May, 2016, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: Tax Code Idiocy, Gun Control Idiocy, and Other Idiocy

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc. In fact, last month we set a record, needing ten full posts to cover it all.

To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity posts we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history.

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

1) Let’s start today’s insanity with some quick hitters. Obama likes to claim that he saved the economy and that every is going great from an economic perspective. We have already proved this point is totally wrong for a number of reasons:

• 45 million Americans still receive Federal government food assistance every month.
• The labor participation rate is at 45 year lows.
• The real unemployment rate is still almost 10%.
• Wages and household income levels have remained stagnant, six years after the recession ended.

And now we have even more damning evidence that Obama has totally mismanaged the economic welfare of this country. According to a recent analysis from the Federal Reserve Board, 47% of Americans would need to borrow money or sell possessions if confronted with an unexpected expense of just $400. In addition, in inflation adjusted terms, middle class American families on average earn 7% less than they did 15 years ago.

Thus, despite spending over $830 billion on a failed economic stimulus program, experiencing the lowest energy costs in decades, and having the benefit of the Fed pumping trillions of dollars into the economy, Obama’s administration and economic policies still could not make it work. As a result, we now have a middle class in America that would find it difficult to replace a busted washing machine, fix a broken car, or cover any other relatively inexpensive and unexpected expense. Insane and so sad.

2) Let’s stay with economic insanity for a bit. As I am writing this, the latest economic conditions, as reported by the government, are not pretty:

• Monthly job growth for April came in at a seven month low.
• Rather than the composite estimate of economists of seeing 202,000 jobs created in April, only 160,000 came about.
• The 160,000 was about 20% lower than the first quarter monthly average of 200,000 per month.
• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a whopping 94,044,000 Americans are not participating in the labor force, as this measure continues to be near historic highs.
• This increase was an increase of a whopping 562,000 people from March.
• This means that more than three times as many Americans dropped out of the labor force than jobs were created by the economy.
• There were 5,962,000 Americans who had to settle for part time work in April even though they desired full time employment.
• The real unemployment rate, not the one the government uses, was 9.7%, almost double what the official government unemployment rate is, 5.0%.

In other words, the 47% of Americans who cannot outright afford an unexpected $400 expense, did not get much relief from Obama’s economic policies in April, despite the economic stimulus plan, low energy costs and the Fed pumping paper money into the economy.

3) We have often pointed out that the city of Chicago has some of the most stringent gun control laws and rules in the country, if not the most stringent. And yet despite these draconian gun laws, according to a recent article in the Chicago Tribune, over 1,000 people in the city have already been shot this year.

This comes out to about 10 people a day taking a bullet in the city. This is the highest gun violence rate since the 1990s. Although much of the shootings involves gang violence against each other, it does show the fallacy of people like Hillary Clinton who seem to think that MORE gun control laws is a good thing and that it would reduce gun violence. 

Anybody with a lick of sense could see from this Chicago reality that gangs will get guns in the face of any kind of gun control that Hillary puts in place and more gun control equals more gun-related woundings and killings. The insanity is that people like Clinton are so stupid in the face of this reality.

4) As a follow up to the filing of Federal income taxes a few weeks ago, consider the insanity from the nation’s income tax processes as reported by the Washington Examiner and the American Action Forum:

• In total, American citizens spent an amazing 11.4 BILLION hours completing all types of government forms every year including tax forms. 
• This comes out to 35 hours per person, or about a week’s worth of working at one’s job on average.
• The Federal government alone interfaces with Americans via 23,000 different forms.
• The Health and Human Services organization alone has more than 5,000 different forms that citizens have to fill out depending on what their needs are.

Imagine how much more productively those 11.4 BILLION hours could be used. People would have more time to volunteer, to interact with their kids, to help their neighbors, to start a business and help grow the economy. Instead, the Jabba The Hutt, oversized government bureaucracy sucks up our time and energy filling out tens of thousands of different forms for government purposes. Please do not try to tell me that government in this country is not too big, anything with 23,000 different options is way too large to be effective and efficient.

5) It is a pretty well known fact that about 47% of the U.S. adult population pay nothing in Federal income taxes. In fact, for millions of Americans, the tax process is a revenue generator for them. We have pointed out why burdening fewer and fewer Americans with more and more taxes to pay for more and more government spending is a real problem:

- The number of Americans who renounce their citizenship every year and move out of the country has been growing steadily over the past few years. You can be sure that these are not the non-taxpaying, low income, low wealth citizens. These are mostly the highest earning, most productive citizens who have gotten so fed up with shouldering such a high tax burden that they are leaving the country, taking their wealth and initiative with them. But now that they have left but the government has not reduced its spending, that void left by the wealthy leaving now has to be passed to the non-wealthy.

-  We have already shown with a real life example of what happens when you raise the tax burden on your wealthiest, most productive citizens at the state level. The state of Maryland did that several years ago when it raised the tax rate on anyone making over a million dollars a year. Just a few years later, they found that the tax revenue they were receiving from millionaires was less than it was prior to raising the tax rate on millionaires. The state’s millionaires did the rational thing, much like those leaving the country altogether, they moved to a less tax heavy state. This left the non-millionaires with a higher tax burden despite a higher tax rate on millionaires.

The bottom line is as politicians put a higher and higher tax burden on fewer and fewer Americans, without cutting spending, the results are never good. This principle recently played out again in the state of New Jersey, as reported by the Tampa Bay Times:

• David Tepper is a very successful and wealthy hedge fund manager.
• Up until recently he lived in New Jersey but has now moved his home and operations to Florida, a state with no state income tax.
• In stark contrast, New Jersey has a top state income tax rate of almost 9%.
• For a person that averaged about $1.5 billion in income a year from 2012 through 2015, Tepper could save about $130 to $140 million a year on average in New Jersey income taxes by moving to Florida.
• But more important, by taxing the wealthy so much, New Jersey loses that same amount of revenue every year, which according to a recent report by Frank Haines III, the New Jersey legislative budget and finance officer, a move by just one citizen like Tepper and “we may be facing an unusual degree of income tax forecast risk,” i.e., the out of state move by a single citizen could have significant negative impact on the whole state budget.
• In Connecticut, Kevin Sullivan, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Revenue Services, said that if just five or six of that state’s citizens follow Tepper to Florida to avoid the high Connecticut income taxes on the wealthy, there would be a “measurable impact on the [state’s] revenue stream.”

As we stated above, if the wealthy move, either out of state or out of the country, the government get’s less tax revenue and if spending is not reduced, than the rest of the state’s residents have to pick up the slack. This is not good or fair tax planning, it is economic suicide over time, higher and higher tax rates result in LOWER tax revenue. 

It is insane when one taxpayer in New jersey or five or six in Connecticut can create a budget crisis by simply moving out of state. The need for tax reform and the slashing of government spending has never been so obvious at the state and Federal level.

That will do it for today’s insanity: idiotic tax rules and regulations, a continuing lousy economy despite the lies of the Obama administration, and the continuing idiocy of gun control advocates as witnessed by the violence and murder rates in Chicago. More insanity 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.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Even When The Feds Get It Right They Still Get It Wrong

Even when the Federal government and the Washington political class do something good for taxpayers, they cannot help themselves but step right back into another screw up that overwhelms whatever good their first good deed did. Consider the recent announcement of good news that the Feds had busted 46 doctors and other healthcare professionals across the country for bilking the government, and the American taxpayer, out of $712 million.

Details of the fraud and bust include the following, as reported by CNN:

• This was the largest Medicare bust ever.
• In total, 243 people were arrested in 17 cities for Medicare billing of $712 million worth of patient care that was either unnecessary or never given.
• In one case, owners of a mental health facility in Miami billed tens of millions of dollars for psychotherapy sessions based on treatment that was little more than moving patients to different locations. 
• Four other people are charged for mass-marketing a talking glucose monitor, shipping the monitors to Medicare patients across the country who didn't need or order them, and then billing Medicare for the devices to the tune of more than $22 million.
• Health care providers got in on the scam by paying kickbacks to fraudsters who got their hands on Medicare patients' personal information which they would then use to bill Medicare for care never given. 
• These fraudsters often got the patient information by preying on the down and out in society by canvassing places like homeless shelters and soup kitchens.
• A Los Angeles doctor allegedly billed $23 million for 1,000 power wheelchairs and home health services that were not medically necessary and often not provided. 
• In a Florida case, a health care provider received $1.6 million from Medicare for prescription drugs that were never purchased and never given.
• "In these cases, we followed the money and found criminals who were attracted to doctors offices, clinics, hospitals and nursing homes in search of what they viewed as an ATM," said FBI Director James B. Comey.
• The DOJ's Medicare Fraud Strike Force team led the investigations which since 2007 it has charged 2,300 people who have falsely billed the Medicare program for more than $7 billion. 
• In recent years, the Strike Force team has expanded from two cities to nine.

Great news, criminals ripping off the American taxpayer might finally be brought to justice. But let’s consider some of the downside to this whole, less than comprehensive law enforcement effort:

• These people were arrested for ripping off $712 million. However, there is no mention of how much of that $712 million will actually be recovered, much of it is likely to already have been spent and is gone forever.
• We have previously reported many times that credible, nonpartisan analyses and sources estimate that Medicare loses anywhere from $40 to $60 billion a year to waste and criminal activity. Thus, if we assume that the $712 million was all ripped off in one year, unlikely, than the recovery rate from the “biggest bust in Medicare history” is a measly 1.8% on $40 billion or 1.2% on $60 billion.
• Since the $712 million was probably obtained over a period of years, then the recovery rate is highly likely to be well below 1%. And this is the biggest bust in history, meaning other busts likely got far less.
• The strike force has been in operation for nine years, 2007 to 2015 and has busted criminals who had illegally collected $7 billion in Medicare funds. If we assume the lower end of annual Medicare ripoffs and waste is $40 billion, nine years worth of such behavior is about $360 billion. That means the task force has recovered a staggering...only 1.9% of the criminal activity and waste.

Look, I am happy that hundreds of people were busted and hundreds of millions of dollars were identified as stolen (not recovered). If some of that money can be recovered and funneled to reducing the national debt, helping the homeless and unemployed, feeding the hungry, then great. 

But come on, a measly 1.9% rate for nine years. Seems the taxpayers are still being abused by a government that cannot get out of its own way when it comes to wasting taxpayer wealth. 

But the story somehow gets a little worse. Even if the Feds can collect the $712 million that these 243 people stole, it will get wiped out by the embarrassing findings of a recent inspector general report relative to Obama Care. That Federal audit report found that the Department of Health and Human Services cannot find out what happened to about $2.8 billion of Obama Care subsidies that have already been paid out.

This should not come as a surprise. The entire Obama Care data processing effort has been a disaster from day one. The online exchanges failed to work properly for weeks. The systems security features were almost non-existent, subjecting millions of Americans to identity theft risk. The interface between the exchanges and insurance companies were chaotic.

Thus, we should not be surprised when the inspector general’s report shows that those systems now cannot track almost $3 billion in just the first four months into the Obama Care world. Apparently the whole system was launched without finishing and checking the accuracy of the back end processes that would communicate between the Federal exchange and insurance companies. 

The audit went onto say that HHS did not have an internal system to ensure that subsidies went to the right enrollees, or in the correct amounts: “[The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] CMS’s internal controls did not effectively ensure the accuracy of nearly $2.8 billion in aggregate financial assistance payments made to insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act during the first four months that these payments were made,” the inspector general said. Furthermore, “CMS’s (HHS) system of internal controls could not ensure that CMS made correct financial assistance payments.” 

Other findings in the report show that HHS did not have a process in place at the time money was being paid out to “prevent or detect any possible substantial errors” in Obama Care subsidy payments and could not “ensure that financial assistance payments were made on behalf of confirmed enrollees and in the correct amounts.”

Great, the Justice Department may have recovered upwards of $712 million that were likely stolen over a period of years from HHS’s Medicare program and then HHS goes out and likely lost almost $3 billion, in just four months, by being totally inept when it comes to Obama Care subsidies. Even when the Federal government and the political class that operate it give us good news they still manage to overwhelm us with bad news.

There are only two solutions to this incredible criminal waste and theft of taxpayer wealth, a short term and long term solution:

- Short Term: Nine years after trying to track down criminals that are stealing from taxpayers via the Federal government and it is safe to say that hundreds of billions of dollars went unaccounted for and the recovery rate is incredibly small, less than 2%. Thus the better short term solution is to offer rewards for anyone who turns in anyone who is scamming the government. Give them a 10% reward of what ever is recovered from their tip.

Police departments have been using this tip process for decades to have the community help them apprehend street criminals. Why not use the same theory to apprehend white collar criminals who rip off taxpayers? Get the whole citizenry involved with the potential of a large financial reward, a cut of what money is recovered. Waiting nine years for the task force to put a substantial dent in the criminal activity is not working, time to try something new and creative.

- Long term: this is just another example of a government beast that is out of control and totally dysfunctional. As we have pointed out a number of times, the Federal government today is no different than Jabba The Hutt from the Star Wars stories. Jabba was a large, formless blob that fulfilled no worthwhile function but who consumed massive amounts of resources via tyranny. 

Severely downsize the Federal government and have it work on far fewer efforts that might actually work rather than what they do today, work on way too many efforts that are either not needed, too expensive, are criminally infected, or plain just do not work.

Because even when the Federal government gets it right (finds the criminals involved in $712 million worth of fraud over years), it still gets it wrong (loses almost $3 billion in just four months).

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

March, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 3: Rubber Duck Races In Wisconsin, Ambassadorships For Sale, The Would-Be Terrorist Nun, and More

This is our third post in this month’s series of political class insanity. Every month we review the latest lunacy, idiocy, disrespect, and wasteful spending of the American political class in all facets of their incompetence. Unfortunately, their level of incompetence seems to be getting worse as it takes longer and longer each month to cover how damaging they are to our wealth and our freedom.

Let’s see what insanity we uncovered today:

1) Tax time is approaching so it was timely to read some words from Sandra Block of Dailyfinance.com that appeared in the January 28, 2014 issue of The Week magazine. According to her research, in 2013 the IRS was able to only answer 61% of calls from taxpayers. This appears to be just picking up the telephone, where they failed 39% of the time. Ut does not include the number of times they answered the phone and gave out the wrong information.

Additionally, the average wait time for a call that was actually answered by the IRS was a disgraceful 18 minutes. And this is the same government agency that is supposed to be the hub in implementing the 2,000 plus page Obama Care legislation. If the IRS cannot do the job they were originally set up to do and have been doing poorly for decades, it is highly unlikely they will do any better handling the Obama Care complexities and bureaucracy.

2) Former U.S. Congressman Mel Reynolds resigned from Congress in 1995 after being convicted of statutory rape, something that you really do not want a standing U.S. Congressman to be convicted of. While serving in prison for that conviction, he was also convicted of bank fraud. Yes, that is correct, WHILE IN PRISON he was convicted of a serious financial crime.

Recently, he was back in the news when he was arrested in Zimbabwe on pornography charges for allegedly taking lewd photos and videos of models and prostitutes. Again, this was a U.S. Congressman at one time, which is insane in itself. Even worse, though, despite the conviction on rape and the conviction on bank fraud, a political peer, Bill Clinton, took care of him by commuting his original prison sentence in 2001.

How many ordinary Americans do you think Clinton would have pardoned if they had been convicted of both statutory rape and bank fraud? I would bet none since they are not part of the political class inner sanctum where insanity and felony convictions are inconveniences more than anything.

3) One of the major budget items in the Federal government across many Federal departments is to protect the country from terrorists. I do not now the exact numbers but I would venture a guess that annually we allow the Federal government to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to protect us from attack.

For those hundreds of billions of dollars you would expect us to have the absolute best terrorism and security protection in the world, in the history of the world. That would probably be a gross inaccurate assumption, however, based on an article that appeared in the February 28, 2014 issue of The Week magazine:

• According to the article, an 84 year old nun was recently convicted for breaking into one of the supposedly “most secure” nuclear facilities in the country.
• Note, that I did not say “tried to break in,” she actually made it inside the facility.
• Once inside, she threw around human blood in protest of nuclear technology besides hanging banners and spray painting peace signs.
• She was one of three people who got in after cutting through a chain link fence around the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
• Not only did they get through the fence, they actually got inside the uranium processing and storage facility.
• Although she was sentenced to 35 months in jail, she pleaded with the judge to put her away for life to honor her protest and principles.

So let me get this right. We pay hundreds of billions of dollars to protect ourselves, our families and our country from terrorist attacks and an 84 year old nun with two accomplices, one 64 years old and one 58 years old, can cut a chain link fence and get close to the uranium in a government facility. Does not seem like we are getting good value for our money in this government area.

The really terrifying thought is if an 84 nun can do this, imagine what a determined terrorist or terrorists could do inside a domestic nuclear facility, who did not want to just hang banners or spray paint some walls. That is the true insanity of what a farce the Federal government’s anti-terrorism efforts are.

4) We have often made the case that government in America is like Jabba The Hutt from Star Wars, a gross, obese entity that cannot get out of its own way. Often, one part of the government does not know what another part is doing or how one part of the government passes a law or regulation that makes no sense to another part of government.

The first Jabba example this month comes from the political class in the state government of Wisconsin, as explained in the February 28, 2014 issue of The Week magazine. One part of the state government in Wisconsin, the state legislature, passed a bill that legalized rubber duck races in the state. A rubber duck race is defined to be when participants throw hundreds of plastic duck toys into a river and watch them race to a finish line. The fact that the state legislature is working on such nonsense is a piece of insanity in itself.

However, another part of the state government in Wisconsin, the Justice department, warned that the legislation might be breaking state gambling laws. Thus, budget shortfalls, failing schools, and other state issues are being neglected while at least two parts of the state government try to decide if rubber duck races are legal. Pathetic.

5) The other Jabba The Hutt issue is going on in New Jersey. That state, along with a host of other northern states, are suffering through one of the coldest and snowiest winters in a long time. This is causing state and local governments to run out of rock salt that is needed to keep their roads clear of snow and ice. There has just been too much needed this year to keep up with the high snowfall levels.

The problem could be easily solved if a non-U.S. ship containing 40,000 tons of rock salt that was being shipped from Maine to other areas would be allowed to dock and unload. This is obviously the simple, needed remedy to keep the roads clean and protect Americans from accidents.

But obvious and simple are not two traits of the American political class, as witnessed by this situation.. It appears that a 1920 Federal law allows only U.S. ships to move goods from one U.S. port to another. Since the rock salt, all 40,000 tons of it were loaded on a non-U.S. ship, that ship is not allowed to dock in an American port and unload, even it means saving lives and protecting the health and welfare of Americans.

You cannot make this nonsense up. Local and state politicians are asking for an obvious waiver to this 94 year old law in order to do their jobs and keep the roads clean this winter. However, according to an article in the February 28, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, Federal government authorities say that the waiver is unlikely to be granted, safety of Americans be damned. Lunacy of the utmost degree.

6) We have covered this issue already but additional information is now available so it is worth reviewing again. We had previously reported that 53% of President Obama’s nominees to be foreign ambassadors for the United States were either political allies or people who had raised at least a half a million dollars for the President’s election campaigns. According to an article in the February 28, 2014 issue of The Week, this is almost twice the rate of previous administrations.

Thus, the President was more interested in rewarding his political allies and election financers than putting experienced State Department career diplomats into important government positions overseas. Better to take of one’s friends than to put the best people in the right places to optimize U.S. interests. 

The additional information on this travesty came out when many of these nominees went before Congressional committees for review and approval:

• The nominee to be ambassador to Norway admitted he had never been there, did not speak the language and ended up insulting the current government in that country in a number of ways. He mistakenly referred to the prime minister of Norway as the president and mistakenly called the existing majority party in the Norwegian government an extremist “fringe political entity" which it is not.
• The nominee to be ambassador to Argentina cannot speak Spanish, a nice asset to have as ambassador to a Spanish speaking country.
• A television soap opera producer, with no foreign service experience, was named as the potential ambassador to Hungary.
• Jennifer Rubin, writing in the Washington Post correctly stated that such a practice “is a grave insult to competent foreign service officers.”
• Jacob Heilbrunn, writing in the National Interest correctly stated that sending wealthy campaign fund raisers to foreign lands as ambassadors is not optimal since “it signals to the host country that the U.S. doesn’t take it very seriously.”

How embarrassing for our country and how disappointing for this Presidency. We are sending amateurs overseas as rewards for winning an election and we are doing it at unheard of levels. So much for “hope and change,” it is just politics as usual or even worse, not better.

That will do it for today. Amateur hour in the State Department, rock salt held captive by a 94 year old law, the importance of rubber duck races in Wisconsin, a nun that foiled the Federal government’s entire anti-terror effort, and more. More insanity tomorrow if you dare. In the meantime, please join our term limits effort at:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

Because if rubber duck races are the priorities of our current politicians, how much worse could it get if we replace them all and see what happens?

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

October, 2013 PoliticalClass Insanity, Part 4: Scamming Food Stamps, Scamming the Army, and Scamming The American Taxpayer

Please note: Nancy Pelosi recently made the outrageous comment that there was no waste to be cut in the Federal govnerment, i.e. EVERY dollar the Washington political class spends is essential to our country. Keep this insanity in mind as we go through this month's polticial class insanity, you will quickly see that she is very much out of touch with the reality of today's wasteful federal government.

This is our fourth post this month that documents and identifies the massive political class insanity and incompetence of our ruling politicians. From idiotic programs and laws to massive fraud and wasteful spending, every month reveals a whole new set of antics that bankrupt the country and its taxpayers while leaving major issues of our times unresolved.

1) Our first piece of insanity today comes from News 11 television in Baltimore. One store in Maryland, that changed its name to “Second Obama Express,” was one of nine convenience/grocery stores in the Baltimore area involved in a massive food stamp fraud operation. The dishonest, store owners illegally scammed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka SNAP) out almost $7 million in cash.

Nine retailers have been arrested for conspiring with customers to redeem food stamps illegally for cash. The customers then got a cash kickback from the transaction. No actual merchandise, food or otherwise, changed hands. The indictment gives a brief overview of how the scheme worked:

The indictments allege that the defendants exchanged EBT benefits for cash, in violation of the food stamp program rules. The indictments allege that the defendants typically paid half the value of the EBT benefits in cash. To avoid detection, the defendants often debited the funds from the card in multiple transactions over a period of hours or days. As a result of unlawful cash transactions, the defendants obtained more than $6,898,000 in EBT deposits for transactions in which the stores did not provide food.

One of the retailers indicted was Abdullah Alijaradi, 51, who was running the scam in two of his stores, one called D&M Deli and Grocery, and the other rejoicing under the euphonious name of “Second Obama Express.” According to the indictment, “From October 2010 through July 2013, Aljaradi allegedly obtained more than $2 million in payments for food sales that never occurred.”

Mr. Alijaradi and his scamming friends each face up to 20 years in jail. Sadly for the taxpayers, though, the money they stole from us is gone forever. Additional sadness since this is merely a drop in the bucket of the overall food assistance program fraid over these [ast few years.

2) This local government piece of insanity is really a lulu. Detroit is broke. Detroit has declared bankruptcy. Detroit does not have enough police to properly respond to 911 calls. Detroit public schools are atrocious. Detroit’s population has plummeted and is still dropping. Detroit does not even have enough money to keep all of its street light lit. Many, many property owners have stopped paying property taxes on the Detroit property they own. But…Detroit is going to build a $140 million, 3.3 mile light rail system in the middle of the city.

Whoa, back up to that last item: building a light rail system when so many other basic functions need to be addressed? Definitely insanity. And even worse, the American taxpayer is chipping in about $25 million to make it a reality. 

Although I am not a fan of giving Detroit any aid until they make the hard decisions on how they are going to turn the city around, I would much rather hire more police, improve the schools, buy them some street lights, etc. before throwing $25 million into a useless light rail system, the history of which of similar systems around the country is spotty at best. And those cities actually had people living in their cities and working in their cities. Insane.

3) We have often made the case in this blog that the Federal government has grown so large and so unwieldy that it basically looks like Jabba The Hutt from the Star Wars movies. A large, tyrannical  blob of a being that absorbs resources without any societal benefit in return. Well, an early August report from the Washington Examiner proves our Jabba hypothesis again.

The Defense Department has admitted that over the years it continued to do business with some contractors even AFTER those same contractors had previously been found to be doing unethical or illegal activities, wasting billions of taxpayer wealth in the process:

• Although only 30 defense contractors were criminally convicted of fraud over a recent three-year period, 11 of those 30 contractors have been paid a total of $354 million FOLLOWING their convictions,
• This conclusion comes from a 2011 report by the Pentagon's Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.
• The Department debarred, or banned, 164 companies but paid $15 million to a dozen of these same companies afterwards. 
• The Department also  reached settlements with 120 other companies and THEN paid $46 million for additional work to nine. 
• Apparently, misbehavior settlements do not prohibit companies from receiving future Department of Defense work.

Nice work if you can get it. Get a lucrative Defense Department contract and if you screw up, either with illegal or unethical behavior, you can still come back to the taxpayer trough for more anyway.

Despite being in business for a few hundred years, the Defense Department has gotten so large that its different systems and coding and company identification processes do not make it possible for one part of the Department to learn from the mistakes of another part of the Department. As a result, billions and billions of taxpayer dollars have probably been wasted over the years by incompetent or unscrupulous contractors.

And even when they try to fix the situation, their incompetence rises to the surface again. In 2008, Congress approved  the creation of a “Panel on Contracting Integrity,” led by the Pentagon's Inspector General and which focused on this type of contractor fraud. That effort came up lame and short, with only the following pathetic “accomplishments” to discuss five years later:

• The panel created a Defense Acquisition University training module of Procurement Fraud Indicators.
• It updated a handbook
• It created a web site to "increase awareness of procurement fraud"
• It hosted a conference
• It created a podcast about fraud
• It published an article.

Nowhere do they acknowledge that the panel actually identified the root causes of the problem, e.g. too many different systems with too many different codings, and how they remedied those root causes. Pathetic.

4) Let’s stay with the Department of Defense for a bit since they are so good at finding different ways to waste taxpayer wealth. According to an Associated Press article from September 28, 2013, a recent audit that was done on the Army revealed that the it had paid out $16 million over a two and one half year period to soldiers who were either AWOL or were actual deserters. 

Good work if you can get it. Run away from the Army for no good reason but still get paid. And this audit apparently was only for the Army, it does not include any similar, additional payment errors in the Air Force, Navy, or Marines.

The really sad part of this incompetence, besides the fact that the Army wasted $16 million that could have funded public White House tours for over 16 years, is that the Army was told a similar accounting mistake was done back in a 2006 audit. That audit found at least 68 soldiers, who were officially considered deserters, were wrongly paid a total of $684,000 AFTER they were designated deserters. Apparently, the Army learned nothing from this earlier wasteful spending.

Pathetic, and Nancy Pelosi seems to think that not one dollar should be cut from Federal government spending. Here is almost $17 million that could have been cut from the budget if only Congress and government bureaucrats were doing their jobs.

5) A few pieces of lunacy from the failed war on drugs. According to a National Review article that was summarized in the September 13, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, U.S. prisons hold about 100,000 American citizens who were arrested and convicted for using marijuana on a small scale. Not dealing, not growing, small scale usage. 

This costs the American taxpayer about $15 billion a year to lock up people for getting a little high in their life without doing anything to anyone else. $15 billion.

6) A similar article appeared in the Briefing section of The Week magazine on September 20, 2013. According to the article, since mandatory jail sentencing was introduced back in the 1970s, the U.S. jail population has quadrupled in size to 2.4 million citizens. We now hold the dubious honor of jailing a higher percentage of our citizens than every other country in the world including the dictatorships in China and Iran. 

The cost of this prison population comes out to $80 billion a year of taxpayer wealth. I am not saying that evil and bad people should not be locked up forever. However, at a cost of $80 billion a year and having the highest incarceration rate in the world, maybe we should force the political class to reconsider some of the laws that it has put on the books at such a high cost, both financially and humanely.

7) Several months ago President Obama okayed the shipment of a about a billion dollars worth of taxpayer wealth in the form of F-16 jet fighters and many, many Abrams tanks to the government of Egypt. Many of us found this expense to be atrocious, why do we need to arm the Egyptian armed forces with a billion dollars worth of goods when there was such an economic mess in this country?

We were told at that time by the political class that we needed to send this billion dollars worth of arms to continue to have “leverage” over present and future Egyptian leaders. What makes that strategy so stupid is the news that appeared in the September 6, 2013 issue of The Week magazine. The current leader of Egypt had recently accepted a $12 billon aid package from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.

Thus, who believes that we will have any leverage in Egypt in crunch time when others have given them twelve times as much in financial support? Another billion dollars wasted for no leverage, no benefit, and not loyalty in return. Are you listening, Nancy Pelosi, another billion dollars wasted.

The waste and ineptness rolls on. More tomorrow and probably another day or so afterwards is required to get it all in.

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

June, 2013 Poltiical Class Insanity, Part 2:ATF Loses Explosives, Feds Lose Track Of Goverment Size, and More

This is the second post of a series of posts that will cover this month’s political class insanity. As time has gone by, the insanity coming out of the American class at all levels of government has gotten worse and worse, requiring more and more time to be used just to review it.

We started yesterday with the first post which covered such diverse and distressing topics as how the Federal government spent nearly half a million dollars on a project to teach fish survival skills, how the Fort Hood terrorist shooter is still being paid his salary while those that were gravely affected by his actions have received nothing, how GSA employees get to set their own performance bonus monetary payouts, etc. Insanity.

We continue today with the following idiocy:

1) Recent reports have come to light on how another half million dollars or so of taxpayer wealth from the failed stimulus program was wasted on a useless program. As you read the details about the following travesty, remember that the whole purpose of Obama’s economic stimulus program was to create an immediate environment that facilitated immediate worthwhile jobs:

• The University of Central Florida (UCF) received $434,812 beginning in 2010 for a project to test a “mixed reality game for Latina middle school students to they are better to resist peer pressure to engage in sex.
• The stimulus program was called, “Using Mixed Reality to Build Peer Resistance Skills in Latina Middle Schoolers."
• According to the grant description” “This study will test a prototype for a game that builds the skills that Latinas need to resist pressure to engage in intercourse when they are in middle school, thereby decreasing their risk for teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Study results will also be helpful to other researchers developing technology-based health games designed to promote health.”
• The project has been completed, according to Barbara Abney, director of marketing and communications at UCF: “Forty-four low-income early adolescent Hispanic girls took part in the study, which included peer resistance skill curriculum followed by specially developed, technology-assisted, social interaction game play.”
• According to Recovery.gov, the website for tracking stimulus funds, the project created 0.91 jobs. Yes, over $400,000 of taxpayer wealth was spent to “create” less than one job.
• The program’s managers claim that “several” part-time positions were created over the project’s two-year lifespan which included two research assistants, a part-time project manager, four positions for people who worked less than 60 hours a year and two high school student research assistants.

Where to start with this insanity:

• The most insulting result of this waste is the TEMPORARY creation of less than one equivalent full time job for over $400,000.
• This was obviously not a shovel ready job that improved infrastructure or that enhanced the lives of many Americans, it was a vanity project for an academic study.
• Even if you think this was a worthwhile effort, it was a very, very limited study of a very, very limited sample size in a very, very limited geographic area. To think that this poor research study will apply to all Latina middle school girls is a fallacy.

A lot of wasted money to create no lasting jobs or impact on the economy whose results will likely have no impact on anyone’s life.

2) KPAX TV in Montana reported on May 1, 2013 that robbers broke into a secure United States Forestry Service bunker in Montana and stole about 559 pounds of high explosives. Material stolen include emulsion-type explosives, explosive cast boosters and detonating cord.

The ATF issued a press release asking for the public’s help in finding the robbers and missing explosives. In other words, they probably have no idea who or how this happened. Thus, for all of the tens of billions of dollars we give the Federal government every year to protect us from criminals and terrorists, the government cannot securely lock up a quarter ton of explosives.

Lord knows whose hands these explosives are in now and what their plans are. Hopefully, those who walked away with a quarter of a ton of explosives do not use it to kill the very Americans who paid to have these types of things kept out of the hands of evil.

3) We have always maintained that the Federal government had gotten so large that it was largely ineffective in anything except wasting taxpayer wealth. It is now like Jabba The Hutt from Star Wars fame: a large, obese shapeless glob that takes and devours resources via intimidation and provides no societal benefit.

In fact, in light of the many, many scandals swirling around Washington and the Obama administration, this might actually be true. All of these calamities are going down and the best that Obama can come up with is that he did not know of them until he heard of the scandals on television, the same time the rest of us heard. David Axelrod, a former leader of Obama’s election campaigns, came out recently and said the same thing, the Federal government is just too large to be managed or be effective.

And now, the Federal bureaucracy has admitted that it cannot track or catalog all of the Federal agencies and organizations, there are just too many. By law, the Federal government is required to know about and document EVERY Federal entity. The Law is known as the Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010 (GPRAMA) which President Obama signed into law on January 4, 2011.

The law requires quarterly performance assessments of ALL government programs, and also mandated that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) create a website that was supposed to publish quarterly performance reports by the heads of every agency.

The website, Performance.gov. was launched in 2011 but two years later contains only a partial list of government programs. The list is so bad that even a major government organization, the Federal Communications Commission, is not on the list or on the website

Although GPRAMA required that there be a standardized and uniform process for entities to report their strategic and performance plans, that process does not exist two years later. Some organizations report heir results in PDF formats while others use XML or StratML.

There isn’t even a uniform standard about how strategic and performance plans data is published, something GPRAMA also mandated. Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute was quoted by the Daily Caller as saying that not only isn’t there a list of Federal agencies that exists, but that there’s no standard machine-readable federal government organization chart or report format.

The House of Representatives passed yet another law to standardize GPRAMA reporting requirements in 2012. However, the bill died in the Senate and the thus, the effort to standardize reporting and document the entire Federal bureaucracy will continue to be another disastrous Federal government program. Jabba The Hutt lives on, parading as the Federal government bureaucracy.

Jabba The Hutt, lost explosives, and another failed economic stimulus program. Seems just about right for what we call the Federal government of the United States. More lunacy 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:

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

The Unthinkable: Government Accounting Processes Force Even Trained Auditors To Give Up

Many, many times and in so many ways we have written how the size of the Federal government has gotten totally out of control, so large and so atrophied:

• Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security have gotten so big and so unwieldy from a government bureaucracy perspective that they lose over $200 billion a year to waste and criminal fraud.
• During the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve Board was trying to increase the amount of short term Treasury debt that was in the market while the Treasury Department was trying to increase the amount of long term Treasury debt in the market while reducing the amount of short term debt, i.e. the government was so big that two parts of it were trying to do the exact opposite of what each other was doing.
• The tax code has gotten so large and so complicated that the IRS cannot even keep up, admitting that it fails to collect over $380 billion a year from tax evaders.
• The Transportation Safety Administration is so inefficient that it recently purchased almost $200 million worth of airport security equipment that it will never use.
• The Defense Department has gotten so large that one of its own task forces found that the Department buys over $30 billion worth of military parts every year that are either obsolete or unneeded.

The list goes on and on. Our Federal government has morphed into a political Jabba The Hutt, an overbearing, overweight, repressive, inefficient, non-agile character out of the Star Wars movies. This political Jabba wastes taxpayer wealth, destroys freedom and liberties, and never actually resolves any major issues of problems.

Nowhere is this illusion been more vivid than in a recent article from the Huffington Post on January 18, 2013:

• The Government Accountability Office (GAO) announced in the third week in January that it will be unable to complete a complete financial audit of the Federal government since there are serious accounting problems with the Department of Defense.
• At that time, the GAO also identified the Department of Homeland Security as having operational and accounting problems so substantial that it was impossible for investigators to audit it.
• Can you imagine, two major government departments that are so screwed up that even the expert auditors from the GAO, trained professionals that are supposed to bring order to chaos, have thrown up their hands and said they give up, these two departments cannot be audited because of how screwed up they have become.
• And these are not two insignificant entities: the article states that the Department of Defense has a net annual cost of $799.1 billion and the Department of Homeland Security has a net cost of $48.7 billion.
• If you add these two numbers up and divide the total by the 115 million households in the U.S., you end up with over $7,300 per household in taxes that that the Federal government cannot account for every year.
• This is an atrocious insult to every American taxpayer who pays their fair share of taxes to a government that then proceeds to misappropriate, misspend, and outright lose those taxes at a rate of $7,300 per household.
• This was the official GAO reasons of why they could not complete their audit: "The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) cannot render an opinion on the 2012 consolidated financial statements of the federal government because of widespread material internal control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations. As was the case in 2011, the main obstacles to a GAO opinion on the accrual-based consolidated financial statements were: Serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense (DOD) that made its financial statements unauditable. The federal government’s inability to adequately account for and reconcile intragovernmental activity and balances between federal agencies. The federal government’s ineffective process for preparing the consolidated financial statements."

I love the phrase, “as was the case in 2011,” in other words, this type of screwup happens every year. The other adjectives used to describe the situation are also quite damning: serious problems, unsuitable, ineffective, control weaknesses, limitations, uncertainties, etc. What a disgrace.

How much corruption, criminal fraud, outright wasteful spending is going on in these two departments? We may never know because of how messed up the government and the political class that should be overseeing these operations have allowed the political Jabba The Hutt to grow out of control.

But not only are the actual accounting and audit processes out of whack, the process for fixing them are also a train wreck, according to the article:

• A GAO source told the Huffington Post writer that Pentagon meetings with the auditors were often canceled at the last minute because the Pentagon could not get its paperwork and financial statements compiled on time.
• Gene L. Dodaro, Comptroller General of the United States and head of the GAO, tried to throw the Pentagon a bone/compliment and recognize the improvements in accounting practices made over time but since the Defense Department’s accounting processes and results are still unaudtiable, how much improvement really could have been made?
• The GAO report said that the Pentagon was working on a way to get its financial statements to a point where they could actually be audited, "following years of unsuccessful financial improvements." How can an “improvement” be “unsuccessful?” Makes no sense.
• The target is to have valid financial statements available by September, 2017. However, in October 2011, the goal was to have audit-readiness by fiscal year 2014 so good luck hitting that 2017 date.
• And in reality, that 2017 date is really unacceptable. That would mean that for four more years, over $800 billion a year would be a mystery as far as how it was being spent and how much of it was being wasted.
• The agency slammed the Pentagon for its financial readiness, saying that recent work has "raised concerns" about the Pentagon's ability to implement a valid accounting process and plan.

Thus, the financial statements are a farce, the past improvements to remedy the statements and accounting processes have been a farce, and the ability to fix the processes going forward look like they will also be a farce. I have never heard of any business, any corporation, any non-profit organization, any government agency, or any human endeavor being so screwed up that it could not even be audited by trained professional to find out how screwed up it was. Until now, that is.

Several steps from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government” need to be implemented right away to start to address and fix this insult to the American taxpayer:

1. Step 46 would impose very strict accounting and auditing processes on every single Federal government entity along the lines of the Sarbannes-Oxley legislation that is imposed on private businesses and companies. If non-government entities have to live under and obey strict, generally accepted accounting rules and guidelines, there is no reason why government entities should be exempted from those same rules. Maybe if Sarbannes-Oxley had been in place all along we would not annual have over $800 billion at risk.
2. Step 34 establishes a process to remove Congressional members from their committee posts if their committees fall down on the jobs they are supposed to be doing. In this case, any Congressional member who allowed the Defense Department budgeting and accounting process to get this screwed up needs to be removed form those committees immediately. Given how massive this screwup is, they probably should also be drummed out of office.
3. Step 1 would reduce Federal government spending 10% a year for five years across the board. Possibly the only way to get the political Jabba under control is to starve it down to a smaller, more manageable entity that could actually be audited.

Is there any wonder why we have a $16.4 TRILLION national debt when two large government departments are so big and so out of control that an audit is not only difficult, it is impossible?

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

Abra Kadabra - The Right Hand Of The Federal Government Still Does Not Know What The Left Hand Is Doing

Several times we have discussed the fact that our Federal government has grown so large and unwieldy, becoming more like Jabba The Hutt of Star Wars (a parasitic blob that wastes resources) than an efficient and effective organization, that we often come across ludicrous situations where one part of the Federal government is doing something that is in direct conflict with what another tentacle of the government is doing:

• A little while ago we saw how the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department were doing the exact opposite of each other. One entity was busy trying to reduce the volume of long term Treasury bills in the market and increase the amount of short term Treasury bills while the other entity was trying to expand the volume of long term notes and reduce the volume of short term notes.See the following link for more details: http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2011/10/clueless-in-washington.html
• Another time we saw how the Department of Agriculture was increasing the amount of cheap corn in the market with its farm subsidies, making obesity provoking foods less expensive and more widely used due to the proliferation of cheap corn fructose while other parts of the government were trying to reduce the use of corn fructose infested foods to fight obesity. See the following link for more detail: http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/06/your-local-and-state-government-in.html

I am sure I could pull up some other examples from past blog posts but you get the idea. This thing called the Federal government has gotten so large and cumbersome that it cannot help but get in the way of itself every day. If the loss of taxpayer wealth and loss of freedom was not so tragic, some of these antics and working at cross purposes would be kind of funny in a Keystone Kop kind of way.

Unfortunately, these actions do waste incredible amounts of taxpayer money and do rob us of our freedom as the government intrudes to our personal lives more and more with its bureaucratic bumbling.

Today let's talk about the latest crashing together of different government priorities and how this crashing negates the use of taxpayer wealth in the process. Specifically, the latest cross purpose example comes out of the recently passed Senate farm bill. Most of the following information comes from an article in the July 8, 2012 issue of Money News:

• The Federal government and every state government adds a multitude of taxes onto each pack of cigarettes that consumers buy in order to 1) collect taxes on each pack sold and 2) to discourage the purchase and use of cigarettes (not included in the Money News article).
• The Federal government recently announced a new $54 million, 12-week TV ad campaign it will be airing to encourage smokers to give up the smoking habit.
• State level and Federal spending on anti-smoking efforts have topped $800 million in some years.
• Which raises the question that if government entities want to discourage smoking, why does the latest Senate approved farm bill contain continued taxpayer financial support for the industry responsible for the product targeted by those anti-smoking ads, namely the tobacco farming industry?
• From 1995 through 2011, the Federal government has paid out $1.329 billion in subsidies for the tobacco industry. In 2011 alone, Federal taxpayers paid out over $190 million in tobacco subsidies to 58,350 recipients, according to analyses done by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
• North Carolina receives the largest share of the subsidies — 39.7% of the total or $528 million from 1995 through 2011 — followed by Kentucky at 28.7%. The taxpayer waste is not even spread out across a lot of states if only two states sop up almost 70% of the total subsidy.

So let me get this straight. Smoking is a leading cause of disease and death in this country and a prime driver in our problem with escalating health care costs. As a result, the Federal and state governments in this country spend taxpayer money, sometimes to the tune of $800 million a year, to discourage Americans from smoking. This is so important in one part of the Federal government that it is launching a $54 million television ad campaign to encourage people to stop smoking.

However, in the past seven years, the same people running these same government entities have also given away over $1.3 billion of taxpayer wealth to tobacco farmers to help them grow tobacco that leads to disease and death and contributes to our escalating health care costs.

Wouldn't this money have been better spent by either returning it to the American taxpayer, using it to fund lung cancer research, or to help treat victims of lung cancer, a cancer that is most often caused by tobacco smoking? These seems like better uses for over a billion dollars than giving it to tobacco farmers who grow a product that governments spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to discourage people from using. Makes no sense.

But making no sense by our political class should not come as any surprise. They do it every day. How else to you explain the fact that these same politicians have overspent and incurred a national debt of almost $16 TRILLION without resolving a single major issue facing American families today: our public schools still fail to educate, we are still losing a war on drugs, our borders still leak, we still do not have a national energy policy, our health care costs continue to rise, our infrastructure continues to decay, etc.

That is why Step 1 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" is so important. Step 1 would reduce Federal government spending by 10% a year for five years. Not only would this result in a tremendous relief to our national debt problem and spur our economy, it would force these politicians to focus on a much smaller set of priorities since they would have far less taxpayer money to spend and waste and divert their attention. With a smaller set of priorities, maybe, just maybe, they might resolve an issue or two.

Lord knows paying tobacco farmers to grow tobacco to be consumed by consumers that the Federal government wants to discourage consumers from consuming is not the right priority.

We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, "The United States Of Purple," at:

http://www.unitedstatesofpurple.com/

The United States of Purple is a new grass roots approach to filling the office of President of The United States by focusing on the restoration of freedom in the United States, focusing on problem solving skills and results vs. personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just one United States Of America under the banner of Purple.

The United States Of Purple's website also provides you the formal opportunity to sign a petition to begin the process of implementing a Constitutional amendment to impose fixed term limits on all Federally elected politicians. Only by turning out the existing political class can we have a chance of addressing and finally resolving the major issues of or times.

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 http://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.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment/