"Try To Pare Things Down. Very Few Moves Do A Lot.... No American Politician Ever Said

“Try to pare things down. Very few moves do a lot.”

It is no surprise that the Washington political class runs a very inefficient and ineffective Federal government:

• Medicare and Medicaid lose upwards of $100 billion a year to waste and outright criminal fraud.
• Social Security loses about $100 billion a year to waste and outright criminal fraud.
• Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are well on their way to financial collapse.
• The IRS readily admits that it fails to collect almost $400 billion a year from tax evaders.
• The IRS has devolved into a political tool to suppress the voting and First Amendment rights of American citizens.
• The National Science Foundation has wasted billions of dollars over time on such idiotic research such as finding out when dogs became best friends, determining if online dating sites are racists, etc.
• Federal housing and food assistance welfare programs waste billions of dollars every year.
• Obama Care is turning out to be the worst piece of legislation ever enacted.
• The nation’s infrastructure is crumbling under our feet despite that fact being known and a reality for years.
• The Federal railroad system known as Amtrak has lost tens of billions of dollars since its inception.
• Our borders still leak.
• Our public schools still under educate our kids.

We could go on and on about other failures but you get the idea, politicians make life very complicated with contorted programs and laws that almost never work. 

The American political class has turned our political processes and the Federal government into Jabba the Hutt from Star Wars. Jabba is a large, formless, tyrannical life form that sucks up resources but provides no societal benefit in return. If that does not summarize the Federal government today then I have no idea what does.

As we proposed in “Love My Country, Loathe My Government,” we need to get to a point in Washington where things get simplified in order to get resolved. Rather than focusing on far fewer problems and making getting some of them resolved, our politicians bounce around from perceived crisis to perceived crisis, resolving nothing.

Let’s consider a fictitious,yet realistic, example of how American politicians make our lives more complicated, more expensive, and more confounding how they never resolve an issue:

The Coyote Principle

California

• The Governor of California is jogging with his dog along a nature trail. A coyote jumps out and attacks the Governor's dog, then bites the Governor.
• The Governor starts to intervene, but reflects upon the movie "Bambi" and then realizes he should stop because the coyote is only doing what is natural.
• He calls animal control. Animal Control captures the coyote and bills the state $200 testing it for diseases and $500 for relocating it.
• He calls a veterinarian. The vet collects the dead dog and bills the State $200 testing it for diseases.
• The Governor goes to hospital and spends $3,500 getting checked for diseases from the coyote and on getting his bite wound bandaged.
• The running trail gets shut down for 6 months while Fish & Game conducts a $100,000 survey to make sure the area is now free of dangerous animals.
• The Governor spends $50,000 in state funds implementing a "coyote awareness program" for residents of the area.
• The State Legislature spends $2 million to study how to better treat rabies and how to permanently eradicate the disease throughout the world.
• The Governor's security agent is fired for not stopping the attack. The state spends $150,000 to hire and train a new agent with additional special training re the nature of coyotes.
• PETA protests the coyote's relocation and files a $5 million suit against the state.

TEXAS

• The Governor of Texas is jogging with his dog along a nature trail. A coyote jumps out and attacks his dog.
• The Governor shoots the coyote with his state-issued pistol and keeps jogging. The Governor has spent $.50 on a .45 ACP hollow point cartridge.
• The buzzards eat the dead coyote.

Sound familiar, you could apply this principle to anything Washington touches. But it was not always that way. Two of the most important pieces of legislation passed by Washington in the past fifty years, were less than 34 pages long. The Voters’ Right Act was about two pages long and the Civil Rights Act was about 34 pages long.

But that is not the efficiency and positive results we get today. If we had politicians from the 1960s, Obama Care might have been only a page or two long, comprising the following three simple principles:

1. Simply raise Medicaid income levels to qualify more lower earning Americans for this Federal insurance program.
2. Allow kids to stay on family policies until age 26. 
3. Recoup the $100 billion lost annually in Medicare and Medicaid criminal fraud and use it to sure those with pre existing conditions.

This is how simple Obama Care could have been. Basically the same results we have seen since Obama Care was rolled out without all of the agony and complications. Instead, today’s politicians gave us the following contorted and complicated (and failed) health care legislation insanity:

1. 2,000 pages of legislation.
2. 10,000 pages of regulations.
3. A massive and expensive Federal government online health insurance exchange process, to the tune of billions of dollars, that failed miserably out of the gate and continues to be a major operations problem.
4. Numerous and expensive state based online health insurance exchanges processes. to the tune of at least hundreds of millions of dollars, the majority of which never performed anywhere close to the promise and many of which have already been shut down or may get shut down because they simply do not work.
5. A large and expensive and mostly useless operations system to handle customer calls and registration for insurance policies that has malfunctioned from day one.
6. Two massive subsidy programs to pay and subsidize large insurance companies for their loses.
7. The forcing of upwards of 7 million people to unnecessarily lose their current insurance coverage.
8. Millions of people unnecessarily lost access to their preferred doctors, hospitals, and current treatment programs.
9. Millions of Americans unnecessarily got exposed to identity theft because of faulty data systems processes within the Obama Care process.

“Try to pare things down. Very few moves do a lot.”  Over 10,000 pages of regulations is not paring things down and will accomplish very little. As we have discussed every month over dozens of posts in this blog, by NOT paring things down, the Washington political class has enacted a Jabba The Hutt monstrosity called Obama Care that is not working and will never work.

To show you how screwed up Washington is from a functionality perspective, the Heritage Foundation recently compared six major projects that were COMPLETED in less time than it has taken the Keystone Pipeline to be STUDIED:

• It took four years and 600,000 rivets to build the Golden state bridge. Since its construction, over 2 billion cars have crossed the span.
• It took five years to build the Hoover Dam that at its base the dam is as thick as two footballs fields measured end-to-end.
• It took one year to build Boeing’s Everett factory which the Guinness Book of World records claims is largest building in the world by volume. 
• It took two years to build the Pentagon which housed 30,000 people during World War II and which has 17 miles of corridors.
• It took two years to build Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta airport which covers 4,700 acres and is the largest air passenger terminal complex in the world.
• It took two years to build Beaver stadium in Oregon which is now the second largest stadium in college football.

Thank goodness today's Washington politicians were not involved in the Voting Rights Act. Fifty years later that might still be studying it and adding thousands of pages of regulations to it. If today’s politicians were working on putting a man on the moon it may take a century whereas Kennedy proposed that it take less than a decade, which it did.

“Try to pare things down. Very few moves do a lot.” And one move that could do a lot, one simple move, would be to impose term limits on all current and future Washington politicians. Many of the current members of Congress have been in Congress for decades. They are the ones responsible for making life much more complicated, expensive, and less palatable to Americans. They are the Jabba The Hutts of our generation. Time to move them out and find people that can focus on far fewer distractions and finally resolve the big issues of our day. To help pare things down, please go to our term limits website at:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

Because really, when Jabba is your role model, any replacement has to be better.

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

November, 2014, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: Bingo Busting in Mississippi, Killing the American Dream, and Keystone Pipeline Insanity

It is the start of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity that has been dumped on us by the worst set of politicians to ever hold office in the history of this country. From wasteful spending to bad priorities to general ineffectiveness, the insanity rolling out of Washington and other political centers and government around the country seems to be accelerating as the idiocy of our political times increases.

Last month we set a record by needing almost two full weeks of posts to get all of the insanity documented and discussed. Given what I see today, we will be hard pressed not to get close to or exceed that record of insanity this month. It keeps getting worse and worse and the effectiveness of the political class gets less and less.

The first post in this month’s insanity can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/11/november-2014-part-1-political-class.html

1) It never ceases to amaze us at how much and in so many varied ways that politicians and governments at all levels can waste taxpayer wealth, especially when there are so many other more important priorities and needs facing Americans. Consider a recent article by Steve Wilson writing for the website, watchdog.org.

Consider the track record of a Mississippi law enforcement organization:

• The Mississippi Gaming Commission’s Charitable gaming Division employs eight dedicated law enforcement agents. 
• This division is responsible for regulating the state’s…wait for it… bingo industry.
• Those eight agents have made four arrests since 2003 or one arrest about every three and a half years.
• The good news is that the agency used to have twenty full time law enforcement agents to make sure bingo games do not break the law.
• Now, the agency has issued 279 citations and collected fines of $176,672 since 2003, according to Rodney Smith, division director II with the Charitable Gaming Division. But that only averages out to about 25 citations and about $16,000 in fines per year.
• If we assume that each of those 20 law enforcement people earn $40,000 a year in salary, than the agency is paying out about $800,000 a year in salaries just to collect $16,000 in fines, a horrible pay back on taxpayer dollars. And that $800,000 does not include overhead expenses, benefits, etc. making the payback even worse. 
• At $40,000 a head in annual salary, the cost benefit ratio is about 50, meaning that for every $50 that Mississippi taxpayers put out for this agency, they get back one dollar for their efforts.

Talk about insane priorities.

2) Five years after the recession has ended, after five years of the Federal Reserve printing money to prop up the economy, over five years after the Obama administration spent over $800 billion to stimulate the economy, the political class has still not learned how to manage and support a growing economy. Food stamp enrollment is still sky high, long term unemployment is still high, the real unemployment rate is still over 10%, and household incomes have DROPPED during the post recession period, an unheard of historical event.

But things are probably worse than these top line numbers show. Consider a recent USAToday article by Erika Rawes that showed how the middle class could longer afford the following six luxuries and necessities of life:

- Vacations - A recent Statista survey found that this year 54% of people gave up purchasing big ticket items like TVs or electronics so they can go on a vacation. Others made financial sacrifices like reducing or eliminating trips to the movies (47%), reducing or eliminating restaurants meals (43%), or avoiding purchasing small ticket items like new clothing (43%) just to afford a vacation. Traditionally, middle class households did not have to make financial sacrifices just to take a vacation.

- New cars - Historically, middle class families could easily afford a new car every once in a while by choosing from a host of cars and brands that offered moderately prices cars for moderate income people. However, Interest.com recently analyzed the prices of new cars and trucks, as well as the median incomes across more than two dozen major cities.

Unfortunately, they found that new cars and trucks were now not affordable to most middle-earners: "Median-income families in only one major city [Washington DC - no surprise there] can afford the average price Americans are paying for new cars and trucks nowadays." As of 2013, new cars are priced at $32,086, according to the study which is about 60% of the median household income in this country. 

To pay off debt - Once reason Americans cannot afford vacations and new cars as easily as in the past is because the heavy debt load they are carrying, meaning that a lot of household income is going to paying off debt and not other parts of the economy. Consider the findings from Debt.org: "More than 160 million Americans have credit cards. The average credit card holder has at least three cards. On average, each household with a credit card carries more than $15,000 in credit card debt."

This is just credit card debt. It does not include mortgage debt, car financing debt, student loans, health care debt, etc. We have so much debt that, just like vacations and new cars, we cannot even afford our debt any more if you believe the work and analyses done Money-Zine.

Money-Zine evaluated household debt growth and income growth over the past few decades and found that "back in 1980, the consumer credit per person was $1,540, which was 7.3% of the average household income of $21,100. In 2013, consumer debt was $9,800 per person, which was 13.4% of the average household income of $72,600. This means debt increased 70% faster than income from 1980 through 2013."

Emergency savings - it used to be that households had enough money left over every month to have a “rainy day” fund inc ase expenses popped up unexpectedly or there was job loss. The rule of thumb back in those days was to have enough cash saved up to survive a six month financial crisis.

However, today it seems like most households cannot even find enough left over funds to save for any kind of emergency. A Bankrate survey found that:

• Only around one out of four households have six months of emergency money saved. 
• Another one-fourth have no emergency savings at all.
• The remaining household have a small to moderate amount of savings, but not enough to cover six months of expenses.

- Retirement savings - Social Security was never intended to be a person’s sole source of financial support during retirement. Middle class workers were encouraged to also set aside money for their retirement. However, the reality today is that nearly half of those who don't save for retirement say it's because they simply don't have the money.

Even worse, around 20% of people near 65 have not saved anything for retirement at all, and the majority of people, 59%, think that they don't have enough money saved for retirement.

- Medical care - Needless to day, many middle class Americans can no longer afford medical care either: 

• A Forbes article published data indicating that middle class workers in large companies "face nearly $5,000 in premiums, co-payments, deductibles and other forms of co-insurance."
• A study by Feeding America found that a 66% of households say they have had to choose between paying for food and paying for medical care and that a depressing 31% say they have to make that choice each and every month.
• The Federal Department of Health and Human Services report that about 108 million people in the U.S. have no dental coverage and even those who are covered may have trouble getting the dental care they need because dental health insurance is too expensive or does not fully cover more expensive needs.
• According to the Centers For Disease Control, nearly one in four American adults between the ages of 20 and 64 have untreated dental caries.

The American middle class used to be the American dream. Now that dream is more of a nightmare with vacations, cars, medical case, debt management, etc. being more of a luxury than the end product of the American dream. That is what happens when we trust our economic fates to ill suited and economically ignorant politicians and the insane and ineffective economic policies they implement.

3) One last piece of insanity for today. There has been much debate and discussion on whether to build the so-called Keystone Pipeline that would bring crude oil out of western Canada down into U.S. Gulf refineries. Today is not a discussion on the merits and downsides of building such a pipeline but how screwed up the decision making process is in Washington today.

Six years have gone by as the Federal government has done study after study to determine whether or not to build the pipeline. This has not included any construction time or progress, this is just the time to examine and study the permitting process. 

To show you how screwed up Washington is from a functionality perspective, the Heritage Foundation recently compared six major projects that were COMPLETED in less time than it has taken the Keystone Pipeline to be studied:

• It took four years and 600,000 rivets to build the Golden state bridge. Since its construction, over 2 billion cars have crossed the span.
• It took five years to build the Hoover Dam that at its base the dam is as thick as two footballs fields measured end-to-end.
• It took one year to build Boeing’s Everett factory which the Guinness Book of World records claims is largest building in the world by volume. 
• It took two years to build the Pentagon which housed 30,000 people during World War II and which has 17 miles of corridors.
• It took two years to build Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta airport which covers 4,700 acres and is the largest air passenger terminal complex in the world.
• It took two years to build Beaver stadium in Oregon which is now the second largest stadium in college football.

Six major and important structures built in far less time it has taken he Federal government to study a simple pipeline project. 

Is it any surprise that nothing ever gets accomplished by the political class and the government bureaucracy it operates when a simple environmental study takes so long to complete? No wonder we are still losing the war on drugs, our public schools are still failing, our borders still leak, we still do not have a national energy policy and strategy and why yesterday we found out it took 17 years for the Federal government to develop a DRAFT set of regulations concerning Tic Tac mints. Insane and pathetic.

Bingo enforcement overkill, just the plain killing of the middle class American dream, and overkill analysis of a simple pipeline. Such insanity that does not end today.

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