May, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 1: What Failed and What Should Have Been Done

While we have spent the past few weeks recording the latest month’s worth of American political class insanity, have taken time to review the travesties and embarrassments from our nation’s idiotic tax code, and asked the question what would happen if Washington passed a law that no one obeyed, insanity coming out of the whole Obama Care effort has also been unfolding. 

We have spent many posts each month since last August trying to keep up with the idiocy of Obama Care and those that wrote it and continue to support it in the face of real world realities. Note: these previous posts can be accessed by the menu at the right hand side of this page. These realities continually to paint this legislation as the worst piece of legislation ever produced by Washington by the most inept set of politicians ever to sit in office in Washington. 

Before going into the details of the latest Obama Care disasters, let’s review the known disasters and review why Obama Care has no chance at all of fixing the problem of ever escalating health care costs in this country. A summary of what we have uncovered, discussed, and analyzed include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and wasted on a Federal Obama Care website that did not initially work despite having three years of preparation.
• Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and wasted on state level Obama Care websites that never worked or initially did not work despite having three years of preparation.
• The Obama Care websites were designed so poorly that they have been called an identity thief’s paradise and an identity thief’s “wet dream.”
• The expected long term cost of implementing Obama Care has more than doubled since the initial estimate by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) when the legislation was originally passed.
• Even ten years down the road, the CBO estimates that tens of millions of Americans will not have health insurance coverage despite the fact that the whole purpose of Obama Care was to make sure EVERY American had low cost health insurance coverage.
• The legislation will conservatively add over one trillion dollars to the national debt load over the next ten years.
• In 45 states, expert actuaries estimate that the average cost of health insurance will ACTUALLY GO UP despite the promises made by Obama Care advocates that the legislation would substantially reduce health insurance costs. In fact, one of Obama’s biggest lies, note I did not say only lie, was that the average American family would see their health care costs go down by $2,500 a year.
• Speaking of lies, the President was awarded the Lie Of The Year in 2013 by the usually Obama-friendly Washington Post for his lie, uttered many, many times, that if you liked your current health insurance plan or your current doctor, you would be able to continue to keep that favored insurance plan and doctor.
• Millions of Americans lost access to their current health insurance plans as a direct result of the legislation, a loss that most did not want or anticipate, given the Obama administration’s lies.
• Many of those millions of Americans who lost access to their current plans as a result of the legislation found that Obama Care plans were seriously flawed relative to their life situation with many, many of them losing access to their doctors, their favorite hospitals, life saving and life improving drugs, and experiencing substantial increase in health insurance premiums AND deductibles.
• Top doctors and top hospitals have opted out of serving those covered by Obama Care insurance policies, denying top quality health care treatment to millions of Americans. i.e. the good news is that you have health insurance coverage, the bad news is that you cannot get health care treatment.
• The President and his administration many, many times broke the law and violated the Constitution by unilaterally altering implementation and rollout dates established in the law.
• The President and his administration many, many times broke the law and violated the Constitution by unilaterally changing the tenets and the requirements established in the law.
• The training for the so-called Obama Care navigators, those people that would help Americans sign up for Obama Care, received very sparse training and were never criminally background checked despite having access to Americans’ highly personal data, providing another avenue for identity theft. In fact, at least a handful of navigators were found to have serious criminal backgrounds.
• The whole operation is supposed to be managed by the IRS, one of the most inept Federal government organizations around, leaving little doubt that Obama Care will also not be run properly, efficiently or effectively.
• Many individual American citizens who dared to criticize the Obama Care legislation, both famous Americans and ordinary Americans, found themselves in turn being investigated by the IRS, likely for daring to criticize aspects of the legislation, a direct violation of the First Amendment rights.
• The legislation infringed on the freedom of religion rights guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution by forcing religious and non-profit organizations to violate their religious tenets or be in violation of Obama Care’s tenets.
• The legislation is forcing many businesses to put expansion plans on hold as a direct result of the legislation, contributing to the continued anemic economic growth over the past few years.
• The legislation has forced many lower margin businesses to turn their permanent workers into part time workers, working less than 30 hours a week, in order to financially survive the law’s dictates, further stunting national economic growth.
• Even worse, the law has forced at least hundreds and hundreds of companies to lay off American workers as a result of the additional business and financial burdens the legislation places on their businesses’ operations.
• The administration has insulted every American by giving special financial treatment to members of Congress and their staffs from a financial perspective but has not done the same for the rest of America, creating a tide of resentment that those who passed the stupid law do not have to abide by the stupid law they passed.
• The President and this legislation have endangered the financial well being of Medicare by proposing that $700 billion be stripped out of the Medicare program in the next ten years to make the Obama Care business case and benefits look better than they are.
• Obama Care insurance companies have already started to indicate that 1) they may have to significantly raise Obama Care premiums in 2015 given the likely sub-optimal mix of younger and healthier Obama Care policy owners and older, less healthy Obama Care policy owners and 2) these same insurance companies might be entitled to bailouts, ala General Motors and the major banks several years ago, as a result of a deal they got included in the legislation to protect their companies’ profitability.

What a mess on so many levels. The saddest thing about the whole disaster is that the legislation has virtually no chance of resolving the problem of ever escalating health care costs because the legislation never attacked the root causes of those high costs. If you do not understand the underlying problem, you have no chance of ever resoling that problem. And that is why Obama Care will eventually implode and fail but still severely damage the economy, Americans' health, and our freedoms and liberties.

What are those root causes? They include the following:

1. Americans eat too much.
2. Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, much of which is the result of the government subsidizing the infection of our food chain with too much fattening high fructose corn syrup, courtesy of its misguided crop subsidy programs.
3. Americans smoke too much, helped in part by the government subsidizing the growing of tobacco over the years to the tune of billions of dollars, artificially keeping the wholesale cost of tobacco products low.
4. Americans do not exercise enough, resulting in the most overweight and obese nation in the world.
5. The medical tort system is in need of drastic reformation, reformation that when executed at the state levels reduced health care costs.
6. Cross state border competition restrictions imposed by the government reduces in state competition for health care insurance policies, increasing costs.
7. The administration never took the time to understand where the money goes once a person pays for a medical treatment, I.e. they never “followed the money” to see where the true underlying costs are, costs which then could be attacked and reduced.
8. The bureaucracy to operate our current health insurance system adds layers and layers of cost and reviews to the health care industry, adding even more to overall costs.
9. The government’s current, large, health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, lose tens of billions of dollars every year to criminal fraud, lost dollars that could be used to attack these root causes at no additional cost in the form of consumer and business taxes.
10. America is aging which means there is likely to be a growing prevalence of age related diseases in the future (e.g. certain types of cancers, dementia, Parkinson’s disease), all of which will overwhelm our health care infrastructure, a situation not addressed by the Obama Care legislation.

Creating a massive and inefficient Rube Goldberg government process based on a piece of legislation that was well over 2,000 pages does nothing to address these root causes. That is why it will fail and fail dramatically and expensively. 

Over the next week or so, we will review additions to the above list of Obama Care disasters and failures that have arisen in just the past month or so. However, before we get into some of that new depressing news, tomorrow we will try and take a more optimistic view of what could be done to address the true root causes of our high health care costs and what is actually being done outside the realm and capabiity of the Washington political class. 

There is hope but that hope is based on absolutely nothing coming out of the Washington political class. Remember, their policies and legislation have helped create the problem we are in the middle of now.

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

Bonus Post: Eight Days Of Logic and Sanity That Prove No American Should Pay Another Penny In Taxes - Protecting Our Kids and Schools

Over the past eight posts we have gone through an extensive list of why no American, rich or poor, should pay another cent in taxes of the Federal government, given how wasteful, inefficient, and criminally infested most government programs are. Our final post on Friday showed how to reduce our staggering $16 TRILLION national debt by a healthy $9 TRILLION over the next decade or so with minimal pain to most Americans AND no increase in taxes.

Well, we thought that would be our last post in this series, a series that shows how ridiculous, stupid, and divisive President Obama has been in these fiscal cliff negotiations. Yesterday, I came across a website post from the Independent Journal Review that listed out the 22 worst expenditure of taxpayer wealth in 2012 which requires an additional post in this series:

http://www.ijreview.com/2012/12/26278-22-of-the-worst-government-expenditures-of-2012/23/

We have covered many of these atrocious wastes of money in previous posts, based on sound research into other news sources, so I believe that most of these are legitimate, actual wastes of taxpayer wealth from 2012.

I would like to review these 22 instances of waste today with two objectives in mind:

1) Reinforce the proof we laid out over the past week of posts that we need to cut overspending by the Federal government, not raise taxes on any American.

2) Consider what these unneeded expenses could have done to prevent the tragic school shooting in Connecticut.

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

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

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

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

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

We have the ability… but we probably do not have the politicians with the courage to do so. We could have done the same thing after the Columbine school killings, the same types of wasteful spending were going on that year also but the political class did not redirect wasteful spending then either. Unless we decide to hold our politicians’ feet to the fire, our kids will continue to be under protected, the Federal government will continue to spend our tax wealth on totally inane and unnecessary expenditures, and in the coming years when the next maniac goes wild, we will wring our hands and wonder why nothing was done.

If you do not want history to repeat itself, may I suggest you make a call to your politicians and start insisting that we can actually magically redirect wasteful spending to start protecting our kids and stop worrying about what a computer simulation of prom week might look like.

The useless Oklahoma $450,000 airport:

The $520,000 Ohio bridge to nowhere:

The $1.1 million sidewalks to nowhere:

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
 



Your Local And State Government In Action: Why That Is A Big Problem and A Big Waste

The following list of political class insanity comes to us courtesy of the website of the Independent Journal.  I cannot state that all of these are actual wastes of taxpayer money, politicians acting on fake problems because they do not know how to solve the real problems facing this country, and just plain political class insanity since the Independent Journal does not list their sources.

However, I do know that many of them are true since either reliable other sources have reported the same stories (e.g. NYC Mayor Bloomberg banning certain sizes of soda purchases) or I have reported, researched and sourced similar stories in this blog already (e.g. local board of health officials shutting down kids' lemonade stands.)

If I had to bet, I would wager that most, if not, of these instances of government gone wild are legitimate misuses of government time and taxpayer wealth, unnecessary intrusions into our lives and our freedoms, and just plain stupid.

#1 New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced that he wants to ban the sale of all large sodas and sugary drinks in order to fight obesity.

#2 In North Carolina, authorities are threatening to send a blogger to prison for blogging about his battle against diabetes.

#3 In San Francisco, if you do not recycle your trash correctly you can be fined up to $500.

#4 The following are just some of the cities that have started using RFID tracking chips to monitor the recycling habits of their citizen.

- Cleveland, Ohio
- Charlotte, North Carolina
- Alexandria, Virginia
- Boise, Idaho
- Dayton, Ohio
- Flint, Michigan

#5 In Minnetonka, Minnesota you can be fined up to $2,000 for having a muddy vehicle.

#6 In Hazelwood, Missouri it is against the law for little girls to sell girl scout cookies in front of their own homes.

#7 San Francisco has implemented a ban on Happy Meal toys.

#8 Over the past couple of years there have been quite a few instances all over the country where lemonade stands run by children have been shut down because the children had not acquired the proper permits.

#9 State legislatures all over the country have been passing legislation making it more difficult for parents to opt out of having their children vaccinated.

#10 In many U.S. states is it now illegal to collect any rain that falls on to your own property.

#11 In San Juan Capistrano, California it is against the law to hold a home Bible study without a "conditional use permit".


#12 In New York City, it is against the law to smoke at public parks and beaches.

#13 In California,”food confiscation teams” visit the homes of people that have been discovered to have purchased raw milk.

#14 In Hilton Head, South Carolina it is illegal to have trash in your car.

#15 In major cities all over the United States feeding the homeless has been banned due to “health reasons”.

#16 In Louisiana, one church was ordered to stop passing out water because it did not have the proper permit.

#17 At public schools all over the United States, the lunches that little children bring from home are now inspected to make sure that they meet USDA guidelines. One North Carolina girl was told her turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips and apple juice did not meet USDA guidelines.

#18 Today, a vast array of government agencies are constantly monitoring what all of us say and do on the Internet. They claim that this helps makes us all more “safe” and “secure”.

A few observations:

- Given the hard economic times the country has been experiencing and the suppression of tax revenue many government entities have lived through, does it make sense to hire government workers and devote government resources to shutting down lemonade stands, tracking peoples' recycle habits, prosecuting muddy vehicle violators, etc.? Wouldn't the money going to these silly, extraneous activities be better spent helping the homeless, keeping teachers on the job, feeding the needy, etc. in these hard economic times? Wouldn't that be the more compassionate list of services than checking for garbage laden cars?

- Regardless of how wasteful these activities are, do we really need them? I think most Americans are smart enough to decide for themselves whether it is safe to buy lemonade from a kid's side walk lemonade stand. I think most Americans are smart enough to decide for themselves whether it is safe to drink raw milk. I think most Americans are smart enough to say and do what they want on the Internet, with rare exceptions, without some overbearing government agency looking out for their perceived safety and security.

In other words, I think most Americans are smart enough to not abuse their freedom of personal choice. If they make poor choices, then they should have to live with them as regards to lemonade, raw milk, Internet usage, Happy Meals, etc.

- Some of these government actions are just plain stupid. If you are homeless and hungry, why shouldn't compassionate Americans help to feed you, even if the meals you provide do not exactly conform to some strict government menu decided by a set of out of touch bureaucracy? Isn't it better to be fed than go hungry? It is not like these shuttered food banks and sources were just feeding the needy candy and cake.

I read about such a story a few months ago where a husband and wife team had been traveling around, using their own money, and feeding local homeless people using their fried chicken recipes. The local authorities shut them down because, in the authorities' opinion, fried chicken is not healthy enough. Thus, rather than get free fried chicken meals, the homeless in that area now get nothing to eat. Talk about a lack of compassion.

- By far, one of the worst examples in the above list is the mayor of New York intervening in the private purchase habits of American citizens by depriving them the opportunity to purchase a 32 ounce or 64 ounce servings of soda. He has nothing better to do than intrude on peoples' lives and their soda habits?

Granted, we have a big health care and obesity problem in this country. We need a strategic plan and effective approach to save the country's financial future and improve the health of those in the country due to the obesity threat. But regulating the size of a person's soft drink purchase in the absence of an overarching strategic plan is pretty much useless for the following reasons:

• Since the mayor provided no research on whether or not his action will help reduce obesity, I am assuming that no proof exists that this action will have any positive outcome. If this is indeed the case, than the mayor's ban is nothing but an uninformed crap shoot on addressing the obesity problem in this country.
• This action, done in a void, will likely do little to change behavior. All it will do is pose a small inconvenience to people without educating them on WHY they should cut down on soda consumption. Without changing behavior, a person who can no longer purchase 32 ounce fountain soda in a NYC 7-11 will just go over to the refrigerated shelves and purchase a one liter bottle of soda. Since a liter contains almost 34 ounces, the mayor's plan may actually make the problem worse by migrating people from 32 ounce fountain drinks to 34 ounce liter bottles of soda.
• A liter purchase is just one way to bypass this silly ban. Without changing attitudes and behavior, a person could simple purchase three 12 ounce sodas to beat this system. This action would make the problem worse, with the person now consuming 36 ounces of soda vs. the banned 32 ounce drink.
• The mayor obviously does not have a clue on what the major root causes of excessive soda consumption are and the bigger root causes of what drives the obesity problem. Is it cultural, marketplace, pricing, psychological, etc.? Without understanding the root causes of the obesity problem, the ability to solve the overall problem is almost zero.
• Regarding likely root causes of the obesity problem, one probable root cause the mayor never dreamed of and one of the prime reasons that soda and less than healthy processed food has become so inexpensive and wide spread, is the fact the U.S. government heavily subsidizes the production of certain corn varieties. These corn varieties are easily and inexpensively processed into corn fructose, a by product of government actions that now infests a large part of our food chain. Thus, a comprehensive and strategic way to cut down on obesity might be to cut down on the government's subsidy of corn fructose. For an insigthful and troubling look at this proposition, I suggest that anyone interested on this subject and perspective view the documentary entitled, "King Corn," and be prepared to be very scared. The movie makes a pretty convincing argument that the obesity problem in this country is really a straight line track from the Federal government's corn subsidy programs to the unhealthy food in our supermarkets and the resultant obesity in the nation.

These 18 foolish political class actions and programs are just another set of bad priorities from the politicians that serve in our government structure. Rather than work on problems that positively allocate resources to help the needy and have the biggest impact on the most citizens, they work on problems that waste resources and impact very few people positively, and possibly a lot negatively.


Until we start getting real problem solvers to run for public office who understand root causes of problems and can then set good priorities for using limited taxpayer resources, we will continue to see bad politicians set bad priorities and waste good money on bad initiatives.

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 our 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

United States of Purple - Solving Our Public Education Disaster

Consider some statistics that were researched in the development of our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government:"

• In 2006, the Program For International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted their tri-annual study of educational attainment by fifteen year old kids from fifty seven nations.
• In science literacy, the United States finished below the overall average and trailed the scores of kids from twenty two other nations.
• In mathematics literacy, the U.S. finished well below the overall average and trailed the scores of kids from thirty one other nations.
• Countries such as Estonia, Slovenia, and Macao finished higher than the U.S. in both categories.

A December 26, 2010 issue of the St. Petersburg Times also addressed the poor performance of our public school system. The main feature in the article was a bar chart that displayed the percentage of 15 year olds performing at the advanced level in math proficiency many countries, including the United States, and every one of our fifty states.

The output from the graph was based on the work of Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and two others. They were very careful to accurately adjust and slice the raw data from the testing that was done to exclude the impact of the following factors, factors that had been used as excuses for the poor performance of American kids in the past:

• They only looked at math test scores since math is math, it is not affected by language or culture, as much as language skills.


• They adjusted for household income and wealth using reliable proxies.

• They adjusted for whether or not the there was a college educated parent in the child's household.

• They adjusted for whether or not there was a race impact.

• They adjusted for how much each state spends per student in their states' public schools.

The bottom line conclusion after trying to look at the data from every conceivable angle? Now matter how you cut it, the United States does a horrid job of preparing public school students for proficiency in math. How bad is it:

• Only 6% of U.S. 15 year olds performed at an advanced proficiency in math.

• This places them behind 30 other nations including Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Slovakia, far poorer countries.

• The top three performing countries, Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, had about four times as many of their students performing at high math proficiency.

• Only two states, Massachusetts and Minnesota, had more than 10% of their kids performing at high levels which were behind sixteen other nations.

• New York state, which spends the most on public education per student, $17,000 per year per student, had only 6.3% of their students perform at high proficiency, trailing 30 countries and 15 other U.S. states.

• A 2010 study found a very high correlation between how well teachers are trained and how well students perform. In the United States, researchers tested 3,300 middle school math teachers-to-be in almost 40 states. They found that these future math teachers performed at about the same levels of would be teachers in Oman and Thailand and far behind teachers in Taiwan and Singapore. (Note: for Thailand, only 1% of their 15 year olds perform at a high proficiency level in math; for Oman, it was not even listed in the graph discussed above).


Pathetic, much like other parts of our government and political class, we spend and waste a lot of taxpayer dollars for very mediocre results. And I know of no plans by the Federal Education Department to fix any aspect of this poor performance and none was mentioned in the lengthy article.

But these poor test results should not be a surprise to anyone in the political class or in the industry if educating our kids. Consider a quote from a Reagan expert panel from 1983, the National Commission On Excellence In Education, that was commissioned to study the failure of public education in American almost three decades ago:

"The education foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a tide of mediocrity that threatens our future as a nation and as a people."

The commission produced a detailed blueprint on how to remedy the deficiencies in public education, circa 1983.

Fast forward ahead to 2012 and we see that the entire Federal political class and the Federal Education Department has failed miserably to fix a thirty year old crises, even though they had a custom, detailed blueprint on how to do it. After three years, it is also pretty apparent that the Obama administration will be no better or more motivated to fix this national disgrace than all of the Congresses and Presidents since 1983.

The nation cannot afford to wait another thirty years to see if the political class can eventually get around to solving the problem with a top down, Washington-centric approach. The rest of the world is advancing faster and faster when it comes to modernization and education. We cannot expect to remain a world leader across the board if we continue to allow countries like Estonia, Slovenia, and Macao to out educate our kids.

Thus, we need a serious, coherent upheaval to the education process in this country if we expect anything to change and we stop wasting about $70 billion a year via the Federal Education Department. Such an upheaval would include the following principles:

• Within four years, the Federal government would be totally out of the education process in the United States. After thirty years of failure, the Federal political class, government, and Education Department no longer deserve to spend $70 billion a year with nothing in return.
• In year one, most of the $70 billion budget would be directed to each state in block grants to improve their state and local education processes. In the second year, the $70 billion would be reduced by one third to about $46 billion which would also be block granted to the states. In the third year the states would get one third less, or about $26 billion, to improve their local and state education processes.
• After the fourth year, the states would be on their own, but in a much better position to improve their own schools and education processes.
• The savings from eliminating the Federal Education Department would be set aside to either reduce the national debt or would be rebated back to taxpayers. Under no conditions would the savings be allowed to flow back to the political class in Congress and the White House to be wasted like the sitting politicians would almost certainly do.
• In ten years, the Federal government's spending would be reduced by more than half a TRILLION dollars under plan, reducing our deficit spending habit. In the next ten years, we would have permanently removed about $700 billion from the government's expense stream.
• The state and local school officials could use the block grants for any number of purposes including updating education supplies, updating and enhancing current teachers' teaching abilities, enhancing and improving the education curriculums at the state's universities, exploring non-traditional teaching approaches (home schooling, remote teaching, charter schools, etc.), updating technology capabilities, and refurbishing school infrastructure.
• The conditions of receiving the block grant money would include 1) the elimination of traditional teacher tenure programs (i.e., jobs for life regardless of teaching ability and effort), replacing it with an approved performance review process, 2) the money could not be used to increase teacher salaries since this effort is to improve the teaching environment, not the teaching salary structure, 3) the money could not be used to increase the salaries of current administrators or increase the number of administrators and 4) the number of non-teaching staff in a school would have to be below approved thresholds before the money would be granted.
• High performing domestic schools and foreign countrys' schools would be extensively benchmarked and investigated to identify why successful schools, both in the United States and across the world,  are successful while most of our pubic schools are not. These benchmark studies would be compiled into a blueprint for success and be made available to local and state school entities for incorporation into their  respective teaching processes.

How would these processes be implemented? The political class has already forfeited their right to be involved, given their lack of success and expertise in this field over the past three decades. Step 27 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" would provide a vehicle for such a task. This step establishes a panel of education experts from a series of diverse fields of study, much like the successful expert panel that President Reagan put together in 1983, which would implement the benchmarking findings, tenure replacement programs, curriculum updates, etc.

These are definitely radical changes. But what other approaches are viable? Business as usual just continues the current process of under educating our kids. Business as usual wastes of $70 billion for little in return. Business as usual allows the political class to have another political football to pass around and eventually fumble. Business as usual does not work.

This approach makes for better trained teachers, better training of teachers, better teacher performance reviews, better teaching facilities and equipment, better curriculums, and benchmarks for excellence against the best in the United States and in the rest if the world. The nation's resources are much closer to the source of the problem without the inefficiencies, waste, ineffectiveness, and bureaucracy of the Federal government.

Taking the Federal government and the politicians that operate it out of the education equation has to be better than what we have today. The above plan gives us at least a fighting chance of catching Estonia, Slovenia, and Macao when it comes to giving our kids a better education.

“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 
 

United States of Purple - Solving Our Illegal Immigration Problem

This week we have been presenting our solutions for the major issues facing the nation and American citizens. We have already talked about taking care of our skyrocketing national debt, our burdensome 70,000 income tax code, global warming, and energy independence. Today we will discuss the divisive issue of illegal immigration.

The issue with this problem is there is not a lot of hard, accurate data. Most estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in this country varies widely, not surprisingly since they are illegal. But most estimates are over 10,000,000 people in the country who should not be from a legal perspective. Some people insist that illegal immigrants play an important part on our economy and our heritage of diversity and should be allowed to stay. Other people insist that illegal immigrants deprive Americans of jobs, increase our crime rates, need to be sent back to their countries, and they absorb taxpayer wealth and resources, resources that would be better spent on citizens.

A very emotional issue and one that seems like it will never get resolved. Integrated into this issue is the lost war on drugs and the role our porous border plays in that debacle. Neither issue can be resolved totally without resolving the other.

However, today we will focus on the illegal immigration component. Let's assume that any solution must involve the following principles:

- These people are here illegally, they broke our laws, and need to have that illegal behavior taken into account.

- Other people that tried to get into this country legally need to be recognized for their integrity of playing by the rules and the laws.

- It is not compassionate or right to break up families, sending some family members back to Mexico or wherever, while their kids who may have been born here and thus, are American citizens, could stay here legally.

- The previous point mentions immediate family, it means immediate family: mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, sons and daughters. It does not involve uncles, cousins, aunts, sisters, brothers, etc.


- There will no mass roundup of illegal immigrants and mass deportations for several reasons. First, it is not congruent with our democracy to have hordes of Federal agents combing the country and breaking down doors looking for over 10 million illegal immigrants. Second, the cost to do so would be astronomical. Third, the effort would probably not be successful anyway, much like government brute force rarely works in any issue. Criminal elements excepted to this principle.

-The issue would not be addressed until the border with Mexico is sealed and substantially less porous than it is today. You cannot have an adult discussion about illegal immigrants if your borders remain this leaky. We have mentioned several times in previous posts that Congress ordered the Defense Department to seal the border within 45 days over two decades ago. That has not happened and as a result, we have the situation we have today: over 10 million people illegally in this country, a divisive issue of citizen against citizen, and an open conduit for illegal drugs to flood into this country. The past approach has obviously not worked.

Let's try this approach. We have unnecessarily deployed about 140,000 U.S. troops in Europe, South Korea, and Japan for no good reason. We should bring them home and put them on the border with Mexico in order to seal it from illegal entrants and illegal drugs, much larger national security risks than stationing troops in Germany, England, et al.

Note: It is also a good idea to seal it so that it is  no longer a conduit for terrorism candidates to come into this country. We have seen a recent uptick in reports of how Iran and other terrorist organizations have deployed resources into South and Central America.

If my memory is correct, the U.S./Mexican border runs about 2,000 miles. Thus, if you broke those 140,000 troops into two twelve hour shifts, you could place one highly trained U.S. soldier every fifty yards along that border 24/7/365/ Once the border was sealed, you could then put a plan together and in place to address the current problem without it getting any larger.

These are the principles. No mass deportations, no discompassionate breaking up of immediate family units, a sealed border creating a stable negotiation and implementation environment, and the recognition that some people did it the illegal way and some did it the legal way.

Once principles are in place, the solution looks like the following:

• If someone is already here illegally, they can register with the Federal government to become a specially designated citizen in waiting.
• The Federal government would not deport the newly registered illegal immigrant unless there was past or future criminal activity.
• The illegal immigrant would be treated as if they were a legal immigrant and would be subject to all of the rules, laws, and demands of legal immigrants and citizens: their income would be taxed, they would contribute to unemployment insurance, Social Security and Medicare, they must file Federal and state income tax returns. If pulled over for a legitimate traffic violation or other potential law violation, an illegal but newly registered person would have to produce identification, just like an natural born American citizen has to do.
• Failure to file state or Federal income tax returns or to pay income taxes is grounds for immediate deportation of the transgressor and their immediate family.
• The registration and identification process includes fingerprint information and any other type of information that is required under the proposed Federal national identification guidelines.
• In fact, that Orwellain process will not be implemented on existing American citizens until it was proven to be workable on the illegal immigrant population.
• However, an illegal immigrant would not be able to become an official U.S. citizen for a very long time, say twenty years. The illegal immigrant broke our laws, citizenship should not come as easily as for someone who did everything by the book.
• To bypass this requirement, an illegal immigrant could go back to their home country and apply for legal entry into the country, which if granted, would lead to U.S. citizenship much sooner than twenty years, say ten years.
• Those that have never been here illegally and get in through legal channels, could become citizens much sooner than ten or twenty years to recognize their observance of our laws.
• After a predetermined and fair time period for registering, any illegal immigrant who does not register and is apprehended by law enforcement would be returned to their native country immediately along with their immediate family, never to be granted legal entry ever.

Now the left side of the political spectrum would not like this approach since it requires registration of illegal immigrants, physically seals the border, requires illegal immigrant to contribute financially to society, and delays citizenship for a longer time. The right side of the political spectrum would not like this approach since it eventually grants citizenship to people who came here illegally and does not go about rounding up those people who are already here illegally.

But having both sides unhappy might be a thing, a workable compromise because both sides also gain a lot. The left gets recognition of the fact that these folks, while here illegally, are already here and we begin to treat them with a little respect and compassion, criminal elements excepted. The right gets the border sealed and increased tax revenue to offset whatever government resources currently being used to support illegal immigrants. The right also gets satisfaction that there is a penalty, delayed citizenship, for breaking the laws.

Employers get their lives simplified since they can now ask for standardized, official government documentation when hiring, assuming that the national identification process is workable. Citizens will be able to see what happens when major drug supply routes are cut with a sealed border, possibly providing some insights into what a replacement policy for our lost war on drugs might look like.

And best of all, the issue can no longer be used by the various sects within the political class to divide us to the politicians' benefits. Politicians need issues like this to energize their base and collect campaign donations, even if it pits one set of Americans against another. We have seen how many major issues of our times like this one have been solved when we allow the political class to keep an issue a alive for their own personal good along with the divisiveness it spawns: none.

This is why the planning of this solution cannot be left up to the political class in Washington. Step 29 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Govenrment" establishes a process to be used, comprised and driven by smart Americans with expertise in various disciplines, to come up with a detailed execution plan of the above approach, solution, and its related principles.

The political class cannot be trusted to actually formulate such a plan even if they have to eventually approve it. Their failure to do so already is proof of this mistrust, they should not be given any more time, resolution is needed now. It is the fair and compassionate thing to do.


“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/

Even When The Political Class Solves A Problem, They Rarely Ever Solve The Problem

Even when the political class thinks they have solved a problem, it always seems to be that they never really actually solve the problem. Consider a few historical examples:

- Back in the mid-1980s, Congress demanded that the Defense Department seal the U.S./Mexican border within 45 days in order to address the problem of illegal aliens and illegal drug trafficking. Didn't really solve the problem, given that millions of illegal aliens have since come over the border along with untold tons of illegal drugs more than two decades after their proposed solution. 

- Back in the mid-1970s, the U.S. struggled economically as a result of a number of oil shocks and energy crises. As a result, Congress tried to solve the problem of energy independence by creating the Department of Energy.

That problem solution did not work out real well either. Decades later we still do not have a coherent national energy program and we do not have energy independence. However, we do have another giant Federal government bureaucracy that eats up tens of billions of dollars a year without ever really contributing anything to the lives of Americans, least of all finding a remedy for our energy problems. 

- As a result of corporate accounting scandals at a very small number of American companies back in the 1990s, the political class passed the Sarbannes-Oxley legislation. The law made all U.S. companies develop extensive accounting processes and accountability documents to theoretically prevent future accounting scandals. It was intended to produce advanced warnings if a company was not following generally accepted accounting principles for the intent of defrauding investors or was in dire financial straits.

However, at the onset of the Great Recession, financial companies like Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns went bankrupt within a matter of weeks even though there were no advance warnings from the Sarbannes-Oxley processes, i.e. the legislation was a failure at producing advance warnings of dire financial straits.

This failure was proven further when the Treasury Department decided to do "stress tests" of U.S. banks to determine if they were in good financial shape as a result of the Great Recession. Wasn't that was the Sarbannes-Oxley solution was supposed to do?

- Almost thirty years ago, President Reagan commissioned an expert panel to examine the deep problems and pitfalls of the public education system in the United States. Their resulting 1982 analysis and report, "A Nation At Risk," addressed the problems of under educating of kids. The panel's recommendations laid out a detailed blueprint for fixing our schools' problems.

Despite having a detailed problem solution presented to them, the politicians in 1982 and beyond could not even execute the blueprint to fix our schools' problems, resulting in the continuing under educating of our children today.

- As a result of the Great Recession and the failure of Sarbannes-Oxley to foretell when financial services companies accounting results did not match up with their dire financial situation, the political class in Washington passed the Dodd-Frank financial services reform legislation that was supposed to do what the Sarbannes-Oxley legislation did not do, i.e. spot bad accounting and financial hanky-panky.

However, shortly after the legislation was enacted into law, MF Global, a large financial services firm, went belly up in bankruptcy, making it the 8th largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Unfortunately, none of the prior solutions from the political class in this area, Sarbannes-Oxley, stress tests, and Dodd-Frank identified the oncoming bankruptcy before it happened. As a result, we have another example of political class solutions that do not work.

Even worse, MF Global accounting hanky-panky may have criminally destroyed over $1 billion in customer wealth by commingling company funds with client funds. This is the exact type of misbehavior all of the political class "solutions" was supposed to prevent. Two years into the Dodd-Frank legislation, the results are not encouraging if the 8th largest bankruptcy gets missed by the legislation.

- In 2008, the political class in Congress passed legislation that was intended to cut down on the massive fraud that goes on every day in the Federal food stamp program. We covered one of the typical frauds in a previous post where we reported how food stamp recipients will use their food stamps to buy cases of bottled water, go outside the store and empty the bottles, and then bring the bottles back inside for a cash refund of their bottle deposit.

The 2008 legislation was written to cut down on this type of blatant fraud. However, even though Congress passed the legislation in 2008 and the President signed it right away, the government bureaucracy has never gotten around to writing the rules, procedures, and guidelines for implementing the legislation.

This has resulted in the food stamp fraud continuing, two years after Congress thinks they solved the problem. Thus, laws are passed that theoretically contain solutions but never get implemented by the bloated Federal bureaucracy.

- But the best solution/non-solution situation is currently gathering steam in Congress and it is a doozy. A few months ago we reported on a CBS "60 Minutes" report that illustrated numerous examples in Congress where politicians abuse their positions of power. They use the insider information they come across during their days of governing to personally enrich themselves, turning their Congressional insider trading information into personal wealth.

Apparently, members of Congress do not have to put their financial holdings into a blind trust once in office like the President, Vice President, and other high ranking government officials have to do. They are free to day trade on their financial accounts as much or as little as they please with no constraints on leveraging sensitive, secret information they come across as politicians. A gross, despicable conflict of interest if ever there was one.

However, the report did get Americans aroused so much and so infuriated that Congress is proposing new ethics rules to curb such abuses, as reported in a January 29, 2012 Associated Press report. The Senate version of the legislation would subject any Congressional member to a ban on insider stock trading in additional to opening violators up to Congressional, ethical, and criminal investigative proceedings. 

President Obama signaled his support for the legislation by stating recently: "The House and Senate should send me a bill that bans insider trading by members of Congress and I will sign it immediately. They should limit an elected official from owning stocks in industries they impact."

Great concept but the politicians are already at work creating tunnels around the currently proposed solution. The 60 Minutes report did not stop at Congressional members using insider information to trade on stocks. The report had at least one report where a high ranking member of Congress used his insider trading information to profit off of real estate deals.

The report also showed that while members of Congress already cannot receive outright stock grants from companies, they are allowed to participate in lucrative IPOs of the same companies. The report showed how Nancy Pelosi earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in a two day period by having access to the VISA IPO offering. Apparently, Ms. Pelosi had also had IPO access to nine other IPO offerings.

No where in the Associated Press article does it appear that Congress is willing to cut itself off from IPO access like it should  Whether a politician gets an outright grant of a company's stock or access to the company's IPO, both actions are nothing more than an outright bribe.

The article does report that the House version of this bill would go further than the Senate version by banning real estate deals based on insider information. However, I would bet that this extra bit of control on Congressional enrichment never sees itself into the final legislation.

Thus, follow along on this escapade of the political class where they make much ado about solving a problem but leave themselves giant loopholes to drive through. In this case, IPOs and real estate deals, which will allow them to continue their obsessions with enriching themselves vs. making the country a better place to live. Just like food stamps and water bottle fraud, bad financial services regulations, bad public schools, non-existent energy programs, and leaky borders, it is highly likely that this solution from our politicians will also turn into another non-solution.

For this type of lousy service, we pay over three TRILLION dollars a year. Disgraceful.




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