July, 2018, Part 7, Political Class: Economic Ignorance In NYC, Rats Gone Wild In Chicago, and The Non-Threat From Russia

It is 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.

Let’s get started:

1) Sometimes you cannot believe what comes out of a politician’s mouth, it is that inane. Such is what happened recently to a co-called”rising star” of the Democratic party, a young lady from NYC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez recently had a huge upset in a Democratic primary, beating a long time Congressman from that district.

This got a lot of liberals and Democrats all excited: a young woman, Hispanic, camera friendly, a millennial, all of the Democratic hot buttons pushed. She was dubbed by some as the future of the Democratic party which seemed a little premature since her only accomplishment was to win one primary.

It got really premature when she opened her mouth during a friendly interview that she granted. Keep in mind as you see what she said, that she supposedly has a degree in economics, which seems really hard to believe based on her understanding, or non-understanding, of a simple economic calculation, the unemployment rate:

• The host lobbed a softball question to her, citing the reality that the nation’s unemployment rate is very low, record setting lows in some places.
• The host then made the correct assertion that this was good news for working Americans.
• At which point Ms. Ocasio-Cortez made a complete fool of herself and her economics degree: “Well, I think the numbers you just talked about is part of the problem, right? We look at these figures and we say, ‘Oh, unemployment is low, everything is fine,’ right? Well, unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their kids.”
• She somehow thinks that if a person has two jobs, that helps drive down the unemployment rate which, of course is nonsense. 
• The unemployment rate is simply the number of people who are without a job and who are looking for a job divided by divided by the the size of the workforce, it has NOTHING to do with whether or not someone has two or three or more jobs.
• This from a supposedly college graduate with a degree in economics who cannot understand a simple high school economics class principle. Makes you wonder how bad her university's economic program is.

But her ignorance and/or lying gets worse:

• She says “everyone has two jobs” which of course is more nonsense.
• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer than five percent of the U.S. labor force currently has two jobs, which means that more than 95% of American workers only have one job, hardly close to her assertion that ”everyone has two jobs.”
• What’s more, the percentage of Americans holding down two jobs has been steadily trending downwards over the past two decades.
• As far as “barely feeding their kids,” Michelle Malkin puts that nonsense to rest also: “As for starving children, government statistics show that hunger has dropped to its lowest levels in a decade as unemployment and food inflation have declined. Federal food stamp usage has also plunged to historic lows.”

Is she a liar, pushing her point of view on an unsuspecting public or is she really that ignorant of the realities of our times regarding how to calculate a simple, very basic economic statistic and does not know the realities of declining hunger levels and multiple job holders in the country? In either case, a liar or ignorant, hardly the future any political party should want for their future.

As a final note, Ms. Malkin does a better job of explaining this nonsense coming from Ms. Ocasio-Cortez than me: “The unemployment rate, which stands at a historically low 4 percent, is calculated by extrapolating and dividing the number of people out of work by the total number of individuals in the American workforce.

If you have one job, two jobs, three jobs or more, you don’t count as unemployed. Whether you are working 40 hours or 80 hours or 120 hours a week, if you’re working, that has no effect on the unemployment rate, either. The number of workers moonlighting and the number of hours they moonlight have zero, zip and nada effect on the unemployment rate.

Ocasio-Cortez’s claim that “everyone has two jobs” is more fake-o-nomics. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the number of Americans holding down multiple jobs is less than 5 percent and has been declining for nearly 30 years. Pew Research adds that both “in terms of raw numbers and as a share of all employed people, fewer Americans are working more than one job than in the mid-1990s.”

2) We have recently discussed the reality that San Francisco has a human feces problem in its city, getting thousands of complaints a week of human feces showing up on the city streets because of the high number of homeless people in the city. Pretty disgusting stuff, but Chicago is not far behind San Francisco in disgusting health situations, as reported by Angie Leventis Lourgos in a recent article from the Chicago Tribune:

• A recent study by an organization called RentHop rated Chicago as the “rat capital” of the country.
• This dubious award went to Chicago based on the number of rat complaints registered in 2017 in four major U.S. cities.
• Chicago had over 50,000 rat complaints filed, Boston had almost 2,500, New York had just over 19,000 and D.C. had just over 5,000 rat complaints.
• Thus, the “contest” was not even close with Chicago have twenty times more complaints than Boston, ten times more than D.C. and two and half more than NYC.
• Even when adjusted for population size, Chicago is still the clear “winner.”
• Now to be fair, the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation said it actually received only 42,670 requests for rat complaints from residents in 2017 in Chicago.
• However, I doubt that made Chicago residents feel any better since the number is still huge and more than double the nearest competitor, New York City.
• Despite what the city says, the article quotes a Chicago veterinarian, Dr. Dylan Frederickson, who claims he has lived in other cities like Minneapolis and Madison, but has never experienced such a dense rat population before: “I’ve never seen anything like the rat infestation that we have in Chicago.” 
• He claims that he has had to treat pet dogs for leptospirosis which is a rat caused disease.

We mention this disgusting situation in Chicago to prove a point we have made often. Given that the city’s rat population is exploding, the south side of Chicago is a murderous place to be any day of the year with hundreds of innocent citizens gunned down in the streets every year, the city school system stinks, and the city is going bankrupt, just what do the local city politicians bring to the table as far as serving their constituents? It does not appear like they bring much except for high taxes.

3) We have often argued that today’s American politicians are more concerned about their careers and self enrichment than being in touch with Americans’ worries, issues, and concerns. This self centered approach to life and politics often has the political class totally out of step with what Americans what to see get done and resolved.

The following is just another example in a long line of examples of being out of touch. If you were to believe the mainstream media, liberals and Democrats, you would think that our relationship with Russia was the biggest crisis in the history of the Republic. They are actually out of control trying to find a way to prove that Russia is the ultimate enemy, in cahoots with Trump.

But is that the reality out in the country, away from D.C.? Are Americans also viewing Russia as the top issue in their lives? According to Gallup, not quite:

• Gallup recently asked Americans what was the most important problem facing America today.
• Not unexpectedly, economic issues were very important to Americans.
• But Gallup also listed out in rank order important issues in Americans’ mind that did not include economic issues.
• The top two issues, by far, in Americans’ lives are Immigration/Illegal Aliens (22%) and Dissatisfaction With Government/Poor Leadership (19%).
• No other non-economic issues garnered double digit results, Race Relations/Racism (7%) and Unifying the Country and Lack of Respect for Each Other, both at only 6%, coming in next.

And where did big, bad Russia come in relative Americans’ fears? The concern about Russia finished at less than one half of one percent, with 26 other issues ranked as more important than Russia. And yet, if you listen to the media, Democrats, and liberals it is by far the biggest threat to our country. So out of touch with the reality in America today.

That will do it for today’s and this month’s political class insanity. Washington still out of touch with Americans, rats going crazy in Chicago, and a totally ignorant and/or lying New York City politician. More insanity 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:


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

October, 2017, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Five Obama Care Policies In Five Years and Doctors Not Being Doctors

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 its 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, sugar, 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 copays 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.

1) We have often discussed the reality that America does not have enough doctors to adequately satisfy the needs of sick Americans. That shortage was made more dramatic once Obama Care was implemented since its' hassles and idiocy led to many doctors retiring earlier, deciding that they did not want to deal with the hassles of dealing with government red tape and bureaucracy associated with Obama Care’s intrusion into the healthcare market.

Well, according to an article in the September 11, 2017 issue of Businessweek, now it appears that the front of the pipeline for doctors in this country is also getting smaller, which will make the number of doctors in this country even tighter in years to come:

• A 2016 survey of 17,000 medical school graduates by the Physicians Foundation found that 13.5% of them stated they planned to be in non-doctor/patient or non-clinical jobs within three years, with many of them going into business or research.
• This is up from 9.9% in 2012.
• Another study of doctors from Merritt Hawkins asked doctors if they were to begin their educations again, would they enter the medical profession and 25% said they would enter another field.
• This 25% is up threefold from the 8% that answered the same question in 2006.
• The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that by 2030, the country will be short 100,000 doctors or about 2,000 per state on average, with rural areas being hit especially bad.
• These medically trained but non-practicing doctors are being hired by consulting companies, going back to get their MBA degrees, or starting their own businesses but are not seeing sick patients, often because of the hassles of actually treating patients or the desire for bigger dollars not treating patients.

Thus, Obama Care’s impact and the administrative headaches and rules/regulations it brought with it at best is not helping resolve the current doctor shortage and at worse (more likely) has made and is making the doctors shortage worse with no solution in sight.

2) Michelle Malkin is a well known political commentator, blogger, and writer. One of her latest pieces shows a real life example of how one American family, her own, has been raked over the coals by Obama Care. In her case, she has had four different insurance carriers since Obama Care went into effect:

• She and her husband just got the fourth cancellation notice of their health insurance policy since 2013.
• Their first cancellation came from Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in 2013 since Obama Care tenets made their preferred and then current policy from Anthem invalid.
• It did not matter that they liked their then current high deductible policy since it fit their family needs and included a wide ranging network of doctors that their family needed and liked.
• Their second plan from Rocky Mountain Health Plans died in August, 2015 which in a way was a good thing since they did not like it since it did not cover their kids’ health needs and was not accepted at their local urgent care clinic.
• This second plan died since the insurer pulled out of their market area because they could not make money.
• Their third plan was cancelled in August, 2016 since the insurer claimed that it was pulling out of their Colorado market because it would “no longer offer your current health plan in the State of Colorado,” i.e. it could not make a profit in Colorado. 
• The Malkin family then enrolled in the Bronze HSA EPO plan offered by the Minneapolis startup, Bright Health.
• Less than a year later, Bright Health told them that their plan would be discontinued on January 1, 2018.
• When they went looking for a new policy for the fifth time since 2013, they found that the cheapest plan they could get would raise their monthly premium cost from $944.86 to over $1,300, and this is a high deductible plan which means that they will have to satisfy an annual deductible that is likely to be over $13,000 a year.
• Malkin goes on to point out that her home state of Colorado is not the only state experiencing the disaster that is Obama Care: “Premiums for individual health plans in Virginia are set to skyrocket nearly 60 percent in 2018. In New Hampshire, those rates will rise 52 percent. In South Carolina, individual market consumers will face an average 31.3 percent hike. In Tennessee, they’ll see rates jump between 20-40 percent.”

So it is not only the unknown average Americans family that is getting slammed every day by Obama Care, it is famous, higher earning Americans like Malkin that also are getting whipsawed by a terrible piece of legislation. And yet, Washington politicians have no clue or energy or will to fix what is a horrible situation. 

Malkin concludes her piece by summing up the frustration that her and millions of other Americans have experienced as a result of the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care: “There are an estimated 450,000 consumers like us in Colorado and 17 million of us nationwide — small-business owners, independent contractors and others who don’t get their plans through group coverage, big companies or government employers. The costs, headaches and disruption in our lives caused by Obamacare’s meddling meddlers are real and massive.

But we’re puzzles to corporate media journalists who’ve never had to meet a payroll and don’t even know what is the individual market.

We’re invisible to late-night TV clowns who get their Obamacare-at-all-costs talking points from Chuck Schumer.

We’re pariahs to social justice health care activists and Democrats who want us to just shut up and subsidize everyone else’s insurance.

And we’re expendables to establishment Republicans who hoovered up campaign donations on the empty promise to repeal Obamacare — and now consider amnesty for immigrants here illegally and gun control higher legislative priorities than keeping their damned word.

We’re the canaries in the Obamacare coal mine. Ignore us at your peril, America. You’re next.”

And idiots like Senator Bernie Sanders and others want Washington to control everyone’s healthcare needs via a single payer system, not just those in the individual insurance market. One look at what Washington did to the individual health insurance market, and families like Malkin’s via Obama Care, should be enough proof that Washington and a single payer system are both insanity and the height of idiocy. More disasters 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:

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 the Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 2: The Uninsured Stay Uninsured, More Job Losses, and Illega lChanges To The Legislation Continue

This is our second and definitely not last post this month on the continually unfolding disaster known as Obama Care as it rampages across our lives. We have been doing a monthly series on Obama Care since last August with about a half dozen posts each month. That many posts were needed each month because this legislation is so bad, ineffective, expensive, economy damaging, personal lives disrupting, and with no chance of ever being successful.

As you will easily see by reading our posts in the past eight months and the posts we have been doing on Obama Care for the past three years, this is easily the worst piece of legislation ever enacted by the most inept set of Washington politicians ever. 

As we said yesterday, we will not go into our solution for resolving the problem of ever escalating health care costs this week. You can read and comment on our solution in past posts we have already published. There is so much bad coming out of the legislation every day that this week we are focusing just on the disasters, not our solution.

1) Millcreek, Pennsylvania schools were in the local Pennsylvania media recently relative to the severe financial hardships that Obama Care is putting on the Millcreek school district, and likely other school districts across the country:

• The school district is already facing a $4.4 million deficit before considering Obama Care.
• If the school district does not change its mode of operation, Obama Care will pile another annual half a million dollars of cost on the district’s budget every year.
• Possibly the only solution is to fire dozens of non-teaching employees such as janitorial and food service personnel and outsource those functions to an outside employment agency to avoid further costs from Obama Care.

Thus, rather than focusing on operating an efficient and effective school system, Millcreek education personnel and board members are devoting a lot of time getting out from under the onerous costs of Obama Care, a non-solution to a real problem. One of the local news reports and the challenges the school district faces can be seen at:

http://www.westernjournalism.com/wont-believe-much-obamacare-raising-costs-pa-school-district/

Remember, Obama and others promised that health care costs would go way down as a result of this legislation. Apparently, health care costs have gone down so much as a result of Obama Care that school districts like Millcreek are looking at a half a million dollar INCREASE in their health care expenses [sarcasm].

2) The Heritage Foundation had a short update piece on its website on March 7, 2014 that illustrates just a small portion of the insanity of Obama Care:

- The first piece of insanity goes back to the time of the original intentions of Obama Care: it was supposed to provide inexpensive health care insurance for EVERY uninsured American. Noble goal, total flop. Heritage reports that the Congressional Budget Office now estimates 31 million Americans will still be left uninsured years after Obama Care is in place. 

Thus, one of the primary reasons for Obama Care, the reason that millions of Americans lost their current insurance, lost access to their preferred doctors, lost access to their preferred hospitals and generally had their lives substantially disrupted, will not come close to be successful.

- But to add insult to injury, we now find out that the Obama Care back room operations and logistics do not even have the processes or intention to track their progress in signing up uninsured Americans for health insurance. Recently, an executive with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Gary Cohen, was asked: How many uninsured Americans are signing up for Obama Care? His reply: “That’s not a data point that we are really collecting in any sort of systematic way.” 

Unbelievable. One of the primary selling points for President Obama was that Obama Care would insure the uninsured. And now the Administration doesn’t even know whether the people signing up had insurance to begin with. The Washington Post reports:

The online application, used by most people to enroll, asks whether people want to apply for coverage but does not give them a place to indicate whether they have insurance now or have had it in the past. As a result, HHS analysts have no way of assessing how many of the online enrollees were uninsured in the past.

How can you know where you are going and how well you are doing against your primary objective if you do not track your progress against your primary goal? You cannot make up this type of incompetence.

3) A Washington examiner article by Michelle Malkin on March 7, 2014 reported on the effort by Senate Democrats to repeal a tax that they purposely included in the Obama Care legislation, the so-called medical device tax. The device tax was put into effect to make the Obama Care business case look good by providing revenue to offset the costs invoked by the legislation.

But the writers of Obama Care had very little knowledge of how business, economics, and reality works. Take profits away from a business, in this case by taxing that business, and they will have less money to hire employees, retain employees, invest in research and development, and have less flexibility to grow their business. It is that simple, but obviously beyond the grasp of Democrats in Congress.

That is why last March, with the support of several key Democrats, the Senate voted to repeal the Obama Care medical device tax that all Democrats had voted to put in the legislation to begin with. They got cold feet when businesses and voters in their home states raised the reality of how devastating the tax would be to their businesses and their employees' lives.

But the vote never got enacted into law. As a result, device makers have cut back on research and development, cut back on hiring, and moved some manufacturing to cheaper overseas facilities. Thus, long term, with less research and development, the ability of these businesses to grow by introducing new products and technologies into the marketplace will be lowered.

Also, according to the medical device manufacturers industry group AdvaMed, the punitive tax has forced companies to lay off or avoid hiring at least 33,000 workers over the past year. This reality proves that recent statements by Kathleen Sebelius, the Obama administration person responsible for implementing Obama Care, and who declared that Obama Care had no negative impact on jobs, is proven again to be a lie and a deception. This time in the medical device industry.

4) The Malkin Examiner article also reviewed the numerous, and illegal, changes the Obama administration has made to the law without staying within the confines of the Constitution, making all of these changes illegal, void, and probably impeachable offenses under our rules of law:

• Allowing insurers for two extra years to continue selling plans that otherwise would have been banned by the Obama Care legislation. 
• Extending the open enrollment period for 2015 from November 2014 to February 2015, a months longer than originally scheduled. 
• Relaxing eligibility requirements for insurers to qualify for financial help under a three-year program intended to protect insurers' costs of complying with Obama Care mandates.
• Exempting labor unions, universities and other self-insured employers from paying a fee.
• Allowing medium-sized employers an extra year to comply with the Obama Care mandate to offer insurance to all full-time workers and reduced the percentage of workers that large companies are required to cover. 

These latest unilateral regulatory changes by Obama administrative declarations all come on the heels of dozens of administrative delays and rollbacks including:

• In November 2010, the administration began issuing thousands of waivers to unions, cronies, businesses and organizations that offered affordable health insurance or prescription drug coverage with limited benefits outlawed by Obama Care. Many of these exemptions went to the political allies of of the Washington political class.
• In April 2011, Obama signed a law repealing his own onerous $22 billion Obama Care 1099 tax-compliance mandate that would have destroyed small businesses inundated with pointless paperwork.
• In December, 2013 and January, 2014, Obama, Sebelius, and this administration got really busy by delaying premium payment deadlines, delaying high-risk insurance pool cancellations, delaying equal coverage mandates that force companies to drop health benefits rewards for top executives, and delaying onerous "meaningful use" mandates on health providers grappling with Obama Care's disastrous top-down electronic medical records rules.

Malkin makes the following and interesting observation in light of the mess that the administration has made of the legislation’s schedules and requirements: “While Democrats complain about Republican Obama Care repeal efforts, we may be nearing a special inflection point at which the White House will have reneged on more Obama Care regulations than it's actually enforcing!”

She is probably not too far off in her assessment. How bad is a piece of legislation when the makers and supporters of that legislation have had to make so many changes that the current bastardized version of the legislation is unrecognizable from the original legislation? Have we gotten to a point where it would be better to just start over: 

Not because millions of Americans have lost insurance coverage, 

Not because millions of Americans have lost access to their preferred doctors and hospitals, 

Not because the law will add massive amounts of debt to the national debt, 

Not because people’s lives have been endangered by the legislation, 

Not because identity theft will make millions of Americans lives a nightmare,

Not because the legislation has no chance of success because it did not attack the root causes of our high health care costs, 

Not because the law is killing jobs creation and the economy, 

But simply because the legislation has changed more than it has remained unchanged relative to the original legislation? More disasters 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.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w