April, 2015, Political Class Insanity, Part 4: Finally Rooting Out Food Stamp Fraud, Taxpayer Funding Or Marijuana Farms, and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time to review the latest political class insanity that has cropped up over the past 30 days or so. As regular readers of this blog know, political class insanity comes in many different forms including, but not limited to, the following craziness:

• Spending taxpayer wealth on idiotic programs and projects.
• Wasting taxpayer wealth on their own selfish financial and political needs.
• Implementing legislation to resolve problems that make the original problems worse or which created unintended bad consequences as a result of their legislation.
• Implementing legislation that supports their political donors and financial backers rather than the typical American citizen.
• Issuing idiotic and stupid comments.
• Overseeing government organizations that are incompetent, inefficient, ineffective, and wasteful of taxpayer wealth.

As always, it is highly likely we will identify new forms of insanity over the next few days as we review the past ineptness coming out of Washington and other bastions of American politicians.

1) Everyone likes the idea of the government stepping in to help out disaster victims. What is seldom reported is the botched job the government usually does in handling the disaster aftermath and more importantly, the funding that eventually gets wasted to support the government effort. From 9-11 to Hurricane Katrina, we could probably go on for days about how the political class and government agencies probably wasted more money than they used to actually help disaster victims.

Which brings us to one of the latest disasters that the government and politicians had to handle, Hurricane Sandy, which ravaged the middle Atlantic states a few years ago. According to an article posted on the Convention of States website from the Washington Free Beacon, nearly one million dollars in taxpayer funding was given to a New York City cherry factory that had a hidden basement filled with hundreds of hydroponically grown marijuana plants.

The company, Dell’s Maraschino Cherries in Brooklyn, got $900,000 in Hurricane Sandy relief cash after it’s “cherry” inventories were damaged by the 2012 storm. But that money might have to be given back, assuming it still exists, after investigators found a hidden door in the factory. 

The door led to a 2,500-square-foot basement containing hundreds of thousands in cash and about 100 pounds of weed: “We have advised Dell’s that the funds are subject to recapture and the city can commence legal proceedings, if necessary,” said a spokesman for the city’s Department of Small Business Services, which administered the Federal Sandy money.

To add insult to injury, the company has also received hundreds of thousands of dollars from New York state taxpayers in state government for power subsidies, which was important since the marijuana plants that were being grown need strong grow lights to grow in the basement, eating up a lot of electricity. Adding more insults, the article reported that the New York District Attorney’s office had been tipped off about the illegal drug activity going on at Dell’s….. in 2009, years before the government gave them almost a million dollars of taxpayer wealth. Insanity.

2) In 1978, Washington politicians passed a law that allowed Federal employees who are union members to spend part of their day addressing union issues. The theory behind the law was that since not all Federal employees have to pay dues and be union members, the law was supposed to provide a financial help to the unions in their union activities by allowing union work to be done with taxpayer funding. 

But some in Washington think that after 37 years, the program and intent of the program have gotten out of control. According to the Office of Personnel Management, in 2012 (the most recent year there are statistics for) Federal workers spent a whopping 3.4 million man-hours on union issues and not the work they were hired for. The estimated cost to taxpayers was more than $157 million.

What’s worse is that two of the most dysfunctional government entities, those that have experienced the most failure in serving their respective clients, purposes, and goals, the Veterans Administration and the IRS, also appear to have the most Federal workers doing union work vs. helping Americans. In both entities, hundreds of workers spent 100% of their time doing only union work.

At the VA, a whopping 259 employees worked solely on union issues. At the IRS, which only disclosed their statistics when the National Review sent them a Freedom of Information Act request, the number of employees was 201. These are 259 employees that are not serving our underserved veterans and their medical needs and 201 IRS employees that are not serving the tax filing needs and questions of Americans.

Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson is co-sponsoring a bill in the Senate to curtail the practice for the same reasons we just discussed: "The VA's had problems getting veterans appointments within 30 days, yet they're taking thousands of hours to organize the union. Something's wrong with their priorities. We need to get it fixed."

While we wish the Senator luck in this endeavor to protect taxpayer wealth, three previous efforts to do the same thing failed to get out of Congress. Thus, even a simple thing of controlling out of control employees is beyond the reach of the Washington political class unless the fourth time is the charm.

3) What is an interesting correlation with the previous piece of insanity is the recent speech of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. He asserted that IRS taxpayer/customer service levels have gotten so bad that the IRS is ignoring an embarrassing 60% of taxpayers’ phone calls. And apparently the trend is not good since a couple of weeks ago they were not answering 57% of the phone calls. 

Maybe if the good Commissioner had used the 201 employees discussed above for the jobs they were hired to do, vs. union work, and had not used a lot of IRS resources to harass tea party and other organizations, he would actually be able to do a better job than failing 60% of the time. Rather than do his job efficiently and effectively, the good Commissioner is crying poverty and is looking for more budget money rather than fixing what is wrong within his organization. At a 60% failure rate, if he worked in the real world, he would no longer be holding that job for his ineptness.

4) I am not going to try to summarize the following insanity and insulting deception that the Washington political class set up to to avoid the additional costs that Obama Care would impose on Congressional members and their staffs. Instead, I have copied below the press release that recently came out from U.S Senator David Vitter and Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton on how the Obama administration's Office of Personnel Management has been using taxpayer money to illegally subsidize healthcare for Congress: 

The Affordable Care Act clearly states that Congress and staff must participate in the new insurance framework based on health-care exchanges, but there’s no available exchange for large employers, like Congress who has nearly 16,000 employees. That meant members of Congress and staff could only participate in the individual exchanges. Just like the rest of America, Congress had to abide by the same Obamacare rules and use these expensive individual exchanges with no employer contribution to help pay their premiums with non-taxable dollars.

In fact, part of the political price to pass the law was that specific provision that there would be no special treatment for Congress. But Republican and Democrat leaders in Congress begged Obama to step in. Rather than losing their tax-free premium subsidy, which would mean higher health insurance bills for themselves and their families, congressional leadership cut a side deal with the administration. The result? The Obama administration’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) ignored the law and decreed that Congress could participate as a “small business” eligible to purchase a “Gold-tier” plan from Washington D.C.’s health-care exchange.

The District of Columbia defines a “small business” as fifty employees or less. Congress has nearly 16,000. According to the documents disclosed by Judicial Watch in a taxpayer lawsuit challenging this scam, the House and Senate filed false applications with the D.C. Health Benefits Exchange claiming they each were a “small business” with “fifty or fewer full-time equivalent employees.”

The applications state that the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives each have 45 employees and that the federal institutions are actually “local/state governments.” The “electronic signature” section of the application states that the signatory has “provided true and correct information to all questions” and is aware that if “not truthful, there may be a penalty.” When we requested to see these documents, the names of the signatories had been blacked out by the D.C. Exchange.

These documents appear to be an outright fraud. They are the basis for using taxpayer money to illicitly subsidize health insurance for Congress. More than 12,300 members of Congress, their staff, spouses, and dependents obtained health insurance through the exchange between October 2013 and September 2014, and that number surely is climbing. It would be hard to credibly attack Obama’s executive overreach (and as the House did – sue to stop him from violating Obamacare), when Congress is a co-conspirator.

The classic "do as I say, not as I do," a common theme of the Washington political class. Or in this case, "pay as I say [relative to Obama Care], not as I pay."

5) The following is political class insanity but in a somewhat good way, especially when you consider that over 45 million Americans are receiving food assistance from the Federal government and other welfare rolls are at record highs. According to an article on the www.800whistleblower.com website, Maine Governor Paul LePage is among the states cracking down on welfare fraud by instituting work requirements for benefits recipients:

• Beginning in 2014, Maine required non-disabled residents who get Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits (food assistance/”food stamps”) to put in at least a 20-hour work week, attending vocational training, or volunteering.
• The results of the work and volunteer requirement was astonishing.
• According to David Sorensen, spokesman for the Department of Health and Services, of the 12,000 non-disabled enrollees without children who were previously on the dole, only 2,680 remain as of now, an amazing drop of almost 80%.
• Could it be that a large number of people receiving food assistance, and other forms of welfare, simply because it is so easy to do so?

And it is not as if the work and volunteer requirements were onerous, with the volunteer option coming out to only 24 hours a month, less than an hour a day. That meager requirement was enough to reduce these welfare loads by a 80% or so. 

Previously we reported in this blog that when the English government required disability payment recipients to re-register in order to continue receiving benefits, they also experienced an incredible decrease in people claiming benefits. Lesson learned: when you make it easy for people to get free money, they will take it, whether it is food assistance leeches in Maine or disability fakers in England.

Imagine how much taxpayer money could be saved if this Maine model was repeated across the country. The insanity of it all is that why this type of gross mismanagement has been going on for decades, not a single Washington politician has had the will, intelligence, and courage to do what the Maine governor has done. How insane and pathetic is that?

Unfortunately, after five days, we are still not through the latest month of political class insanity, more 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.loathemygovernmobama,washington post,politifactent.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

How About More Hate Control Before More Gun Control, Part 4 - Protecing Our Kids, Protecting The Second Amendment, No Tax Increases, it Can Be Done

This is the final post in our series on how to protect ourselves and our families from violence and gun play without shredding the Second Amendment in the process. We have discussed how the political class is again not looking for the root causes of the violence that happened in Newtown, Connecticut last month, instead focusing on the “what” of the incident, guns were used to kill innocents, rather than the “why” of the incident, why and how could someone become so irrespective of life and humanity. As a result, we will end up with less freedom via more government control without solving the root causes.

We have discussed several real life examples of how Americans and their legally owned weapons defended themselves, their families, and their assets from violent criminals, an option that some politicians would like to see eliminated via more draconian gun control laws.

We discussed the fact that more stringent gun control laws do not reduce violence. We reviewed examples of where higher legal gun ownership resulted in less crime but lower gun ownership, more restrictive gun control laws resulted in higher rates of violent crime (e.g. Chicago). We reviewed scientific studies that proved this point and other studies that pointed to the legal overmedication of Americans as a high potential cause for mass slayings like Newtown, not the availability of guns.

We concluded from all of this discussion that outlawing or severely restricting the ownership of guns by responsible Americans will result in more violence, will not cause violent criminals to turn in or register their guns, or solve the problems like what happened in Newtown.

But there is a simple, better way to protect our kids without endangering the rest of the population, without shredding the Second Amendment, and without viciously dividing the country again along political lines. On December 24, 2013, we proposed a way to protect our kids in while in school from violence and gun play without raising the taxes on any American:

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Thus, the Independent Journal Review’s vote for the worst Federal spending in 2012:

• Tax loopholes for the National Football League (NFL), National Hockey League (NHL) and Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) – professional sports leagues that generate billions of dollars annually in profits pay nothing in Federal income taxes($91 million worth of taxes)
• Moroccan pottery classes (part of a $27 million grant from U.S. Agency for International Development)
• Efforts to promote caviar consumption and production ($300,000)
• The building of a robotic squirrel named “RoboSquirrel”- part of a $325,000 grant from the National Science Foundation
• Promotion of specialty shampoo and other beauty products for cats and dogs ($505,000)
• Corporate welfare for the world’s largest snack food producer, PepsiCo Inc. ($1.3 million)
• Government-funded study on how golfers might benefit from using their imagination, envisioning the hole is bigger than it actually is ($350,000)
• “Prom Week,” a video game that allows taxpayers to relive prom night ($516,000)
• Oklahoma’s layover boondoggle, a scarcely used airport in Oklahoma receiving nearly half-a-million in taxpayer dollars only to transfer funds elsewhere in the state ($450,000)
• The 2012 Alabama Watermelon Queen tour, paid for in part by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “to promote the consumption of Alabama’s watermelon through appearances of the Alabama Watermelon Queen at various events and locations” ($25,000)
• Out-of-this-world Martian – $947,000 – NASA is studying what food astronauts could eat on Mars by simulating a Mars outpost at a barren location in Hawaii
• ObamaPhones’ – $1.5 billion. Enrollment in the Lifeline program has skyrocketed as people sign up to get free cell phone for which they qualify if they are on federal tested programs
• Speed reading faces – $30,000. NSF funds used to study whether people can determine a person’s sexual orientation with just a glance.
• Fighting obesity with giant graffiti carrots – $13,000. Anti-obesity funds pay for a giant graffiti mural focused on sustainability.
• Another bridge to nowhere – $520,000. A covered bridge in Ohio that is not used by cars or tied to any walking or bike trail will be rehabilitated with federal funds
• Free bus rides for Super Bowl attendees – $142,419. A Department of Transportation grant paid for free bus rides during the 2012 Super Bowl in Indianapolis. Average prices for Super Bowl tickets are around $3,000
• Movie theater field trip to see “Red Tails” – $57,000. Federal education funds were misused in Texas to send fifth-grade boys to a movie theater to see “Red Tails” (girls were left behind).
• Self-reflection video game using Henry David Thoreau’s 1845 writings – $40,000. National Endowment for the Humanities funding pays for video game simulating Thoreau’s experience at Walden Pond.
• U.S. Iraqi police State Department training program burns through hundreds of millions, crashes in flames – $400.2 million. State Dept’s Iraq police training program has failed miserably, according the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. No objectives were created, and classes did not help Iraqis at all. The State Department will hand over to the Iraqis several building projects that ended up being unnecessary
• The streetcar named No Desire – $35.6 million. Federal transportation money will help build a trolley in St. Louis that has been called the “Streetcar Named No Desire” by one local. It duplicates existing light rail and public transportation, some say.
• Sidewalks to nowhere anger local citizens – $1.1 million. Department of Transportation funds are used for “sidewalks to nowhere” in Florida and Michigan that have local citizens angered. In Florida, the sidewalk was a “safe route to school” that was still unsafe. In Michigan, Federal requirements forced a county to make sidewalk ramps at an intersection without sidewalks.
• Congressional salaries total almost $100 million. Seems like they should be able to get something done for that much money? Especially since these people will work only 13 Fridays in 2012 and worked less than three weeks in the three months leading up to the November elections.

These 22 wasteful spending expenses total $2,160,420,419. Let’s
do some simple math, in light of the Connecticut school shootings:

• According to the Federal government, there 132,183 private and public schools in this country up through high school. (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84)
• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average police officer in this country earns about $55,000 a year.
• If we decided to place an armed, trained police officer in every school in America, the annual cost would be about $7.3 billion a year.
• If we could somehow magically redirect the above wasteful spending away from these trivial expenses to funding protection for our kids in school, we would be able to put a trained, armed police officer in 30% of the nation’s schools. ($7.3 billion in police officer costs divided into the $2.16 billion in spending on the 22 projects/program listed above.)
• Thus, if we could find another 50 or so other, similarly wasteful Federal government spending instances (something that would be extremely easy to do), we could annually put a trained, armed police officer in EVERY U.S. school, without raising taxes on any American.
• Another approach would be to magically redirect the $2.16 billion to protecting 30% of our schools and charge every American household just $.85 a month in taxes to cover the other 70% of schools.
• Still another approach is to consider the fact that the U.S. has needlessly deployed over 130,000 troops in Europe, Japan, and South Korea. Rather than using taxpayer money to defend Seoul, Tokyo, and Paris, maybe it is time to maybe it is time to use that taxpayer money to defend our kids within the confines of this country.

The bottom line is that, as nation, we have the wealth and ability today to more fully protect our kids in their schools without killing any vital Federal program or project, without going through the fruitless and divisive political debate of gun control, and without raising taxes on any American.

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Since this blog post and the solution it proposed, we found out that:

1. President Obama signed legislation that will guarantee that he and his family, along with former Presidents, will have armed, Secret Service protection for life.
2. The school that President Obama’s kids attend is protected by 11 armed guards everyday in addition to the Secret Service detail assigned to protect his kids.

If the President can provide trained, professional armed guards for his kids in their schools, why can’t we do the same for every American kid while in school? The above math indicates it is possible if we just cleaned up wasteful government spending a little bit.

But there is another way to finance such a program, without raising taxes on any American, if we only could force the political class in Washington to stop spending and wasting taxpayer wealth on themselves and start spending it on our KIDS.

In our January 6, 2013 post, we revealed excessive and useless wasting examples of politicians spending our money on themselves. A few examples include the following disgraces:

1. Georgia Senator Isakson - Arranged a $4 million earmark for Northrop Gruman in exchange for a $7,000 donation and arranged a $1.6 million earmark for Scientific Research Corp. in exchange for a $2,900 donation. (Source: Seattle Times)
2. Hawaiian Senator Inouye - Secured a $135 million taxpayer financed bailout after intervening on behalf of a poorly managed, non-qualifying bank. Why? Inouye had most of his net worth invested in that bank. (Source: Hawaii Free Press)
3. Illinois Senator Durbin - Arranged a $1.6 million earmark for Gentex in exchange for a $2,000 donation and arranged another $1.6 million earmark for Epir Technologies in exchange for a $2,700 donation. (Source: Seattle Times)
4. Rep. Corrine Brown (D - Fla.) - Between 2005 and 2010, Brown helped secure $21.9 million for six clients of a lobbying firm where her daughter works.
5. Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D - NC) - Butterfield has helped obtain $817,500 over the past few years toward revitalizing buildings in Wilson, N.C. The lawmaker owns 19 properties within three-quarters of a mile of the project.
6. Rep. Norm Dicks (D - Wash.) - In 2008, Dicks, as an appropriations chairman, secured a $1.82 million earmark for a Washington state environmental agency where his son worked as executive director.

These are just six random examples of politicians wasting our money on their families and their careers, money that could be spent protecting OUR kids. You can visit the dozens and dozens of other examples of similar waste at that January 6th post.

If you did read that post and added up the amount of waste that the political class in Washington dispenses for its own goals every year you would find it sums to $711.6 million. Since, on average, it costs about $55,000 a year to staff a police officer throughout the country, if the political class had used $711.6 million in taxpayer wealth to put an armed police officer in schools rather, than divert the taxpayer money to their financial backers or their friends and family, as outlined in detail in our January 6, 2013 post, we could have armed protection in another 13,000 schools protecting our kids.

Since we have already calculated above that terminating just 22 wasteful government projects would allow us to staff armed officers in about 39,300 schools, this additional savings would put armed police officers in 52,300 schools or about 40% of our schools. No taxes raised, no Second Amendment shredding, just good solid trained protection in over 50,000 schools FOR OUR KIDS! It is that simple.

All it requires is for the Federal government to stop spending over $2 billion a year on stupid, inane, useless projects and programs and stop the political class from using taxpayer money to grease their reelection campaigns and the personal wealth of themselves and their family members. You decide what are the better spending priorities, I know what my answer is.

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