaining sentences between 2-5 years, with higher priority on those with less time remaining. This will give the program continuity through prisoners who continue to participate and facilitate training for others, but also in that acquired skills will still be relevant upon prisoners’ release in a medium-term time frame,”

Typical government nonsense talk. How about training some prisoners in the U.S. who have remaining sentences between 2-5 years, how about giving them some skills so that they can succeed when the get out of U.S. prisons. Who comes up with these types of wasteful spending projects …in other countries no less.

3) In a previous series on political class insanity, we reported on how the Forestry Service was embarrassed when they had hundreds of pounds of explosives stolen from one of their so-called storage bunkers. Well, that kind of incompetence is not restricted to that part of the government, as a recent set of news reports tell of another multi-million dollar heist of government equipment, this time from the U.S. Marshalls organization:

• The US Marshals office has lost/had stolen 2,000 encrypted radios worth $6 million dollars.
• This robbery/heist occurred even though in 2011, an internal U.S. Marshall technology office warned that the Marshals Service was not properly tracking their equipment. 
• In a tribute to understatement, a spokesman for the Marshall Service has publicly stated that he believes “this is in large part attributable to poor record keeping .” Ya think?
• As always, worse than the crime was the cover up.
• When news agencies started submitting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, there was instruction for upper management at the organization to no longer discuss the lost/stolen equipment. 
• Worse than the crime and the cover up is the lie that follows. Several documents obtained through FOIA requests including a note from the agency’s director asking employees to estimate a lower dollar value for the missing equipment to make the screw up not appear as bad as it was. 

But worst than the heist, worst than the cover up, and worse than the lie is the fact that a facet of national security may have been compromised. There is some evidence to indicate that these encrypted radios could have ended up in foreign, possibly hostile hands. In 2012, one of the missing radios showed up on eBay from a seller based in Hong Kong. 

When the Marshal Service spent more taxpayer money to buy  back their own missing radio, they found that the radio had been disassembled and reassembled, which leads to new troubling questions of how vulnerable this makes the Marshals Service.

Incompetence, cover ups, lies, and breeches of national security. This episode of insanity had everything.

4) Many times we have reported on the wasteful and corrupt spending in Afghanistan. We previously discussed how the State department, under Hillary Clinton, ignored its own security guidelines to build an $80 million consulate in Afghanistan and THEN realized that it was not defendable against terrorist attacks, which they would have realized if they had not ignored their own guidelines.

We know that as our part in the conflict winds down, we are going to leave about $7 billion worth of military gear behind after we leave, military gear that I would bet eventually ends up in the hands of the Taliban.

The latest corruption apparently wasted $34 million of taxpayer loot for no reason at all:

• When a two-star general recently visited a new 64,000-square-foot US military headquarters building  in southern Afghanistan, he was so impressed that he stated that  “It's "better appointed than any Marine headquarters anywhere in the world.”
• Impressive, except for the fact, as reported by the Washington post, that the facility has never been used and likely will never be used by U.S. troops.
• Much like the never used but very expensive State Department consulate, a top Marine commander had warned the Pentagon brass that the building was unnecessary three years ago but his insightful opinions were ignored. 
• The building was originally commissioned for the 2009 troop surge  but by the time construction began that troop surge was over.
• "This is an example of what is wrong with military construction in general," the special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction told Chuck Hagel in a recent letter. Another wonderful understatement.

So between these two disastrous spending, $34 million and $80 million, we have $114 million that went down the drain. $114 million that could have operated White House tours for over 114 years. We could provide combat pay for our military personnel that are serving in dangerous areas but who have had their pay cut. The July 4th celebrations at military bases to celebrate those that serve would not have been postponed.

So many worthwhile uses of over $100 million that had no military or societal benefit.

Another day and we are just getting started. Federal government loses millions of dollars of electronics equipment. Federal government blows over $100 million for nothing. Haiti prisoners are taught skills, U.S. prisoners are not. And economic ignorance I still alive and well in Washington. More bad news tomorrow.

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 

Politicians' Deficient Math Skills - Ignorance or Arrogance?

I often wondered if politicians are really that ignorant and deficient when it comes to math skills or are they really good at math but arrogant enough to think that they can tell us anything, math wise, and we are too deficient to understand the math lies we are being told. Consider the following examples and then you decide, ignorant or arrogant:

• It seems forever that politicians have been telling us what a great financial idea the Social Security program is and why it is stupid to allow mere mortal citizens to handle their retirement affairs by, gasp, investing their retirement funds in the stock market. Well, I did a little math work in this area and put together some elementary math models to determine if this myth was true. I got my historical Social Security salary history from the Social Security Administration, I researched the historical Social Security tax rates which enabled me to compute how much money was sent to the government for my retirement based on my wages, I found the historical S&P 500 annual returns for the stock market over the years, and put all of these numbers into a simple spreadsheet. The basic assumption of the model is that I would have been allowed many decades ago to keep all of that money that was being sent to the government (and political class) and invested it in an S&P 500 taxfree/IRA-like, low fee mutual fund. The results indicated that if the world had been like my spreadsheet, I would have been able to retire with a monthly check that was about two and half times what I will get from the Social Security Administration. This estimates takes into account the drastic reduction in stock market values from the "Great Recession." If I had played it more conservatively and invested in one year Treasury notes over that time I would have been able to retire with 50% more that what I will get from Social Security. Thus, I am tired of the political class telling me how great their program is and how dangerous it would have been if I had managed my retirement wealth, the math proves them wrong.
• Of course, we have constantly heard how the Obama stimulus package saved the economy and how many jobs it saved and created. Forget the fact, that unemployment is much higher than anyone in the Obama administration said it would be if the stimulus package was passed, let's do some simple math using only the administration's numbers. In a series of articles in late October, 2009, the Associated Press took a look at what effect the stimulus package was having. At that time, the Obama administration was claiming that 650,000 jobs had been created or saved. The AP and Reason magazine were relatively close in their estimates of how much of the stimulus package had been spent up to that point, about $180 billion. If you do the simple math of dividing the number of jobs created and saved, Obama's own numbers, and divide that into how much was spent to create and save them, you come out to about $277,000 per job. You cannot solve a recession when your policies cost over a quarter million per job. Didn't anyone do the math at the White House, these are not good numbers.
• Forget math, how about basic counting skills. The 650,000 jobs at that time should have been considered a best case estimate. Subsequent Associated Press reports found that in many, many cases, jobs saved/created were double counted, in some cases stimulus money was given to people as raises but those people were counted as saved jobs, and it the best example of bad math skills, a Georgia day care center said its stimulus money saved 129 jobs - that is one big day care center. If the political class cannot even count, how can we expect them to fix anything and fix it efficiently and with integrity?
• Back to math skills. The Obama administration has claimed from day one that it must incur large spending deficits and higher national debt in order to drag the country out of the recession. So far, results have certainly been lack luster with high unemployment persisting and GDP down to less than 2% a year. Apparently, no one in the administration took a look at what happened to the economy during the 1940s or if they did, they did not understand the math of the U.S. economy during that time. Between 1945 and 1948, the budget of the Federal government shrank by almost 68%, unemployment never got above 4% and the size of the U.S. economy grew by almost 21%. These are official U.S. Government figures. These good economic things happened despite the fact that over ten million Americans came home from the war and assimilated into the domestic U.S. economy. Thus, relative to the 1940s, the Obama administration is doing the exact opposite of everything that worked to transition the U.S. economy from a war time footing to a peace time economy. Just look at the math.
• In the first two years of the Obama administration, 2009 and 2010, and likely for 2011 also, his administration will incur a Federal deficit in these three years of over four TRILLION dollars, running an annual deficit of between $1.4 and $1.5 TRILLION. Now for the silly math. The President has this irrational obsession of raising the taxes on those Americans that make more than $250,000 a year by 4%, the levels before the Bush tax cuts, insistently saying that these people need to pay more in taxes to get the deficit under control. Good math or silly math? I went to the IRS website where I was able to get the official income levels by income bands for 2008. Using some simple, elementary math, I was able to construct a spreadsheet model that accurately predicts what the incremental tax hike would generate in additional taxes and the impact it would have on the deficit. The result is less than Mr. Obama would have you believe. The math shows that raising the taxes on these American would generate an additional $70 billion a year in tax revenue, or reduce the annual Federal deficit by a whopping 5%. The math just does not support Obama's deficit reduction assertion: ignorance of the math or arrogant in his assumptions that we are too dumb to figure it out? The problem with the deficit is that this administration spends too much, not that the rich are not taxed enough. [Note: this $70 billion estimate is a solid estimate, at least in the government's mind. According to a recent Associated Press article, Congressional analysts estimate that that the incremental amount of tax revenue from raising taxes on the rich would be about $700 billion over the next decade or... $70 billion a year, our estimate.]
• Another Federal deficit/tax the rich exercise. About six months ago, Fortune magazine estimated the total wealth, not the income, of the richest 400 Americans. If you added up their total wealth, you found that the richest 400 Americans were worth just under $3 TRILLION. Thus, if the government could somehow confiscate the wealth of these richest Americans as a one time tax levy, their total wealth would not even cover the Federal budget deficit that Obama will ring up during just his first two years in office, never mind the deficit already in place or predicted for the future. Do the math, you cannot tax the rich enough to eliminate the deficit even if you took everything they owned, the math just does not work. Given that the rich pay the vast amount of the government's budget anyway, once you took their wealth, you would still have to raise taxes on everyone else to cover the shortfall from the rich who are unlikely to try and become rich again if the government is just going to take it. The Federal deficit is a spending problem, not a government income problem, the math does not lie.
• More about deficit spending math. An Associated Press article form September 13, 2010, quoted Congressional analysts' estimates that if the Bush tax credits were allowed to expire for ALL Americans, an additional $400 billion a year would flow to the Federal government. However, even if everyone paid more in taxes, we would still be a TRILLION short relative to the Obama administration's annual spending history and plans. Thus, even this math proves we have a spending problem, not a taxing and income problem.
• Earlier this year, the President publicly claimed that for every dollar the government spent on pre-school education, the country gets back $10 in value. I wondered at the time how anyone could come up with that kind of math calculating how a dollar spent today will turn into $10 worth of benefit decades later. Before I went too crazy trying to figure out that math, the President's own HHS Cabinet Secretary released a report that showed the benefits from the Headstart pre-school program and other similar Federal programs had no lasting effect at all on the children involved with the programs. Thus, the 10-to-1 ratio the President talked about was obviously faulty or deliberately deceiving math. In either case, the administration's own people proved his math to be wrong.
• Talk about ridiculous math, consider a September 12, 2010 Associated Press article about the earthquake clean up process going on in Haiti. According to the article, the United States has spent $98.5 million of U.S. taxpayer money to clear out 1.2 million cubic yards of ruble. Now, to the math deficient, 1.2 million yards seems like a lot. To the math capable, if you divide the cost ($98.5 million) by the amount of rubble removed (1.2 million cubic yards) you quickly find out that the American taxpayer spent about $82 to move each cubic yard of rubble, or about $3 to move each cubic foot. Two shovelfuls would probably move a cubic foot, how in the world does it cost us $3 to do that? Just do the math.
• One last tax the rich scenario. The President recently tried to sell his tax the rich (those making over $250,000 a year) by claiming that if you allow these Americans to keep their earning they will not spend it and stimulate the economy. The example he gave is that Warren Buffet will not spend his saved taxes and stimulate the economy. But from a math perspective, how many Warren Buffets are there in the country? This is a pathetic example of politicians demonizing a group of Americans, which in this case really do not even exist. 76% of the taxpayers that would be affected by the Obama "tax the rich by 4% more plan" make less than $500,000 a year, hardly Warren Buffet territory. On average, these Americans will retain just $5,000 more in taxes if the Bush tax cuts are kept in place. They are likely to spend it and stimulate the economy if allowed to keep it. 91% of the people affected make less than a million dollars a year, again, hardly Warren Buffet territory. And finally, if you look at the 2008 IRS data, only about 630,000 Americans made over a million dollars that year. If you do the math and divide these 630,000 tax filers with the number of U.S.households, about 115 million, you find that the people most affected by the Obama obsession is about .5% of the country. Contrary to Mr. Obama's position, the math shows that you cannot balance the budget on about .5% of the population.

Getting back to the original question. are politicians that deficient in math that they cannot see what their policies and programs are really worth or are they so arrogant that they know their programs do not work but assume we are too ignorant to understand the basic math of their reality? When you think about it, it does not matter. By denying the reality of the math, the political class continues to under serve or misserve the country with programs that are incoherent with the reality of our times, as defined by simple math concepts.

Until we can elect competent math people for Washington, we will continue to be fed lies and wrong information which is no way to run any entity, especially one that controls what happens to our tax dollars. Two steps from "Love My Country, Loathe My government" come into play here. First, Step 1 would reduce the size of the Federal government by 10% a year for the next five years. Given that the political class does not know how to accurately count or does not want to accurately count how our tax dollars are spent, the only real solution is to give them less tax dollars to deal with. Step 39 would institute term limits, preventing the currently math deficient political class from staying in office longer than necessary.

Mark Twain popularized the saying: "there are lies, damn lies and statistics." If that was updated for our current day government it would probably read like: "there are lies, damn lies and politicians." In any case, keeping our current politicians in office does not add up.

Our new 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.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/

The BP Oil Spill, Our Political Class, and Pollution of The World

Consider the following examples of pollution that were presented in an article by Ronald Bailey that appeared in the October, 2010 issue of Reason magazine (after reading the four examples, figure out what they have in common):

• The Nigerian government owns all of that country's petroleum resources. Since 1966, over 456 million gallons of that state-owned oil has been spilled which is comparable to having an Exxon Valdes disaster every year since 1966. Although oil accounts for 90% of Nigeria's exports and 80% of the government's revenues, the Nigeria political class has handled the industry so poorly that thew national petroleum company is now insolvent from a financial perspective. The risk of more pollution from spills is likely to increase as the Nigeria government starts drilling in more remote and dangerous terrain. Mr. Bailey notes that the Wall Street Journal's ranking of countries in order of economic freedom, places Nigeria at 106 out of 183 countries that were ranked, describing Nigeria as "mostly unfree," i.e. the government runs most of the operations in the country.
• In China, a country that ranks 140th out of 183 in economic freedom (another "mostly unfree" nation), 62 underground coal fires have been burning since the 1960s. These fires started when the country's communist government ran the entire coal industry in the country. The underground coal fires burn more than 20 million tons of coal annually, contributing 2-3% of the entire world's total fossil fuel greenhouse gases.
• Haiti is ranked 141, just after China on the economic freedom scale, and is also designated as "mostly unfree." According to Mr. Bailey's article, Haiti is currently 98% deforested, making it highly susceptible to storm and hurricane damage. 95% of Haiti's real estate property is owned by the government, giving private Haitian citizens no reason to protect their own property since they own virtually none of the property in Haiti. Haiti shares the same island with the Dominican Republic where virtually no large scale deforestation has occurred so it must be something in how each country manages it's assets that result in the dramatic difference from an environmental perspective.
• In central Asia, the Aral Sea, the fourth largest lake in the world in 1960, it has shrunk by almost 70% in size since then. Throughout that time, the central communist government in Moscow had repeatedly diverted feeding rivers away from the Aral to support large scale irrigation projects in the Asian deserts of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. These now independent countries get poor economic freedom ratings of 82 and 158, respectively.

As you probably guessed it, in every example, the source of the pollution was caused by each country's political class, who rule in a strongly undemocratic manner, where property rights and personal freedom is minimized. The point Mr. Bailey is making is that when faceless government bureaucrats manage their country's' problems, they are unlikely to have a personal stake in the how things are done, just how to get the desired or demanded results. Since these bureaucrats and politicians do not personally own their country's property, they have no stake in protecting them. As a result, four of the world's worst environmental disasters can directly track their source to government actions.

Unfortunately, dictatorships do not have a monopoly on the pollution of their countries. Consider a few examples what the United States government has done to Mother Nature in our nation:

• The Department of Defense generates 400,000 tons of hazardous waste a year, which is more then the waste generated by the five largest chemical companies in the country combined, and this mountain of waste is outside the enforcement capability of the Environmental Protection Agency. In other words, the biggest potential polluter in the country, the Federal government, does not have to abide by the same rules that the rest of us have to abide by.
• The Tinker, Oklahoma Air Force base was supposed to recycle all of its hazardous waste byproducts but until recently decided to sell it, not recycle it. Tests have found higher than expected pollution levels from these materials in the underground water sources close to the surface.
• The U.S. Army's Rocky Mountain Arsenal is only six miles outside of Denver, Colorado. One source I found called the arsenal the "most polluted piece of ground in America." It cost $40 million to clean up the arsenal's 600,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil, soil that was identified as contaminated back in the early 1950s.
• The Federal government runs the 59 Tennessee Valley Authority power plants. While these power plants expels large amounts of greenhouse gases every year, they too are exempt from Federal environmental regulation.

The same effect is going on in these Federal government examples as the examples pointed out by Mr. Bailey throughout the world. These properties are owned by the government and run by the politicians, they have no personal stake in preserving the properties since they do not personally own them. As a result, the biggest pollution source in this country is the very government that is supposed to prevent the pollution and which has exempted itself from its own regulation and oversight.

Which brings us to the government's role in the BP oil spill:

• No one seemed to care that those government employees that were supposed to safeguard the Gulf from an oil spill were either busy surfing the Net for pornography, accepting vacation trips and gifts from the same companies they were supposed to be regulating, were busy setting up career changes to move to the same companies they were supposed to be monitoring for safety, or were neglecting to do the required number of rig inspections. These employees had no personal stake in the safety of the Gulf, they did not own it (the United States government owns it), and the political class obviously gave them no incentive or direction to take a personal ownership stake in its safety.
• The political class legislated a trivial $75 million cap on liability for environmental and economic damages from an oil spill. This released the oil companies operating in the Gulf from having any kind of corporate stake in the environmental condition of the Gulf, they could just buy their way out of a oil spill for a relatively nominal amount of money.
• And the most atrocious piece of political class legislation, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 encouraged and incented the oil companies to go further and further out in the Gulf for oil drilling. The further out they went, the less and less they had to pay the Federal government in royalties. The chance for making billions in profits at the risk of millions in fines made the safety of the Gulf environment secondary.

We trusted environmental safety to our politicians, all of which all over the world caused some of the greatest environmental disasters the earth has ever seen. These politicians were in charge but were not responsible for the ensuing disasters. In all cases, they had no personal stake or ownership of the resources they were supposed to be safeguarding. The scary thing about this phenomenon in America is that the Federal government owns almost two thirds of the physical land in this country. Imagine the potential for widespread ecological damage like Rocky Mt. Arsenal, Tinker Air Force Base, and the Tennessee Valley Authority coal plants.

Several steps from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" would address these issues:

• Step 1 would downsize the size of government by 10% a year for five years. Included in this downsizing would be the selling of the 70,000 or so government buildings that no longer serve a purpose (as we discussed in a previous post) and should also include the sell off of government land, with proceeds going to reduce our national debt. If the right conditions and laws for private ownership were put in place, people, companies (oil and mineral exploration companies), and organizations (e.g. the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society) could own Federal land, have a personal stake in keeping that land safe, and would be placed under the enforcement authority of the EPA.
• Step 34 would replace Congressional members sitting on Congressional committees that are responsible for the Federal departments and agencies that end up polluting public lands, i.e. they would have a personal stake, if not a property ownership stake, in protecting the earth. In the BP oil spill case, any Congressional person sitting on those committees that oversaw the Interior Department's operations, those operations that were negligent in safeguarding the Gulf, wold be removed from their committee post. Before these politicians are removed form their post, they would remove those federal employees from the posts which they failed at. This would put a federal employee's career stake in play regarding public land, air, and water when a personal ownership stake is not possible.
• While Step 7 would prevent any politician from accepting campaign donations from anyone or any organization except a private citizen, a short term solution in the spirit of this step would not allow any politician to accept campaign donations from any industry that the politician has Congressional committee oversight responsibility for. In the BP case, no politician sitting on any committee responsible for oil exploration and safety would be allowed to accept campaign donations form that industry.

The main point to take away from Mr. Bailey's article and this post is destroy the myth that government and politicians are caretakers of the earth. They are not trusted caretakers, mainly because they have no actual or administrative stake in keeping the earth whole. Another example where "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you" is not the case. Make them accountable by dumping the incumbents in the fall elections and making sure that the three steps above are implemented to ensure that accountability is instituted, from the lowest Federal employee to the highest ranking Federal department heads and Congressional members.

Our new 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.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/