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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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

February, 2016, Bonus Post, Political Class Insanity: Restricting Viagra Sales, Taxpayer Money for Casinos and Prostitutes, and More

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.

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.

I thought we were done with this month’s insanity yesterday but a late flurry of insanity showed up over the past couple of days that deserves to be reviewed this month: 

1) According to the I Have The Truth website, if you are a man and living in Kentucky, if a Kentucky legislator has her way you will have to get your wife’s permission before you can buy Viagra. Yes, according to David McIntosh writing for the website on February 14, 2016, state representative Mary Lou Marzian is putting forth legislation to such effect in the name of “family values” and “to protect men from themselves.”

Her bill, HB 396, specifies only married men can get Viagra and requires a “man to make a sworn statement with his hand on a Bible that he will only use a prescription for a drug for erectile dysfunction when having sexual relations with his current spouse.” What is interesting is that this legislator is a Democrat, you know, the political party that is always talking about sexual freedom and keeping the government out of our bedrooms.

In reality, Marzian is ticked off that there are currently several anti-abortion bills pending in her legislature and this is a frivolous, nonsensical reaction to those bills. Rather than have an adult conversation about the issues, she files this time wasting, taxpayer dollar wasting, embarrassing piece of legislation to get attention. These antics resolve none of the issues facing her state or the country.

2) The insanity and corruption of politicians does not exist only in Washington, if often extends down to local politicians also. The DC Gazette recently reported that almost the entire city council of a Texas town was recently arrested by the FBI. Vianna Vaughan wrote on February 8, 2016 that all but one member of the Crystal City, Texas city council was arrested under a Federal indictment that accuses them of operating an illegal gambling operation and taking thousands and thousands of dollars in bribes.

According to the indictment, the five arrested “used their official positions to enrich themselves by soliciting and accepting payments and other things of value” and “voting to award contracts in exchange for bribes, extorting payments from contractors, turning a blind eye to Nguyen’s illegal gaming business while taking action to shut down would-be competitors, and agreeing to reduce Nguyen’s taxes in exchange for him waiving debts, among other dealings.” If found guilty, they each face up to 10 years in Federal prison and a quarter million dollars in fines.

American political corruption, from town hall to the halls of Congress to the White House.

3) The national debt recently cross into the $19 TRILLION range territory and remains on a course to eventually crash our economy, our wealth, and our freedoms. When that happens, remember how a recent Heritage Foundation report showed where a million dollars of that growing $19 trillion went. Christopher Oleska and Romina Boccia, writing for the Heritage Foundation on February 8, 2016, reported that from July, 2013 until June, 2014, over 4,000 separate transaction totally $1 million in taxpayer wealth were incurred at gambling casinos using Defense Department government travel and credit cards.

But it gets even worse. Nine hundred more transactions were incurred, at an expense of $96,576, at “adult entertainment establishments.” And it gets even worse: as of May, 2015 only 41% of these transactions went punished.

But we should not be surprised. The Defense Department is not the only abuser of government credit and travel cards:

• Employees of the State Department abused the cards by funding unauthorized first class trips to Hawaii.
• Over $600,000 was used for golf and tennis lessons and other abuses instead of being used for the intended purposes of helping Hurricane Katrina victims.
• IRS employees abused their cards by buying everything from diet pills to alcohol and pornography for their own personal use.

Disgusting abuse. But as the article points out, every law passed by Congress to stop the abuse over the past several years has been a failure, much like everything else Congress does.

4) Speaking of wasting taxpayer money, the Labor Department recently announced that it will spend $20 million this summer to create summer jobs and “career pathways” for young Americans. On the surface, this seems like a good thing. The unemployment rate among teenagers is very high and the lack of summer and other part time jobs does not give them the experience in the work force that would serve them well in the future. 

In fact, the unemployment rate for kids aged 16 to 19 is 16%, more than three times the overall unemployment rate. Up to $2 million will go to each of 10 local workforce development organizations to pump up existing summer job programs.

But if you do the math, this is really an insanely bad idea and waste of taxpayer wealth. Let’s make a few assumptions:

• Assume the kids work for 12 weeks over their summer vacation.
• Assume they work 40 hours a week.
• Assume they get paid $10 an hour.
• If we multiply 12 weeks times 40 hours times $10 an hour and divide that into $20 million, we find that this program will create, wait for it, about 4,000 summer jobs for the whole country or about 80 summer jobs per state on average.

Given that millions and millions of kids need summer jobs, this effort of 4,000 jobs is a nit on a much bigger problem and resolves nothing except wasting $20 million of taxpayer wealth. And this assumes that all $20 million is used to finance jobs, knowing how government works, a big chunk of that $20 million is likely to be lost in administrative overhead or criminal fraud.

A better solution is to have politicians who have some sense of how to put sound economic policies in place, reduce business taxes, and reduce the staggering burden of government regulation so that the market creates jobs naturally. 

But since the Obama administration in particular and Congress in general have no idea how to execute a well run economy we get stuck paying for these minimal piecemeal government programs that resolve nothing and just waste money.

5) But politicians do not only waste money on stupid ideas, they also waste time on stupid ideas.The state of Illinois is a financial basket case wasting to die. Their current expense streams and future expense liabilities are much greater than their current tax revenue streams. But raising taxes to help pay the outrageously high government expenses is likely to drive away businesses and families from the state, further reducing the tax revenue streams.

Things had gotten so bad last year from a revenue perspective and political gridlock perspective that for a while the state did not have the money to pay off state lottery winners or pay the claims of state workers’ health insurance plans. It was behind in payment to vendors for months and months. It is a state in dire need of leadership, focus, and strategic planning.

But instead of those traits, Illinois state politicians have recently been working on legislation that would establish a state holiday in honor of Barack Obama. Under the proposed state legislation, it would be a state wide holiday for which state employees would get the day off with pay, as if the state did not have enough financial challenges.

Talk about bad priorities. A state that was technically in default of its debt for a short time in 2015, a state that has bloated pension and retirement benefits for state workers, so bloated that it may bankrupt the state government, city schools that do not educate, a gun and homicide epidemic in its biggest city, and the political leaders are worried about establishing a state holiday for a President who should have been impeached years ago, a President whose administration has been a failure on so many levels. Insanity.

That will definitely do it for this month’s insanity, I cannot take anymore. But rest assured, more insanity is sure to put up by this time next month.

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

January 2016, Part 1,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Gaming The System For Cheap Medical Care, Premiums Still Going Up and More

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements it rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

For the next several days we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) One of the obvious holes in the Obama Care legislation, obvious to everyone except Obama and those in Congress who voted for the law, was that by forbidding insurance companies from refusing to insure anyone regardless of their health, it would be easy to “game the system.” By “game the system” I mean that one could go along without insurance, realize they were looking at major medical expenses, get an Obama Care policy, get those expenses covered, and then drop the Obama Care policy. 

This scheme then results in unhealthy financials for the insurance company which raises the rates on existing customers’ Obama Care policies which causes some existing customers to drop their Obama Care policies which hurts insurance companies’ financials which cause them to raise rates…. a classic death spiral. 

Two things within the ObamaCare legislation was supposed to stop this kind of game:

1. First, the penalty for NOT having health insurance was supposed to drive people into Obama Care insurance policies so that they could not jump in and out of a policy depending on when they needed medical expense coverage.
2. Second, with only very special and minimal exceptions, one could only get an Obama Care policy during a short window of time late in a calendar year, forcing people to decide whether or not they wanted to gamble on not having insurance via Obama Care since they would not be able to get it between sign up periods once a year.

But like all other aspects of Obama Care, these two safeguards have failed miserably. Consider some facts from a recent NewsMax article:

• According to Newsmax, “Obamacare loopholes are letting some people wait until they get sick and need expensive care to use late enrollment periods to enroll, or drop coverage while abusing a "grace period" for payment — driving up costs for everyone.”
• At a recent Congressional hearing, the Obama Care representative, Andy Slavitt, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, admitted that this was indeed the case: "There are some [special enrollment periods] that we need to clarify because they're subject frankly to abuse. There may be bad actors and others out there who are abusing those." 
• According to reporting by Politico, more than 900,000 people have been allowed to sign up for Obama Care coverage outside of the official signup periods, hardly the minimal, few cases that were supposed to get exceptions to the rules.
• These 900,000 exceptions represent almost ten percent of all Obama Care policy signups.
• Again, according to Politico, many of these exceptions for such excuses as a physical move or job change were granted without ever getting proof they were legit.

Obama Care insurers assert that these exceptions/latecomers cost much more to insure and run up higher medical bills than those that use the regular sign up periods and that exceptions have a higher policy drop rate than others, all of which help cripple insurers’ financial results.

In addition, insurers also complain about policyholders who abuse a three-month "grace period" that lets them get the subsidized medical coverage even if they've stopped paying for it, i.e. free health insurance.

Slavitt testified that he has created an enforcement task force to make sure people are getting legitimate exceptions. But given the government’s performance so far in this area, I would bet success will be minimal.

I suspect that one of the reasons why the exceptions are so high is that Obama wanted to pump up the enrollment numbers as much as possible even if it meant financial pain to the insurance companies since his promise of having Obama Care policies covering 20 million people by now will fall about 50% or 10 million people short. As always in Washington, politics trumps common sense and rational thought.

Bottom line: insurance companies are paying for some of the serious flaws in the law and those flaws will cause Obama Care policy costs to go up and the number of Obama Care insurers to eventually go down.

2) A recent article in the Tampa Bay Times reinforced the reality that people are screwing the Obama Care system and regulations to get either short term or free health insurance to handle medical care expense and cost coverage. Details of their reporting include the following:

• The Obama administration created 30 “special enrollment” reasons and then sent out millions of pieces of mail encouraging uninsured people to sign up for an Obama Care policy under these specialenrollment reasons.
• So many special enrollment periods have caused financial stress for the Obama Care insurers.
• According to the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, the people who enroll under the special enrollment reasons use up to 55% more of medical services than those that enroll during regular enrollment periods.
• Aetna claims that one fourth of their enrollments come under these special enrollment reasons which may explain their recent announcement that they cannot survive long term in the world of Obama Care without changes to the regulations.
• An Aetna representative claimed in the article that special enrollment enrollees stay with the insurer for only four months, probably just long enough to get medical care and to have their expenses covered.
• A spokesman for the Health Care Services Corp., which operates insurance plans in five states, claims that one fourth to one third of the policies he writes come under special enrollment reasons and that those policies are much more likely to generate high claims in the very first month that the policy is in effect.

There are certainly reasons for special exceptions to the standard enrollment periods. But as with everything else that Washington touches, they screwed up this simple concept also. And this screw up is likely to continue to drive up health insurance costs, the exact opposite of what Obama Care was supposed to do.

3) Dozens of times in this blog we have presented videos and quotes from Obama where he promised that Obama Care would reduce health insurance costs for Americans up to $2,500 a year. Of course, the reality has come nowhere close to this promise and/or lie, with health insurance costs still climbing far beyond the total inflation rate.

More proof of this fallacy was recently presented by Freedom Partners which is a Virginia based non-profit organization. Their analysis found that 49 out of 50 states will see insurance premium increases in the individual health insurance market in 2016, the market that Obama Care serves. More detailed findings from their analysis include the following:

• Mississippi is the only state where premiums will not rise in 2016.
• Most states will see double digit increases in insurance premiums.
• Some state citizens should expect insurance premium increases of at least 20% including Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
• The states getting the largest hits include Minnesota at 47.7%, Alaska at 39.1%, Tennessee at 35.2%, Hawaii at 30%, and Oklahoma at 29.4%.

So much for seeing that $2,500 annual decrease.

3) We have often spoke how the various Obama Care portals to get insurance have been utter failures. Many of the taxpayer funded state exchanges to buy Obama Care policies online have already folded down from failure, with one of them having never even signed up a single customer. We have reviewed how over half of the Obama Care co-ops have already failed and gone out of business, leaving hundreds of thousands people without insurance and wasting over $1 billion of taxpayer subsidies.

Now we can add another failure to this litany of failures. Kentucky’s Governor Matt Bevin recently told the Obama administration that his state will terminate Kentucky’s Obama Care exchange, kynect. The exchange will terminate operations on January 31 after the current enrollment period ends. Just another disaster in the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. More disasters in the coming days.



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