August, 2019, Part 2, By The Numbers: Wasting Billions In Baltimore and New York

On a periodic basis we do some posts that fall under the theme of “by the numbers.” Rather than trust what the American political tells us about reality, we like to examine the real numbers and the real reality in the world to understand what is actually going on. Relying on politicians, and their cohorts in the media, to tell us what is reality is always a sucker bet. They have their own agendas and goals, usually centering around their needs and self-enrichment. So we need to look at the reality of the numbers to determine what is really going on.

Previous analyses of “by the numbers” can be accessed by entering the phrase in the search box above. We will do a few “by the numbers” posts this month where we look at the numbers to truly find out how good, not likely, or bad, most likely, the American political class is doing in managing our tax dollars, protecting our freedoms, and resolving major issues that affect all of us. 

1) According to a recent article on the Conservative and Free website, the Federal agency, Housing and Urban Development, is curious as to where billions of Federal taxpayer dollars were spent, or wasted:

• $15.7 billion from the Federal government has been sent to the city of Baltimore over the past two years.
• But despite this grant and the other billions and billions that have been given to the city over time, it still has a poverty rate of about 24%, 60% higher than the national poverty level.
• If that $15.7 billion had been given directly to every Baltimore resident, each person would have received over $25,000, a family of four would have gotten $100,000.
• Obviously, given the poverty situation, that money really never made it down to those living in the city, so what happened?
• The murder rate in Baltimore is 56 murders per 100,000 residents compared to El Salvador’s 50, Guatemala’s 22 and Honduras’ 38.
• Thus, the murder rate in the city is higher than the murder rate in third world countries.
• And while Chicago gets more press for its number of murders every year, at 24 murders per 100,000 residents, it is less than half of what Baltimore’s rate is.
• Every week, 6 people on average are murdered in the city.

So while the city’s Congressman is busy berating hard working border patrol agents thousands of miles away, the people he represents are not getting the benefit of the billions and billions of dollars that have flowed from the Federal government to Baltimore. And the numbers show they continue to live in a violent and poor city. The numbers do not lie.

2) According to the Godfather Politics website, the Mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio and his wife, may actually be worse at financial management than the wasteful spending of Baltimore politicians:

• Alicia F. Luke wrote back in March that the Mayor’s wife cannot account for the $850 million she was given by her husband for a city mental health project.
• His wife, Chirlane McCray, runs the ThriveNYC mental health program.
• After three years, the organization failed to keep records of it spending and has badly missed its objectives and targets.
• ThriveNYC claims it has 417 metrics but fails to track many of these metrics.
• One metric called for the program to work with 29 hospitals to serve 78,000 mothers with postnatal depression every year.
• But over the past two years, only 28,000 patients were screened, only 35% of objective, and worse yet, only 570 patients were actually offered help.
• The expectation that between 12,000 and 15,000 were supposed to be offered help, meaning that the program achieved only between 3.8% and 4.7% of its objective.

A lot of money for very little return. And worse, no one knows where the money went since the Mayor’s wife and her cohorts have lousy record keeping skills and/or intent, leading one to assume the worse: the money was a front for fraud and the stealing of taxpayer wealth.

3) But the numbers show that de Blasio’s wife is not the only family member that can waste, lose, and screw up when it comes to taxpayer money. Consider the failure and related numbers of one of his own doomed projects:

• Apparently de Blasio was high on a program called Renewal which was supposed to boost the performance of some of NYC’s lower performing schools.
• The program has failed miserably at a cost of $773 million.
• As a result of the failure, it is being shut down.
• Since many of the lower performing schools were not helped, the city and the Mayor will now just shut down 100 of the failing city schools.
• Let’s play with some numbers, starting with the reality that there are 1,700 public schools in NYC.
• Rather than have the Mayor and his minions administer, and waste, $773 million, for no measurable positive return, would if that money had simply been disbursed to the worst performing 20% of the 1,700 schools?
• That means the 340 lowest performing schools would have gotten a cash infusion of just under $2.3 million EACH.
• Best Buy currently has a nice HP 14” laptop computer for sale which means that each low performing school, if they had gotten that money directly, would be able to purchase just 7,500 computers for EACH school, obviously much more than they would need to give each kid in their school a new laptop for educational purposes.
• In fact, given that there are about 1.1 million public school kids in NYC, EVERY student in EVERY school could have been bought TWO of these HP laptops and had money to spare.
• Let’s look at it another way: it appears that the starting salary for a new teacher in NYC schools earns about $60,000.
• This means that the $773 million that the Mayor’s program wasted could have theoretically been used to hire almost 13,000 new teachers for a year.
• Rather than hiring 13,000 for a year, we could theoretically hire 2,600 new teachers and pay them for five years with this wasted $773 million.
• If we took these 2,600 new teachers and spread across the worse schools, each school would have another 7-8 teachers on staff to help turn around these poorly performing schools.
• Instead, there are no new computers and no new teachers, the NYC education process is not any better, and the city taxpayers are out $773 million.

Look, I know the computer numbers and teacher numbers estimated above only exist in a perfect world. But just magnitude of these estimates are large enough to show how much more good could have been done with the straight hiring of new teachers and the purchasing of new computers for NYC kids getting a less than stellar education vs. letting politicians and bureaucrats like de Blasio and his minions handle the money.

So, between husband and wife, the de Blasio family has spent or skimmed over $1.5 billion off of the city’s tax coffers with really nothing to show for it. Nice work if you can get it, the numbers do not lie.

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/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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

September, 2017, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: Accounting Scandal At HUD, The Clinton Crime Syndicate Update and More, ,

It is the beginning of another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us.

1) Democrats flipped out when they found out that Ben Carson was going to take over the Federal department, Housing and Urban (HUD). He had no experience in the Federal government bureaucracy, as if that was a good thing given how badly the Federal government bureaucracy actually worked and he had no housing industry experience. They seem to ignore the fact that he grew up poor in housing projects, giving him first hand experience with government housing programs, and that he is really, really smart.

So smart that just being months in the job he uncovered some really nasty goings on with HUD:

• One of the first things Carson did once in place was to conduct an audit of the HUD organization.
• The turned up an amazing $520 billion in bookkeeping errors.
• Which makes you wonder how the Obama administration and their administration of HUD somehow missed this whopping problem.
• According to the auditors: “The total amounts of errors corrected in HUD’s notes and consolidated financial statements were $516.4 billion and $3.4 billion, respectively.” 

Not bad for someone the Democrats thought was unqualified for the job. Makes you wonder how much of that half a trillion dollars in bookkeeping errors was siphoned off by criminals, political friends of the Democrats, or just pure wasteful and inefficient government. Also makes you wonder how many more trillions of dollars are also being hidden by “bookkeeping errors” throughout the Federal government bureaucracy.

2) It has always been our opinion that Hillary Clinton,while Secretary of State under Obama, was essentially operating a crime syndicate that probably even the Mafia envied. The syndicate tied together three components:

1. The ability of Hillary Clinton to grant favors and direct, or misdirect State Department affairs, to suit certain parties.
2. These parties would offer up large donations to the Clinton Foundation in exchange for access to Hillary and the favors she could grant them for contributing to the Foundation.
3. These same parties would often give husband Bill Clinton huge “speaking fees” after Hillary had granted special favors, making Bill and Hillary richer and richer.

Proof and examples of how this crime syndicate worked was recently uncovered by Judicial Watch which forced the government to release Clinton State Department emails via a Freedom Of Information Act request, as reported by Kyle Becker, writing for the Independent Review website last month:

• Many of the released emails involved Huma Abedin who was Clinton’s most trusted top aid during her time as Secretary of State and as a Presidential candidate.
• These emails had not been disclosed earlier even though Clinton claimed that all of her State Department emails had been turned over, according to Judicial Watch: “The documents included 91 Clinton email exchanges not previously turned over to the State Department, bringing the known total to date to at least 530 emails that were not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over to the State Department, and further contradicting a statement by Clinton that, “as far as she knew,” all of her government emails had been turned over to the State Department. [...]”
• Many of the emails showed how Clinton Foundation donors used their contributions for access to and favors from Hillary as Secretary of State.
• Howard Buffett, Jr., the grandson of Warren Buffett, sought a meeting for his father, Howard Sr., with Hillary Clinton to discuss 'food security,' a meeting that Bill Clinton aid Ben Schwerin tried to arrange through Abedin, which she said “we will take care of this.”
• In April, 2009, Puerto Rican telecom executive, Miguel Lausell, who supposedly made a personal one million dollar donation to the Clinton Foundation and who was a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, asked Abedin via a third party to push for an acquaintance/friend to be made U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic.
• Also in April, 2009, the Managing Director of a left wing fundraising group called Democracy Alliance emailed Abedin and asked them to “reach out” to someone who was an “extremely loyal supporter” and get that person a job at a senior level in the State Department.
• In all of these emails Abedin always appears to be amenable to providing these favors and is actively involved in the contacts.

The perfect crime syndicate set up.

3) California is not in good fiscal shape, It has unfunded liabilities in the hundreds of billions of dollars. It has high levels of short term and long term debt. It has high levels of poverty and its schools and infrastructure (streets, dams, bridges) are in horrible shape. One would hope that the state political class would be doing all it could to help its legal citizens get better services from the state government.

But as always when dealing with American politicians, hope is a concept that never materializes. According to various news reports:

• According to the Los Angeles Department of Public Social Services, the city of LA paid out about $1.3 billion in welfare payments in 2015 and 2016 to illegal immigrants living in that city.
• That was about 20% of all money paid out by the city in welfare payments in that time period.
• The Department found that 58,000 illegal immigrant families received $602 million in benefits in 2015 and 64,000 families received $675 million in 2016.
• LA county’s total budget for welfare in those two years was about $6 billion, yielding a rate of about 20% of the total budget gong to legal immigrants.

Some may call me racist but really, over a billion dollars given out to people that are not here legally to begin with? How many actual citizens could have received more and better housing options with that $1.3 billion? How many actual citizens could have received relevant job training to get them back into the workforce for that $1.3 billion? How many actual citizens could have received drug addiction treatment to help them turn around their lives? Instead, illegal immigrants, technically criminals, got to use $1.3 billion of taxpayer wealth without doing anything to deserve it.

Okay, that’s my rant for the day. Citizens getting shortchanged in California, rich people get valuable favors from a high ranking government official, and Federal bureaucracy bookkeeping errors that likely costs American taxpayers untold billions of dollars every year. More insanity to follow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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

August, 2017, Part 2,Political Class Insanity: MIsmanaging Taxpayer Wealth From Texas To Kentucky

It is the beginning of another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us.

1) According to Elizabeth Harrington, writing for the Washington Free Beacon on July 26,2017, the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) entity of the Federal government has been very busy wasting taxpayer money in a very original way:

• According to a HUD inspector general report, the organization spent over $800,000 on apartments for people who “did not exist.”
• And this was in just one housing complex (Beverly Place) in one county in Texas.
• Apparently, housing managers at the housing complex defrauded the government and taxpayers by stealing the identities of former tenants and falsifying incomes.
• According to the inspector general’s findings: "Beverly Place's owner did not administer its project-based Section 8 program in accordance with HUD regulations. Specifically, the owner billed HUD for at least 97 tenants who did not exist or whose income eligibility was either falsified or unsupported."
• These so-called “ghost tenants” are people who either never lived in the apartment building or were past tenants who had moved out.

Fortunately, this fraud was uncovered, the people responsible are looking at prison time, and the government is going after the owners of the apartment complex to recoup the money illegally paid out. But did I mention this was only one housing complex in one county? I believe there are over 3,000 counties across the country, how much other fraud do we think the American taxpayer is paying for in the other thousands of counties? Insanity.

2) Okay, HUD seems to be doing a good job of misusing taxpayer wealth but let’s rest assured it is not the only government entity that is inefficient and ineffective in executing its duties. Consider an article by Kelsey Harkness, writing for the Heritage Foundation on July 21,2017, concerning an Obama administration Commerce Department job program:

• A Federal job training program that was supposed to train residents of Kentucky’s coal country to become computer code writers has succeeding in only placing 17 residents into tech jobs at a cost of $2 million. 
• This means it cost well over $100,000 per person placed in a job, hardly an efficient use of training funds.
• The program was supposed to spend $4.5 million through 2019 to train up to 200 people from an economically struggling region of Kentucky, or a job placement cost of $22,500 per placement.
• Instead, less than 9% of the 200 have been trained at a cost that was about five times more expensive than planned.
• Interapt, the company supposed to do the training and receive the Federal funding is closing up shop in Kentucky two years before the program was to end.
• Former students did not have kind words for Interapt: “Interapt was kind of smart,” one woman who participated in the training program said. “They preyed upon underemployed and unemployed people because we were vulnerable.”
• Another former student: “It was a light at the end of a dark tunnel for me, a way to rise up out of the poverty my family has lived in for years and make a bright future for my wife and kids. Now it is a shattered dream.”
• Another student: “It was like a bad joke poorly told, it felt unreal. I never would have imagined that I’d be asked out. I’d poured my heart into this program.”

Despite this massive failure of employment and taxpayer money, the company is trying to expand its program to other parts of the country while again tapping into Federal and state government money. And this is probably just one of many, many other failed job programs that the American taxpayer is funding for missed objectives and the dashing of hopes of desperate Americans everywhere.

3) Washington Democrats did a horrific job running the economy at the beginning of the Obama administration when they had control of the White House and both houses of Congress. As a result, they ran up four consecutive years of annual trillion dollar Federal government spending deficits, the first time any administration came close to exceeding an annual trillion dollar deficit. 

They put the country on a path that would double the national debt from $10 trillion to almost $20 trillion in short eight years. In other words, during the Obama reign, the Federal government overspent its tax revenue stream by about the same amount that ALL previous administrations had overspent their tax revenue streams.

Given this insanely bad handling of the Federal government budget, it should come as no surprise that we now find out that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is flat broke. In fact, according to reporting by the New York Observer and Federal government documents, the Democrats nationally are $3.3 million in debt. The DNC has $7.4 million in bank accounts as assets but owes over $10 million in expenses.

Bottom line: if you cannot efficiently and effectively manage millions of dollars under your own direct control, how can you expected to efficiently and effectively manage trillions of dollars of the Federal government? Given the past years of ever mounting national debt and fiscal mismanagement, you cannot be expected to manage either money streams.

So what did we learn today: HUD cannot manage taxpayer wealth, the Commerce Department, the government entity responsible for the Kentucky training fiasco above, cannot manage taxpayer wealth, and the Democrats cannot manage their own wealth. Strike one, strike two, strike three, the taxpayer loses. More insanity to follow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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

April, 2017, Part 8, Political Class Insanity: Idiocy In Germany, MIscounting In California, Corruption In Maryland, and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us.

Today and for all of the insanity posts this month, let’s start off with a welcome piece of honest political dialog. It comes from a State Department spokesperson. Mark Toner, who is about to start the daily State Department press briefing. In a joking matter, he makes the following quote: "Welcome to the State Department. I think we have some interns in the back. Welcome. Good to see you in this exercise in transparency and democracy."

He then burst out laughing at his own quote, indicating he also knew what a joke the Obama administration has been, especially Mr. Toner’s State Department, when it comes to cover ups, lack of transparency, denial of Freedom of Information Act requests, the prosecution of whistle blowers, etc. But at least it was a little refreshing to finally hear some actual honesty out of Washington as we see from the actual clip of the news conference:

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2016/08/when-even-the-state-department-spokesperson-cant-keep-a-straight-face-about-things-anymore-video/

With that context of honesty, let’s see what other insanity has been going down:

1) California is probably the most socialistic state in the union. They have the most generous welfare programs and have no qualms about giving taxpayer wealth to illegal immigrants. But they are starting to run into the insight of Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money to spend.”

This is especially true when a state’s accounting processes are so fouled up that they find out after the fact that they spend almost $2 billion more than they thought they had spent:

• The Associated Press recently reported that California had miscalculated the expenses of their Medicaid program, Medi-Cal, by $1.9 billion last year.
• This more than doubled the original estimated 2016 budget deficit of $1.6 billion.
• The state spokesman claimed that this was an “accounting error,” obviously a really BIG accounting error.
• The original deficit of $1.6 billion was driven by a shortfall in tax revenue which has now been exploded even bigger by this “accounting” screw up, a screw up that surprised state politicians: “It makes you wonder what else is not right. … When something like this happens, the trust factor gets eroded, and you lose confidence in what’s being provided to you,” said Sen. John Moorlach, a Republican from Costa Mesa who serves on the Senate budget committee.

This example and the article shows how expensive Medicaid has gotten over time. Not only did the program spend almost $2 billion more than it thought it had, overall it spends a whopping $100 billion a YEAR on total Medicaid expenses, expenses that cover a whopping one third of all Californians. Obviously, operating a program that spends $100 billion a year leaves a lot less for other state government programs such as infrastructure, education, etc.

Oh, by the way, the state government also screwed up the accounting for another medical program, the Coordinated Care Initiative. In that case, they double counted some of the savings which created another budget deficit, this valued at $913 million. This is what kills the credibility of any politician, when major accounting errors lose billions of dollars. Insane.

2) Let’ stay out on the west coast. While California politicians were losing billions of dollars, the Seattle mayor was allegedly doing something even more despicable. According to the Seattle Times:

• A 46 year old Washington citizen has sued Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, accusing the mayor of raping and molesting him over several years beginning back in 1986.
• The accuser was 15 years old at the time.
• The lawsuit says Murray abused the teen on numerous occasions for payments of $10 to $20.
• NBC News reported that this is not the first time that Murray has been accused of abusing youths, that the abuse had happened in at least two other instances.

Obviously, the good mayor is assumed innocent until proven otherwise.

3) Let’s jump to the east coast for the next piece of insanity, proving that political class insanity infects the entire country. According to a recent Justice Department arrest warrant, Maryland State Senator Nathaniel Thomas Oaks of Baltimore, Maryland was charged with wire fraud for allegedly accepting illegal payments in exchange for using his official position to benefit an individual on business-related matters.

I will not go through the details of the scam and the FBI investigation but given that the Justice Department saw fit to arrest the good senator, it does not look good for him. If convicted, he faces upwards of 20 years in prison. Another hit against the integrity and credibility of the American political class.

4) But it is not just state government operations that are screwed up. The latest Federal government screw up comes to us courtesy of the Federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) agency:

• The inspector general for HUD did a multi year audit of HUD and their findings were not good.
• Their report found “pervasive material errors” in HUD’s 2015 and 2016 financial statements.
• The total errors in the statements totalled a whopping $516.4 billion that were miscounted.
• But these were not the only problems since the audit by the inspector general found a number of “unresolved audit matters” including the auditors’ inability to “obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to express an opinion.”
• In addition, “this audit report contains 11 material weaknesses, 7 significant deficiencies, and 5 instances of noncompliance with applicable laws and regulations.”

What a mess. A organization that has been around for decades and it still cannot count accurately, massively failing an audit of its books. And if you cannot balance books in a sufficient way to pass the auditors’ review, who knows how many billions of other dollars are being lost from criminal fraud and inefficiencies? Insane.

5) But political class insanity is not restricted to America. Let’s go overseas for this piece of political class insanity:

• German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been a big advocate of allowing millions of Muslim refugees and immigrants to come into Germany.
• However, she recently admitted that by allowing so many refugees and immigrants into the country that German may have also admitted dedicated terrorists: “There is no doubt that among the so many people who have sought shelter in our country were also persons who have become the focus of the security authorities.”
• Great, realizing your mistake after an untold number of terrorists have entered your country does not provide a sense of relief.
• But then Merkel tries to lamely justify her grave mistake on immigration by asserting that: “We should not forget that our country was already in the sights of Islamic terrorism before the many refugees came to us.”
• In other words, “Hey, it’s okay I let terrorists in without thinking, we were already one of their enemies.”

Unfortunately, Germany has been the victim of some of the people that Merkel’s administration allowed into the country so it is little solace to the families of those that have been killed by terror attacks that Merkel now realizes the error of her ways.

That will do it for today’s political class insanity from across the world, from self inflicted terrorism in German to corruption in Maryland to potential perversion in Seattle to miscounting in California. Never underestimate politicians in their ability to surprise us with their idiocy, greed, and other forms of insanity.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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

December, 2015, Part 7, Political Class Insanity: More VA Corruption, Another Stupid Politician Quote, and More

It is the start of another month which means it is time for our monthly review of the latest political class insanity that continually spews forth from America’s politicians. Their actions, words, quotes, incompetency, and general ineptness continue to reinforce our theory that we are currently being served by the worst set of politicians in the history of the nation.

As you read about the latest shenanigans and ineptness of the political class, keep in mind what should be their priorities in these difficult times and compare this list to what they are actually working on:

• NBC recently reported that ISIS forces are getting larger and stronger despite the Obama administration spending billions of dollars on a failed air campaign and military strategy.
• The stock market is stalling.
• Job creation is barely keeping up with population growth.
• Wage growth is anemic, growing just .2% in the second quarter, the lowest quarterly growth since 1982.
• The labor participation rate is at the lowest level in decades because the Obama economy cannot generate enough jobs.
• Thousands of veterans are still not getting the medical care they were promised by the Federal government.
• 45 million Americans are still receiving monthly Federal food assistance.
• Our borders still leak and thousands of illegal immigrant criminals continue to walk our streets.
• Major programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are hurtling towards insolvency and lose hundreds of billions of dollars every year to fraud and mismanagement.
• Our kids are still getting lousy public educations at most public schools.
• The IRS and other government functions seem to be getting their computer systems hacked on a regular basis, exposing tens of millions of Americans to identity theft potential.
• Obama Care is a failure along so many dimensions as health care costs continue to soar despite the Obama promise that they would decrease.
• Annual Federal deficits, while down, are still about half a TRILLION a year meaning that even though the Federal government is collecting more in taxes than ever before, it still cannot run a balanced budget.

Again, keep these real crises in mind as you read what our politicians are actually doing, saying and wasting.

1) When reporting on political class insanity, sometimes you just have to shake your head in disbelief and say out loud you cannot make this stuff up. This is the case with our first topic today,based on a Washington Examiner article from November 24, 2015 by Sarah Westwood. The Veterans Administration (VA) has been under fire and investigation for a while because of their incompetence in providing the promised medical care to our veterans. 

Thus, you would think and hope that the people running the VA would be on their best behavior and be diligent in our taxpayer money at the VA was being spent and used. But alas, that would be a major error. According to the article:

• According to an inspector general’s report, two employees of the VA who allegedly stole $400,000 of taxpayer money from the organization will be allowed to KEEP the money they defrauded from the VA.
• While they did each get pay cuts and demotions, they do not have to return the stolen money
• Diana Rubens and Kimberly Graves were both accused of abusing a program that was used to relocate VA employees who transfer long distances to new jobs within the VA. 
• Rubens fraudulently stole more than $274,000 and Graves stole more than $129,000, according to the agency's inspector general.
• Congressman Jeff Miller was justly outraged by the fraud: "This is not a situation in which VA can have it both ways," Miller said in a letter to VA Secretary Bob McDonald Monday. "In demoting Rubens and Graves, VA has already admitted what they did was wrong. Consequently, the department's failure to recoup the money Rubens' and Graves' unethical behavior enabled them to benefit from defies all logic."
• In a bit of twisted irony, the Congressman pointed out that the VA aggressively goes after veterans or their surviving family members when they accidently get overpayments from the VA but are letting their own employees get away with far more than the typical overpayment to a veteran.
• In even more irony, Alison Hickey, the VA's former top benefits official, stepped down from her position in October amid controversy over the inspector general's findings.

Like I said, you cannot make this stuff up. Steal tax money, get to keep the money you stole, get to keep a job within the VA, get your boss fired, and as always, get Congress all fired up who end up doing nothing. Insanity.

2) There is an old saying that goes something like the following: "It is better to remain silent and thought stupid than to speak up and remove all doubt.” That wisdom certainly applies to a recent sentiment by California Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez. In light of the recent terrorist attack in California, the good Congresswoman issued the following statement: “We let the assault weapons ban, which was led by our Senator Dianne Feinstein, we let that lapse. So you know, multiautomatic round weapons are easily available, even though not in California, but they can cross the state line, as you know.” 

The only problem here is that there is no such thing as a “multiautomatic” weapon. So how are we expected to take her seriously on a very important issue and topic when the Congresswoman is so ignorant of what she is talking about? This is similar to a Colorado Congresswoman who several years ago stated that over time there would no longer be any large capacity magazines left in the world as they got used up:

http://blogs.denverpost.com/thespot/2013/04/03/as-lead-sponsor-in-house-on-gun-legislation-rep-diana-degette-appears-to-not-understand-how-they-work/93506/)

Little did she know that a magazine is refilled when it is empty.

Again, word of advice to politicians: better to remain quiet and thought stupid than to speak up and remove all doubt. Because when you speak up on topics you have no knowledge about your credibility goes to zero, a journey that is usually pretty short to begin with.

3) Several times over the past few years we have reported on several studies and audits of the Pentagon's financial systems and accounting processes and how everyone who has looked at those processes comes away with the same conclusions: the Pentagon’s financial processes are so screwed up that they are not only are they in disarray but they cannot even be audited, that is how bad the situation is.

Given that the Pentagon accounting systems cannot even be audited, one can only imagine how much fraud and waste is going on within the Defense Department. If they were a private company within the country, the SEC would likely have prosecuted them under any number of accounting laws.

Well, according to a recent article by Nathan Barton, writing for the Daily Caller website, the Pentagon is not alone in being totally out of control from an accounting and audit perspective:

• A government inspector general report recently concluded that it could not audit billions of dollars allocated to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) because HUD’s accounting processes and books are so poorly kept.
• HUD's financial statements are missing financial records, some records are inaccurate and in some cases actually violated Federal law. 
• Just one single HUD entity, the Government National Mortgage Association, had $20 billion in financial accounting problems (Ginnie Mae).
• According to the inspector general report: “This audit report contains nine material weaknesses, eight significant deficiencies in internal controls and six instances of noncompliance with applicable laws and regulations. These weaknesses were due to an inability to establish a compliant control environment, implement adequate financial accounting systems, retain key financial management staff and identify appropriate accounting principles.”
• With regards to Ginnie Mae, the audit could not audit $19.8 billion in Ginnie Mae’s purse “because of the inaccurate reporting from its budgetary system.” Specifically, Ginnie Mae — a HUD agency — is missing documents needed to audit the funds.
• The audit could also do nothing with $5.4 million of Ginnie Mae’s loan assets because accounting documents “did not completely transfer” after the agency switched contractors maintaining the records, the report say. As a result, "Ginnie Mae was unable to provide appropriate supporting documentation and data to enable us to audit the completeness and accuracy of these asset balances.”
• The audit report also noted that HUD’s accounting has not had any oversight for the past ten years.

Again, just like the Pentagon, if a company tried to pull off some of these accounting shenanigans many people would have been investigated and possibly gone to jail under Federal laws. But alas, these are government workers wasting taxpayer dollars so you know that no one will get demoted, no one will get fired, and the problems are unlikely to be fixed within our lifetimes.

4) Let’s finish up today’s and this month's political class insanity with some good out fashioned corruption. What makes this case special is that the corrupt politicians actually got caught and actually got jail time. The added twist is that he is closely to Hillary Clinton.

In 2008, Clinton called New York state politician Sheldon Silver “a stalwart voice on behalf of the needs of New Yorkers.” Which is not surprising since way back in 2000, Silver, a former speaker of the New York state assembly, lobbied members of the state assembly to support Clinton’s Senate campaign. He offered Clinton his law office for Clinton to do lobby Assemblyman Dov Hikind.

Unfortunately, Silver was recently found guilty in a Federal corruption trial. He was charged with seven counts of fraud, extortion and money laundering and was found guilty on all counts. The prosecutors showed that Silver managed a scheme through which he received a whopping $4 million in illegal payments for taking official and illegal actions that benefited a cancer researcher, Dr. Robert Taub, and two real estate development companies. Evidence pointed that Silver orchestrated the New York State Health Department to grant Dr. Taub $500,000 to study mesothelioma in return for Dr. Taub to refer patients to the law firm Weitz & Luxenberg, which in turn gave money to Silver.

The good news is that this corrupt politician is going to jail. The bad news is that he had access to the one of the highest political power players in the country, Clinton. The further bad news is that I doubt he is the only corrupt American politician raping the American taxpayer today.

That will do it for this month's political class insanity. Seven days were needed to digest all of the insanity from the past month or so. And you can bet that it is likely we will repeat the process again next month.

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