January, 2016, Part 3, By The Numbers: Gun Control Is Not A Priority, Raising Tax Rates Reduces Tax Collections and More

This is the first post this month in our continuing theme of “by the numbers.” We do this theme occasionally where we look at the reality of the numbers in the world and not the lies, deceptions, and spin of the American political class. I used to work for a boss whose favorite quote was: “There is nothing more devastating to an opinion than the correct number.” By looking at the statistics, trends, and numbers in our world we can cut through the politicians’ smoke screen to truly understand what is going on and hopefully, remedy the issues of the day.

And there will be a lot of smoke to cut through in these posts. Always believe the numbers before you believe our politicians, numbers do not lie but politicians do.

1) We have often shown that when politicians raise taxes in order to get more tax revenue, the overall level of tax revenue received usually drops. For instance, we once reported how the state government of Maryland raised the state income tax level on millionaires residing in Maryland. Within a short amount of time, the total amount of tax revenue collected from state millionaires actually dropped even though the tax rate was higher. The details of this insanity can be seen at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/12/day-7-eight-days-of-logic-and-sanity.html

The reason for this apparently wrong reality is that people are not stupid. They want to keep as much of their wealth as possible. Thus, when the state of Maryland raised taxes on rich people those rich people simply moved away, resulting in fewer Maryland millionaires and less tax revenue from state millionaires. It is that simple.

And cigarette smokers are not stupid either. Put too much tax on their cigarette purchases and overall tax revenue goes down rather than up, as a recent Daily Caller article by Guy Bentley shows. According to Bentley:

• New York lost $400 million in taxes from cigarettes after imposing the highest cigarette tax in the nation on sales of packs in the state.
• The tax resulted in an average cost of $10.66 per pack of cigarettes in the state.
• Cigarette taxes in the state are up 190% in the past decade or so.
• Despite the 190% increase in taxes, the New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli estimates that the state government has lost $400 million in cigarette revenue over the past five years.
• A separate study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine estimates that the state lost far more in tax revenue, namely $1.3 billion each YEAR, because smokers switched to less expensive alternatives.
• These cheaper alternatives included turning to black market and organized crime criminal enterprises to buy cigarettes, crossing state lines to buy them, or buying less expensive brands of cigarettes from Native American outlets.
• The number of cigarette packs bought paying the full tax has also dropped by 62%.
• And as always, increased taxation always hits the poorest in our society the hardest with smoker households earning less than $30,000 a year spending a whopping 23.6% of their annual household income on cigarettes in 2010-2011, up from only 11.6% in 2003-2004, according to the New York State Department of Health. 
• Smoker households earning over $60,000 spend on average 2.2% of their annual income on cigarettes. 

As with most government actions, the numbers prove again that their action never resolves the original problem (in this case stopping people from smoking since they just go to other sources for their nicotine), raising taxes results in LESS government revenue, and criminal enterprises are given an opportunity to make obscene profits.

2) According to a January 5, 2016 article on the Political Outcast website, a recent Gallup poll shows that only 2% of Americans think that gun control is the major issue in their lives despite the fact that Obama and his administration are fixated on imposing illegal and un-Constitutional gun controls on the nation. The most important problems facing the country today according to the Gallup study is:

1. Politics/Congress/Government - 16%
2. Economy in general - 13%
3. Jobs/employment - 8%
4. Immigration - 8%
5. Healthcare - 6%
6. Ethics/Moral decline - 5%
7. Race Relations/Racism - 5%
8. Terrorism - 5%
9. Federal budget deficit/national debt - 5%
10. Education - 3%
11. Poverty/homelessness/hunger - 3%
12. National Security - 3%
13. Gap between rich and poor - 3%
14. Crime/violence - 3%
15. Foreign aid/focus on overseas - 3%
16. Situation on Iraq/ISIS - 3%
17. Seven other issues tied with 2% including gun control

Thus, there are at least sixteen issues that Americans rank as more important than gun control. And yet, Obama continues to fixate on an issue that is so minor in most Americans lives. Probably because he has no clue on how to fix the sixteen issues ranked more important than gun control.

What I find particularly ironic is that the number one issue in Americans’ ranking the major issues is government and politicians. So, Obama is trying to fix a problem that is minor in Americans’ eyes even though he is part of the largest perceived issue of our times.

3) CNBC recently reported that mortgage applications have dropped a whopping 27% during the past two weeks after the Fed’s first rate hike in almost ten years, a further indication that the economy is on the verge of a slowdown. 

4) In another number indicating an economic slowdown, the cost of a barrel of oil recently hit $35, the lowest price in the past 11 years. The price dipped 6% in just one day recently because of any number of world wide factors.

5) Throughout the life of this blog we have lamented the reality that the Washington political class has no ability or intention to get the nation’s runaway national debt under control. The debt level is now over $18.3 TRILLION with an amazing and depressing $8 TRILLION of that debt coming during the Obama administration. This comes out to about $160,000 per U.S. family.

According to a recent MoneyNews article, the U.S. Federal government will have to refinance about $3.5 TRILLION in 2016 to pay off expiring debt. This is equivalent to every American family writing a check for about $30,000 just to tread water with current debt. As these numbers make it so clear, at some point the debt burden in this country will crush the economy, our democracy, and our futures.

Oh, and by the way, if you had $18.3 TRILLION single dollar bills and laid them end to end, they would circle the earth about 70,000 times. If you laid them end to end and pointed them to the moon, you would have over 7,000 strings of dollar bills hitting the moon. That is a lot of debt.

6) The Obama administration via mostly his Justice Department has said that it will vigorously investigate and prosecute real and imagined attacks, slurs, and affronts against Muslims throughout the country that are religion based. While this attitude has the potential of sending government agents out on witch hunts looking for Americans who were simply expressing an opinion, that is not the biggest problem with this “protect Muslims from religious persecution” attitude, as the numbers show.

First of all, if the President wants to protect people based on their religion, as the President of ALL Americans he should not be restricting his government agents and Justice Department to attacks solely against Muslims. Christians, Jews, Hindus, etc. should also get this same type of protection, not just Muslims. In reality, if any religion should be protected it should be Jewish Americans. According to a recent FBI investigation and report, in 2014 more than half of all hate crimes based on religion were against Jews, 56.8%, despite the fact that Jews represent less than 2% of the American population.

In 2014, 16% of religion based hate crimes were against Muslims. Since Muslims and Jews account for about the same percentage of the American population, Jews are about three and a half times more likely to be subjected to a hate crime based on religion than Muslims. And yet the President ignores these numbers to give very special protection and attention to Muslims.

That will do it for today's by the numbers. Today we learned that raising taxes actually can reduce tax revenue, that gun control is way down the list of Americans’ concerns, the economy might be tanking if we measure it by falling mortgage volumes and falling oil prices, and our debt load is still stifling. The  numbers are in and the numbers are not good, as we have shown over the past three days. Term limits anyone:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

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

December, 2014, Part 8, Political Class Insanity: Over Regulation, Job Security In The Federal Government, More Iraq Wasteful Spending, and More

It’s the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from America’s politicians. Whether it is wasteful spending, inane quotes, faulty government operations, or insulting the American public, there is always new material spewing forth from these people, usually enough to fill up half a dozen or so posts every month. Given what we know today, this month should be no different as the insanity seems to be expanding exponentially from those in office today.

This is our eighth and final installment this month and we are getting near to the end of the latest insanity from our politicians. A lot of what you will see today comes from events that happened this past summer. It is only now that we have been able to get through the recent insanity that we can now review older, but still crazy, political class insanity. 

We will move onto other topics tomorrow, not because we have covered all of the current and recent past insanity but because it is getting too depressing to review such idiocy in such a short time.

1) One of the main components that drove the country to into the Great Recession and close to a worldwide financial meltdown was the fact that many Americans families bought houses that they could not afford. And the main driver of that problem was the fact that banks and mortgage dealers sold mortgages to millions of Americans that required little or no down payment on the house.

As a result American families over extended themselves, buying more house than they could afford, and many, many ended up in foreclosure. It was a brutal economic lesson to learn: do not allow someone to buy a home with so little of a down payment, tit can lead to events like the Great Recession.

Or was the lesson learned? According to a recent Associated Press report, the Federal government, via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, will encourage banks and other financial organizations to sell mortgages to Americans and require as little as 3% of the purchase prices as a down payment. Unreal, having just survived a financial meltdown because of over extended mortgage holders, the Federal government is encouraging Americans to overextend themselves again on housing.

"These underwriting guidelines provide a responsible approach to improving access to credit while ensuring safe and sound lending practices," Mel Watt, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said in a statement. The FHFA oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have been under government caretaking since 2008 because of the housing bust. 

How in the world is this a “responsible approach” when the last time Fannie and Freddie allowed this type of reckless behavior the American taxpayer had to bailout both Fannie and Freddie to the tune of almost $200 billion? And according to the Associated Press report, this low down payment approach is targeted to first time buyers, the very type of people that cannot afford to overextend themselves. Insane.

This is the equivalent of getting hit with a right upper cut in a boxing match and after getting off the mat, doing the exact same thing to get hit with the same upper cut again. Has Washington learned nothing from how its behavior created the Great Recession?

2) More bad news out of Iraq, as if we have not had enough of it. According to a Washington Post report, after the downfall of Hussein in Iraq in 2003, the American taxpayer spent $25 billion to train, fund, and equip a rebuilt Iraqi army. 

Iraq’s new Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, recently publicly made the announcement that the Iraqi government had been paying for at least 50,000 soldiers who simply do not exist. These so-called ghost soldiers draw salaries but review of Iraqi military rolls showed that there are upwards of 50,000 false names in those military rolls

It appears that Iraqi military officers were making up the fake soldiers and simply pocketing the salaries of these ghost soldiers. This may help explain why the Iraqi military forces folded so easily when attacked by ISIS terrorists earlier this year, many of those forces may have not even existed. How much of that $25 billion that the U.S. spent on the Iraqi forces was not reported but you can bet that a lot of that $25 billion never made it to its ended end purpose. 

There seems to be no end on how many different and unique ways the U.S. Federal government and its Defense Department can waste, lose, and abuse taxpayer money. Whether it is in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere.

3) Tom Hinchey, writing for the Heritage Foundation, uncovered another National Science Foundation (NSF) disaster and more wasteful and corrupted spending. We have never been a fan of the National Science Foundation, given how it has spent taxpayer money on a whole range of inane and stupid projects that have little to do with the problems facing Americans today. For a summary of the wasteful spending, just enter “national science foundation” into the search box above.

The latest NSF stupidity comes from an audit of the non-profit National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) in November by the National Science Foundation (NSF) inspector general and the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA). The audit found that NEON billed NSF for normally unallowable costs for entertainment, lobbying, and alcohol:

· $25,000 for a Christmas party 

· $11,000 for coffee services for employees 

· $3,000 for Board of Director dinners (which included alcohol) 

· $3,000 for t-shirts and other apparel for Contractor employees 

· $83,000 for business development 

· $112,000 for lobbying 

· $150 million in questionable construction costs

The audit report also found that the NSF had lousy accounting controls and other safeguards in place to track spending in any phase of its funding processes. Just another project in the long line of useless and out of control projects mismanaged by the NSF.

Also included in the writing by Mr. Hinchey were other inane NSF projects that even we had not heard of but which were just as useless as the ones we were aware of and reported on:

• Senator Tom Coburn released a report in 2011 identifying more than $1.2 billion in losses from waste, fraud, duplication, and mismanagement at the NSF. 
• The NSF spent $80,000 to study why the same college basketball teams always dominate March Madness.
• It spend $1 million for an analysis of how quickly parents respond to trendy baby names.
• It spent $581,000 on whether online dating site users are racist.
• And last but no least, it wasted $2 million to figure out that people who often post pictures on the Internet from the same location at the same time are usually friends.

$1.2 billion could have fed and sheltered a lot of hungry and homeless Americans, it could have treated a lot of drug addicts, and it could have given proper medical care to underserved veterans. Bad, bad priorities.

4) Years after the Great Recession ended, economic growth in this country still stinks. Median household incomes are still trending downwards, there are about 16 million Americans who are under employed or unemployed, about 46 million Americans need Federal food assistance every month, the job creation rate is still pretty anemic, and the labor force participation rate is at a 35 year low.

Tremendous economic mismanagement by the Washington political class years after the recession ended. One reason for the bad business, job, and economic environment could be the fact that the Federal government keeps issuing thousands of new regulations every year. The Daily Caller website recently reported that the Obama administration issued an amazing 3,415 NEW government regulations just before Thanksgiving.

To see how inane this overregulation binge is, 3,415 new regulations means that on average, the Federal government issued over nine new regulations EVERY DAY during the year. So much regulation does two very bad things:

1. First, business owners are faced with more and more time distracting government reporting and regulation requirements, taking time away from growing their businesses, hiring more workers, and expanding the economy.
2.  Many of these regulations also cost money and with more money going to an inefficient and incompetent Federal government, there is less money left in businesses to grow, hire more workers, and grow the economy.

And really, given that the Federal government has been around for well over two hundred years, do we really need nine new government regulations EVERY DAY? Or is it simply the reality that government bureaucracies have gotten so large and so out of control that they start to create work and new regulations that do not help Americans but only help justify the continued existence of these same bureaucracies? Look no further than overregulation to find out why this economic recovery is a historical worse.

The fact that the Obama administration released these new regulations just before the Thanksgiving holidays to minimize the fallout says that 1) many of these new regulations are useless and no defensible, and 2) as always, this administration is sneaky, cowardly, and as non-transparent as possible.

5) One last piece of insanity for this month. Readers of these monthly political class insanity posts cannot help but come away with the feeling that the Federal government has gotten so large and so bureaucratic that it is a very dysfunctional human endeavor. Wasteful spending, bloated bureaucracies, rampant criminal fraud, ineffective leadership, and other general incompetencies are rampant throughout the Federal government.

And probably the most frustrating aspect of the whole insanity is that usually no one within the Federal government is ever held accountable for the messes that are created. According to a recent analysis of government data by Eric Katz, using data from the website www.govexec.com, in 2013 only 9,244 workers out of the civilian Federal workforce of 1.87 million were fired for poor performance or misconduct. This comes out to an annual firing rate for misconduct or poor performance of just 0.49%, less 1 in 200 a year. Most federal firings are for misconduct, with a smaller share for poor performance.

No matter what data source you look at for the firing rate of employees in private companies, you will see that the firing rate of Federal employees is a tiny, tiny percentage of people being fired in the real world. As Eric Katz’s following chart shows, despite a dysfunctional Federal government, it is almost impossible to get fired once the Federal government hires you:

That will do it for this month’s insanity. Today we learned that the NSF is still wasting our money, billions of dollars were sent to non-existent Iraqi soldiers, we are overregulated by the Federal government which kills economic growth, the Federal is consciously recreating the housing conditions that caused the Great Recession, and despite overall dysfunction and incompetence, Federal government employees are almost never fired. Insanity.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

Part 5, September, 2013 Political Class Insanity: Dodd-Frank Is a Disaster, Paying For Palestinian Mortgages With American Money, and Nancy Pelosi Thinks She Has Dignity

After a short diversion to cover the latest crises in Syria and Obama Care, this our fifth post this month covering the latest stupidity, insanity, and antics of the American political class. You do enough of these posts and the associated research and it makes you realize why these politicians have never resolved a major issue facing Americans over the past few decades. They are either unwilling, unable, or to wrapped up in their own personal careers and personal enrichment to care if an issue ever gets resolved.

The continuing saga of political class incompetency and embarrassments starts here:

1) According to a New York Times article that was summarized in the August 30, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, banks, insurers, and other financial institutions have ponied up $10 million to members of the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee. Pretty disgraceful show of business cronies supporting their political cronies for favorable government treatment.

The really embarrassing part of this bribery scheme is that there are a whopping 61 Congressmen and women that actually sit on this committee. 61 members is about 14% of the entire House of Representatives. These 61 obviously know where to go to get the money they need to stay in office. You can bet if this committee had something to do with an insignificant part of the economy, unlike financial services, there would NOT be 61 members clamoring to get on the committee. Disgraceful.

2) In a related set of insanity involving the financial services industry, consider an article from the latest edition of Business Week. The Dodd-Frank legislation that was supposed to fix all of the problems in the financial services industry so that another “Great Recession” never happened again, was passed into law three years ago. We have shown numerous times how the tenets of this law are already proving inadequate to stop financial services misdeeds with the collapse of MF Global being just one glaring example.

However, according to the article, one reason why this legislation may not be working, besides the fact that is was a horrible piece of legislation, is the fact that less than 40% of the processes and regulations that are needed to implement Dodd-Frank have not yet been written. At this rate, it will take at least 7-8 years to implement the legislation, a time length that will likely render anything positive in the law, if there is anything positive, obsolete, as the world moves on.

How poorly is a piece of legislation written if it takes years and years to make it operational> In 7-8 years, the country will likely have gone through at least two more recessions, given historical patterns, any one of which could be caused by the same factors that caused the Great Recession.

Obama recently called a meeting to find out what the problem is and the attendees at the meeting are a good indication of why this is a snail-like process. At the meeting were people representing the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Consumer Financial Bureau, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the National Credit Union administration, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Nine Federal bureaucracies are working on operationalizing Dodd-Frank and they cannot get out of their own way. 

Nine Federal entities and less than 40% of the way there after three years. And many of these entities were the very ones that should have seen the Great Recession coming and were asleep at the wheel until the recession hit them in the face. What are the odds they can even operationalize the legislation, given their history of ineptness?

Thus, we have legislation written by people that probably never read it or understood what was in it which was then handed off to massive Federal bureaucracies that have to make it work even though they have not done their watchdog jobs in the past. Oh yeah, this is going to work out fine. Just like Obama Care, this is what happens when politicians pass bills that are well over a thousand pages long.

3) Staying with the financial services industry again, a recent article in Business Week reported on a Federal Reserve analysis and conclusion that five years after the Great Recession began, major U.S. banks are still not fully ready for the next economic disaster. 

The Fed found that although these banks have increased their capital levels, recent financial stress tests indicate the banks have not done enough to test for and anticipate major changes and trends in the economy. This puts them on a par with the Washington political class and the nine Federal bureaucracies listed above who are also not prepared to protect Americans from the next economic blow up. Failure all around.

4) Over 20 million Americans are either unemployed or under employed. This pathetic situation has resulted in many, many Americans defaulting on their mortgages and losing their homes or putting them under intense financial pressure to make their house payments. A very sad situation as the dream of home ownership is shot down by the economy.

But, that has not stopped the Obama administration from spending $313 million of taxpayer wealth on mortgages …for Palestinian homeowners. Yes, American taxpayers are paying for the funding of $313 million in home mortgages for Palestinians living in the West Bank, according to a recently released  Government Accountability Office report .

And to add insult to injury, the U.S. will also guarantee $110 million in loans to small- and medium-sized businesses located on the West Bank. The mortgage and business-loan activities will be managed by the Federal Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). “OPIC is the U.S. Government’s development finance institution,” says OPIC’s website. “OPIC provides financial products, such as loans and guaranties; political risk insurance; and support for investment funds, all of which help American businesses expand into emerging markets.”

Home mortgages for Palestinians, the same people that hate us for our support of Israel? Small business funding for Palestinian businesses when small businesses in America are being smothered and stamped out by Obama Care and other onerous government regulations? Hundreds of millions of dollars going to the one of the most corrupt government entities in the world? Ridiculous. 

These wastes of money could have helped some struggling American families and small businesses. These wastes of money could have helped pay down the debt or provided tax relief to American taxpayers. These wastes of money could have kept White House tours operational for over 400 hundred years. But no, it will be sent half way around the world to people that hate us and our country. Pathetic.

5) Former Speaker of the House and current Congressional member, Nancy Pelosi is estimated to be worth in excess of $35 million according to the website, Celebrity Worth. In a “60 Minutes” report that we reviewed in this blog:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/07/washington-corruption-train-keeps-on.html

 it was shown that she participated in up to nine different corporate IPOs, getting special insider financial advantage not available to ordinary Americans. In the space of a few days, she made over $100,000 by participating in the VISA credit card IPO. According to the Celebrity Wealth website, including in her wealth of $35 million is a multimillion dollar winery in California.

Her husband is very active and very wealthy in the California real estate market. Her Congressional salary is less than .5% of her family’s net worth. In other words, Nancy Pelosi is rich beyond most Americans’ dreams.

But ask her to take a pay cut for the good of the country and she goes ballistic. Earlier in the year when the sequester was requiring the Federal government to reduce the overall Federal budget by a nominal amount, Ms. Pelosi had this to say:  “I don’t think we should do it [cut the pay of Congressional members, people who earn more than three times the average U.S. household income]; I think we should respect the work we do. I think it’s necessary for us to have the dignity of the job that we have rewarded.”

Rather than cut their salaries, at least this member of Congress thinks it would be a blow to their so-called dignity. Apparently it is better, as a result of the sequester, to terminate White House tours, cut air traffic controller resources to inconvenience millions of America travelers, cut educational aid to native American schools, etc. than it is to ask a Congressional member worth over $35 million to give back a few thousand dollars to the American taxpayer in these times of economic stress.

Given the low performance of the current set of Washington politicians in Washington, there are many other words that I would use to describe their performance and results and none of them include the words dignity, respect, and reward. If these people were paid for the work they do in a merit based system, they would starve to death. The arrogance of these politicians is beyond disgraceful.

So, let’s review. Politicians that fight to be on the best Congressional committee to extort money for reelection purposes. Politicians that write cumbersome, inane laws that cannot be put into effect three years after they are passed. Politicians that fund home mortgage loans and small business loans for foreigners halfway around the world while American families and businesses suffer. And at least one politicians that thinks she is too valuable to have a pay cut despite being worth over $35 million. Pathetic is too kind of a word to describe these people. 

And we are still not done for their insanity this month, more to follow at least through 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 

Part 6, September, 2013 Political Class Insanity: The Road To Nowhere Lives, Rewarding Food Assistance Incompetence, And More

This is hopefully the final installment in this month’s review of the insanity that has recently poured out of the American political class. If so, it will take us only six days this month to get all of the insanity and lunacy documented as compared to the record setting nine days it took last month. 

However, please note that the Washington political class has been on vacation for the past four weeks so that is probably the reason for the lighter craziness this month. I shutter to think what we will need to cover next month once the minions are back in Washington for a month and causing trouble.

1) Back in 2009, the Citizens Against Government Waste organization applauded the Obama administration for saying it would attack wasteful government spending by slashing some programs including the infamous West Virginia  “Road to Nowhere.” This embarrassment was a pet pork spending project of the late Senator Robert Byrd. The road had no financial or  economic value at all except to divert American taxpayer wealth into some road construction jobs in his home state.

Well, four years later, Senator Byrd has passed away but the road to nowhere continues to get funding to go nowhere. A recent Washington Post article points out that Byrd’s ability to fund pork spending in his state is just as strong in death as in life, as the road continues to get $40 million a year from the Federal government and the U.S. taxpayer. It will continue to need that amount of money every year until 2035 when it should be finished but still lead to nowhere. Pathetic.

As a recent Cato Institute article points out, why don’t we just build a large statue honoring the late Senator and be done with this annual wasteful spending. Sounds good to me.

2) The Independent Journal review had some interesting statistics and findings in an article it published on August 22, 2013:

- A recent Gallup poll asked a set of Americans how much they trusted the Federal government and the politicians that operate it to do the right thing, "how much of the time do you trust the government in Washington to do what is right: just about always, most of the time, only some of the time and never." 

Their latest survey found that a whopping 81% of Americans do not think that the Federal government will do the right thing just about always or most of the time, only 19% think it will. This finding of 81% has been trending worse for the past five years or so with 70% saying government will not do the right thing (still not a great perception) as late as 2007.

Another confirmation of our hypothesis that we are living under the worst set of Washington politicians in the history of our country, a hypothesis confirmed by over 80% of Americans thinking that Washington hardly ever does the right thing.

- Despite President Obama’s assertion that the economy has fully recovered, recent research from Pew Research indicates that only 28% of Americans agree with him while 46% think economic recovery is a long way off. Looks like the President needs to  get out of his cocoon of non-reality and get out into the real world where the real unemployment rate is still about 14% and over twenty million Americans are unemployed or under employed. 

I would hate to see what he thinks America looks like if it had not fully recovered, given these dismal statistics.

- According to another Pew Research study from May, 2013, 66% of Americans think that the public education system and processes in this country either need a major overhaul or need to be torn down and started over. However, in the four and a half years that Obama has been President, there has been absolutely no effort made on his behalf to change this negative status quo to stop under educating our kids. Perhaps it is because his kids and most of the rest of the politicians in Washington send their kids to elite private schools.

- When the Obama Care legislation was passed three years ago only 46% of Americans had a favorable view of it. Today, that number has dropped to 37%, probably as a result of the myriad of problems and stupidity that was embedded in the law and how much of that insanity has now become public. 

However, Obama and other political types in Washington continue to insist that this is a wonderful bill, that they have exempted themselves from much of, and that there will only be a few bumps in the road to roll it out. Highly doubtful

I think what these statistics point out is that the politicians in Washington have a gross misunderstanding of the reality of what Americans think about the major issues and even what the major issues are. A paragraph from the article sums up this disconnect quite nicely:

Even a blind monkey with half a brain could tell you that there’s a disconnect between the current administration and the public. Just how big is this disconnect? As you probably expect, massive. On the major issues that dominate interviews and debates each year, political leaders are increasingly distancing themselves from the views of the majority of American people.

The President is taking multi-million dollar vacations while regular Americans are decreasing their number of paid off days just to keep their jobs. Legislators are enrolling their children in elite private schools while the rest of us are volunteering personal time and money to help our local public school systems. The NSA is defending its right to access public phone records, though we are adamantly calling for it to stop.

Well said, a major disconnect between what the political class perceives and what reality is throughout America.

3) An August 16, 2013 article from the wonderful website, Bankrupting America, had a great example of how perverted reason and logic can be in Washington D.C. According to  the Department of Agriculture (USDA), Virginia recently passed their yearly food assistance/food stamp audit with flying colors. Virginia had one of the lowest food assistance mistake rates in the country. They mistakenly paid out ONLY $19 million in taxpayer wealth in their state program. ONLY $19 million and they were one of the best states with the lowest mistake rate. I cannot imagine what the millions and millions of dollars the worst states paid out mistakenly.

Even if Virginia was one of the best, $19 million is still a lot of waste. But how did the USDA reward a state like Virginia that over-issued $19 million worth of food stamps?The USDA gave the state a whopping $2 million bonus for being the best of a bad lot. 

Makes no sense: get rewarded with two million dollars for mistakenly paying out $19 million. Maybe Virginia should have paid back the American taxpayer $2 million for being so incompetent. Talk about rewarding idiocy. And, again, Virginia had one of the lowest mistake rates in the country! In 2012, the USDA rewarded 14 states a total of $22,325,811 million in rewards. Florida earned the top spot with over $8 million from the USDA. 

At the same time that states were being paid bonuses for mistakenly giving out food stamps, Tom Vilsack, Secretary of the USDA, claimed that the only way he could deal with the minor budget cuts that came about as a result of the sequester, was to  layoff 500 firefighters to make up for the $52 million budget cut he had to absorb. Seems that if the states, and the Federal government that was overseeing the states and their food stamp/food assistance programs were actually doing their jobs correctly, it would have been no problem to overcome that $52 million budget reduction. 

Vilsack could have closed about 80% of that budget hit just by making sure that Virginia no longer had an annual $19 million mistake and if he eliminated the silly reward system, over $22 million annually, for rewarding incompetence. That gets him back $41 million before he even fixed anything in the other 49 dysfunctional state food assistance programs. Instead, he let’s the status quo go on and endangers the lives of Americans and their assets and property by cutting fire fighting resources. Pathetic set of priorities.

4) Einstein once said the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Keep those insightful words in mind as you read the following information, as reported by the California Report website.

In 2011, as a result of the housing collapse and the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve and other government entities, agencies, wisely decided to tighten lending rules for Qualified Residential Mortgages (QRMs). In the lead up to the Great Recession, recall that many homeowners were able to get mortgages that they could not afford by signing up for mortgages that required little or no down payment and mortgages that did not require an income or asset verification. Millions of these mortgage holders eventually defaulted on their mortgages, leading to the near collapse of the financial system and the crash of the stock market and the end of many, many banks.

In order to not duplicate this devastating economic meltdown in the future in the housing industry, the Fed and other government organizations instituted common sense changes to the home mortgage process. These changes required the buyer to put up a 20% down on the purchase, have viable assets, personally fund his own closing costs and not exceed 36% total debt to household income, including all housing costs. Good, solid guidelines to make sure people did not get into mortgage payments that were over their financial means.

But the definition of insanity…. Citing the dismal recovery in the housing market and rising rates, the Fed and other regulators recently announced that the rules on QRMs would be relaxed in order to stimulate the market and give many more people an opportunity to purchase a home. These changed rules include a proposal to not require ANY down payment and a debt to income ratio of 43%. In exchange, banks who make these loans would hold a 5% stake in the loans sold off on the secondary market.

We just came off a housing induced Great Recession, took remedial steps to fix what caused the Great Recession and we now want to allow banks, the same banks that got bailed out to the tune of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, to do the same stupid mortgage things all over again. While these relaxed rules and guidelines will probably allow more people to purchase a home, it will in no way make them more likely to afford a new home in tough financial times. You cannot make up this stupidity. 

That will do it for today, I promise that tomorrow will be the final political class insanity post for this month. You will be surprised, shocked, and ticked off to see what your Federal politicians are spending your tax money on as we explore a new, insightful source of wasteful government spending.

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 

Washington D.C., The Great Kitchen Garbage Disposal - Subprime Lending Revisited, Head Start, and High Speed Rail

There are a lot of famous quotes on stupidity:

Stupid is as stupid does. Forest Gump

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein

In politics, stupidity is not a handicap. Napoleon Bonaparte

Evil isn’t the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it’s a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference. Jim Butcher

Far be it for me to ever let my common sense get in the way of my stupidity. I say we press on. Sherrilyn Kenyon

There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life. Frank Zappa

We’ll stop there. Yes, there is a lot of stupidity in the world and unfortunately, the Washington political class seems to attract a lot of stupid thinking. Consider the latest stupidity emanating out of the Beltway from the Washington political class and what quote above most ably describes the stupidity:

1) Consider what the brainiacs in Washington want to do the housing industry according to an April 2, 2013 article in the Washington Post:

• The Obama administration stated it is working to get banks to lend to a wider range of and potential homeowners by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs.
• These loans/mortgages would go to a “wider range” of people and would be backed by government organizations, i.e. the American taxpayer, such as the Federal Housing Administration to insure home loans that default would not hurt banks earnings.
• This “wider range” is a code phrase for giving mortgages to people with bad credit and less chance of supporting a mortgage before getting foreclosed on.
• Federal housing officials are encouraging the Justice Department to provide assurances to banks that they will not face legal or financial recriminations if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default.
• Government officials are also encouraging lenders to use more subjective judgment in determining whether to offer a loan, in other words give out mortgages to people that are less likely and unlikely to ever be able to pay them back, resulting in defaults and the American taxpayer picking up the tab.

Didn’t we just relive this horror show? Wasn’t it called the “Great Recession” where sub prime lending to people with questionable credit received mortgages from banks, who made large profits but dumped the risks on the Federal government via Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the FHA, risk that was paid off by taxpayers? Didn’t that bailout cost the American taxpayer almost $200 billion with the final tab yet to come.

This insanity is especially stupid in light of recent news reports that reported the Federal Housing Authority was likely to need a $943 million taxpayer bailout to cover expected losses from mortgages it insured as the U.S. housing bubble was deflating during the Great Recession. The Obama administration reported this problem on April 10, 2013.

It would be the first bailout of the government's mortgage insurer in its nearly 80-year history. The FHA is required by Congress to keep enough cash on hand to cover all expected future losses and must take a taxpayer subsidy if its projected revenue falls short. And it could get worse. In November, an independent audit found that the FHA faces projected losses of $16.3 billion and was at risk of depleting its cash reserves. Guess who ends up paying for this shortfall?

So Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have already choked themselves and the American taxpayer on mortgages that were given to and defaulted on by low credit and low income people. The FHA may need billions dollars more because it backed mortgages on bad mortgage customers. And the Obama administration wants to loosen current credit processes so more people with bad credit and poor chances of carrying a mortgage get a mortgage, to be backed in case of default by the taxpayer. Stupid, did these people learn nothing from the Great Recession and the underlying mortgage/housing/subprime issues that created it?

My best analogy for this shortsightedness is a kitchen garbage disposal. It’s like the stupid person who mangles his right hand in the garbage disposal and just as the scabs and scar tissue are falling off from that disaster that person puts his left hand right back into the garbage disposal. Stupid is as stupid does and that is exactly what the Obama administration is about to do with reenacting the subprime disaster.

2) Apparently, one of the proposals in Obama’s delinquent and ridiculous budget proposal is to provide Federal pre-school programs for every kid in America. But why should we do that when we know that the existing Federal pre-school program in America, Head Start, has been a financial, educational, and administrative disaster:

• A detailed study by Obama’s own Health and Human Services Department conclusively showed that any positive gains by kids in Head Start programs are lost forever by the end of the first grade versus kids that had not been in Head Start programs, with all other areas of variation being controlled by the study analysis.
• Another detailed study, again by Obama’s own Health and Human Services Department, looked at third and fourth grade students and compared students that had been in Head Start programs vs. that had not been in Head Start. That study found that in general there were no differences between Head Start kids and non-head Start kids and in some areas, non-Head Start kids were actually further along from an educational and development perspective, all other sources of variability being controlled.
• Numerous government studies have found rampant waste and fraud throughout the Head Start program.

So, the many promises of the Head Start program from an educational, cultural, and childhood development perspective have never materialized and the program has been administered in a sloppy, fraudulent manner. Thus, we have spent billions and billions of dollars over the Head Start years to run an overrated, glorious babysitting service with no redeeming societal benefit in return.

And given this backdrop, the President wants to vastly expand the concept of daycare to every kid in the country without being able to fix the existing Head Start program. He just has the grandiose concept with no plan on remedial action on how to prevent a more expensive Head Start disaster.

In this example, we still have our right hand stuck down in the garbage disposal (Head Start) and want to stick the left hand down it also (Obama’s proposal). But alas, in politics, stupidity is not a handicap.

The previous posts we did that explain the Head Start fiasco in more detail can be found at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2010/04/government-education-programs-that-do.html

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/01/failing-our-kids-again-massive-fraud.html

3) Our final example of stupidity also comes from the President’s budget proposal. Apparently, he still wants to build this national high speed rail line that will cost untold billions of dollars for questionable benefits. But before going down this garbage disposal, maybe he should fix the current Federal government railroad service, Amtrak.

Earlier this month (April 4, 2013 post) we reviewed an article from the March, 2013 issue of Reason magazine, an article that contained some interesting analyses of Amtrak, the distressed, Federally operated national train system:

• Amtrak is the most expensive way to transport oneself from city to city, on average costing consumers twice as much than commercial airline travel.
• The average American travels 15 miles a year via Amtrak but 15,000 miles a year via car.
• Amtrak per-passenger miles subsidies are more than nine times higher than subsidies paid to airlines and 20 times more than subsidies paid to car drivers.
• In 2012, Amtrak needed about $1.4 billion from the American taxpayer to run its operations.
• Only three of its twelve routes are profitable without taxpayer subsidies.

In our September 5, 2012 post we reviewed as New York Times article that described the insanity and waste in just one aspect of Amtrak:

• According to a New York Times article that was summarized in the August 17, 2012 issue of The Week magazine, Amtrak lost $834 million just on its food and beverage services over the past ten years.
• This comes out to about $83 million a year, or almost a quarter million dollars a day, 365 days a year.
• We found it amazing that any organization, even a government organization, can lose so much money so quickly just on food and drinks.
• The article blamed the astronomical losses on poor management, waste, and employee theft.
• Despite being in the train management industry for decades, it is apparent that the political class and the government agencies it operates have learned nothing on how to be efficient and effective.

Pitiful. Rather than learning from the Amtrak garbage disposal experience, billions wasted on an unprofitable rail line, imagine how much the American taxpayer would lose if the Federal government ever went ahead with their ill conceived and unnecessary high speed train pipe dream. Far be it for Washington to ever let common sense get in the way of its stupidity.

Einstein once said: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” We would substitute the word “stupidity” for “insanity” to summarize the state of the political thinking in Washington:

- Subprime mortgage lending to people with poor credit and poor chances of carrying a mortgage caused the Great Recession but Washington wants to go down that path again today.

- Head Start has been a disaster for over four decades and the Obama administration wants to do the same program on a grander scale, likely wasting a grander sum of money.

- The Obama administration wants to build a massive high speed rail line across the country even though the current Federal rail line loses over a billion dollars a year.

The Washington kitchen garbage disposal is alive and well, continually shredding taxpayer wealth every day.

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

Political Class Insanity, March 2012, Part 1 - By The Numbers

Every month or so we pause to take time out and review all of the insanity and idiocy that has emanated from the American political class over the previous 30 days or so. This insanity usually takes many forms including wasteful spending, unnecessary spending, stupid and ineffective government programs, or just pure lunacy.

Unfortunately for the country, over the past month we have uncovered more than the average amount of stupidity and unbelievably bad behavior from our politicians, so much so that we need to divide this month's insanity review over two days. Tomorrow we will look at the regular types of insanity that pervade our political landscape. However, today we will look at the insanity "by the numbers," the quantitative view of what our politicians continually inflict on us and the numbers of despair they create in the process:

- According to a blurb in the February 24, 2012 issue of The Week magazine, a recent Pew Research study found that 1.8 million dead people are still registered to vote in various states, 2.75 million people are registered to vote in more than one state, and 51 million Americans are not registered and cannot vote.

If voting is the ultimate expression of democracy, it has to be scandal free and corruption free. It cannot reach this integrity if the voting rolls are so out of date, so bad, and so lacking in tens of millions of registered voters. You would have hoped that more than two centuries after our democracy was created, the political class would be able to implement a voting process that was a true reflection of the desires and freedom of Americans. According to Pew, that was too much to ask of our politicians and the voting processes they oversee.

- In that same issue of The Week, a review of a recent Rasmussen poll found that 43% of Americans would rather have Congress operated by a random selection of people from the phonebook than by the current members of the Congressional political class. Only 5% of those polled thought Congress is doing a good job.

Reminds one of the recent Brazilian elections where a famous clown (yes, a clown) called Grumpy was actually elected on the campaign slogan of, "How much worse could it get?" It looks like Americans are starting to see the wisdom of Grumpy's insight.

- The U.S. Postal Service lost $3.3 billion in the last QUARTER of 2011, a tenfold jump from the same period in 2010, according to the Associated Press. Despite the dire results and trend, who wants to make a bet that the President and Congress will do nothing in time, or anything that makes sense, to address the issue before the American taxpayer will again have to step in with a major bailout?

- The February 24, 2012 issue of The Week also reviewed the President's recently unveiled program to help stressed homeowners get mortgage and refinance help. The program will cost about $20 billion, which sounds like a lot of money, but really is not. U.S. homeowners are underwater, they owe more than their homes are worth, to the tune of $700 billion. Thus, $20 billion is about 3% of the $700 billion problem, hardly enough to make any kind of dent in the problem.

Even more ridiculous, according to RealtyTrak, about 2.87 million U.S. homes entered into foreclosure in 2010. If each of these homeowners got an equal share of the $20 billion, assuming nothing was lost in the administration of the program, either administration costs or fraud, than each of these foreclosed homeowners would have gotten just under $7,000. Again, this relatively small amount would probably make no difference in stemming the tide of foreclosure.

Just another $20 billion of taxpayer wealth thrown at a problem without 1) solving the problem and 2) understanding the underlying and pathetic math of why the problem was not solved. But we have seen this wasting of billions of dollars for nothing in return many times over the years from politicians that use useless solutions like this to help their reelection rather than come up with real solutions that make logical and financial sense. 

- According to CNNMoney.com, the percentage of young people without jobs is at its lowest point since the government began tracking the statistic in 1948. Only 54.3% of people ages 18 to 24 were employed in 2011, down from 62.4% in 2007.

And the longer these young Americans are unemployed, the more likely they are to never reach their potential in the economy and job market as more and more young people become of age and also try to enter the job market. This tragic statistic is a ringing indictment of both our failed education system and the failed economic policies of the entire Washington political class.

- According to a recent article by Time.com, the American taxpayer is still owed about $133 billion that was doled out to banks and other financial institutions in the TARP bank bailout program. More than 450 companies still owe us money. Most of these debtors are small banks. However, the article points out that AIG, General Motors, Chrysler, and the auto financing divisions of these car companies are still on the hook for $90 billion of outstanding taxpayer wealth.

It has always been our position that TARP and all of the bailouts were a political sell off to corporate America in return for current and future reelection campaign support and that these companies should have been allowed to adapt and make the difficult financial decisions to survive or go out of business because of their own bad decisions. However, each American household is still owed about $1,200 each for the unpaid balance of the bailouts.

- According to an article in the November 23, 2011 issue of The Week magazine, president Obama has agreed to station 2,500 military troops in Australia, along with Navy war ships, "as a way to exert pressure on China."

It is my recollection that China has over 1 million people in its military, which raises the obvious question: just exactly how are 2,500 U.S. troops, no more than 2.5% of the size of the more local Chinese armed forces, supposed to exert pressure? Just another wasteful and strategically stupid deployment of U.S. troops overseas.

- Business Week reported in its January 16, 2012 issue that the Dodd-Frank financial industry reform law was 2,300 pages long. How many of the 535 members of Congress do you actually think read this piece of legislation that the majority of them voted to enact into law? Given the attitude of long term Congressman John Conyers, as illustrated by the following video, I would say the over/under bet line for the number of politicians who read the 2,300 pages is about 10.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=t32ckkdlcao&NR=1


There you have it, the latest political class insanity, by the numbers. Pretty depressing and certainly continued sub-standard performance from substandard politicians, the numbers do not lie.




“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein

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 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/