July, 2018, Part 1, I Am A Global Warming Doubter and A Believer In A Science: Forecasts That Went Horribly Wrong and The Massive Failure Of Paris

Every month we have enough material to return to a continuing theme in this blog, namely that “I am a global warming doubter AND a believer in science.” This became of interest because of people like Al Gore who fanatically and verbosely claimed that you had to be an idiot to not believe in manmade global warming. It has been my life belief that anyone that is that loud and that obnoxious is hiding something, that rather than argue facts and reality it is better to beat down and insult anyone who disagrees.

As we have dove into the whole issue of manmade global warming, or its new rebranded title of climate change, we found that Al Gore and people like him were guilty of a number of things:

• Ignoring science and realities that did not support their opinions and positions.
• Rather than have an adult conversation about climate, these types of advocates like Gore sank to the level of insulting those who dared look at ALL science by calling them a variety of names including racists, homophobes, terrorists, flat earth believers, and other slanderous names.
• Continuing to insist that politicians step up their intrusions into our lives with higher taxes, more regulations, and more control on our freedoms and standards of living based on a shaky theory at best.

To see the past posts and the multitude of evidence that we have compiled that showed it is perfectly okay to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, enter the phrase "global warming doubter” in the search box above or go through the monthly historical post listed on the right side of this page.

Thus, let’s see the latest facts and science that prove you can be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, regardless of what Al Gore proclaims.

1) As a trained professional statistician, it comes natural to me to go back in time to see how well a forecast predicted reality. Given how good, or badly, your forecasts performed allows you to improve your forecasting skills and accuracy. According to a June 23, 2018 article by Shawn on the Fix This Nation website, that is exactly what some folks have been doing for the major climate forecasts of the past thirty years:

• The Wall Street Journal had climatologists Patrick Michaels and Ryan Maue compare climate forecasts from thirty years ago to today’s actual results.
• James Hansen of NASA back in 1988 started a lot of this climate change/global warming nonsense when he declared he found a “high degree of confidence” in the relationship between human-produced CO2 and the “greenhouse effect and observed warming” of the atmosphere.” 
• Most of Hansen’s predictions said that the Earth’s temperatures would increase steadily over the next thirty years as humans threw more and more CO2 into the atmosphere. 
• However, only his Scenario C was close to being true and that forecast said that the Earth’s temps would NOT increase substantially in the coming decades.
• Forecast models developed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on average forecasted twice as much warming than what actually happened as did other major “expert” forecasts.
• Hansen also did forecasts that also lamely predicted that the number of hurricanes and tornadoes would increase as a result of CO2 that was going to be produced by mankind.
• Of course, those forecasts were also epic failures with Michaels and Maue concluding that not only were Hansen’s forecasts wrong the reality was “the opposite may be true.”
• Michaels and Maue also concluded that, “The list of what didn’t happen is long and tedious.”

The forecast failures were “long and tedious,” the predictions never came close to being accurate over the test of time. And yet, many liberals like Al Gore and Obama still insist that man made global warming and climate change is reality. When everything you claimed would happen did not happen when do you let go of the fantasy?

2) We have often discussed the reality that the infamous Paris Climate Agreement was a disaster and that, fortunately, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the agreement. The only people that were going to have to make sacrifices were Americans, that the big and growing polluters (e.g., China, India) and others had no fat in the climate fire. Obama sold the U.S. down the road to satisfy his own ego.

Trump took some serious heat from both inside and outside of the country for correctly pulling us out of the agreement but Nicolas Loris and Bryan Cosby, writing for the Western Journalism website on June 2, 2018, updated everyone on how well, really how badly, other countries were doing relative to their meager commitments within the agreement, one year after Trump’s withdrawal:

• Despite the claim of climate alarmists that coal is bad for the environment and climate change, worldwide coal usage actually went UP 1% in 2017 despite the effort of the Climate Agreement signees to reduce coal usage.
• A lot of this coal usage increase was because Asian countries’ increase in coal fired electricity.
• World wide there are 1,600 coal fired electricity generating plants under construction, plants that will burn enough coal to produce 840,000 megawatts of electricity.
• If the Paris agreement was any good I doubt that it would allow for the use of 1,600 NEW coal fired power plants.
• And it is not just China and India increasing their usage of coal, smaller countries like Turkey and Indonesia have also struggled to meet their Paris goals since they need the cheap and quick use of coal to meet their growing economy needs.
• Pakistan signed onto the Paris agreement but that agreement is quite useless: “Given the future economic growth and associated growth in the energy sector, the peaking of emissions in Pakistan is expected to take place much beyond the year 2030. An exponential increase of (greenhouse gas) emissions for many decades is likely to occur before any decrease in emissions can be expected.”
• But it is not just Pakistan who is contributing nothing to the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement: “Germany, a world leader on climate action, has failed to cut emissions and has actually seen emissions rise during the past two years. Germany may even have to buy its way out of a binding European Union agreement to lower emissions in the coming years.”
• Brazil expects its emission to continue rising until at least 2030, Japan will continue increasing its use of coal since nuclear in that country has a bad rep, and Poland and South Korea also plan on using more coal going forward.

But all of this proves how bad the whole agreement process was from the beginning: although many countries are falling short of the commitments they made just a few short years ago there are no ramifications or penalties. Even infamous NASA scientist James Hansen, see above discussion, called the whole process “a fraud” in 2015, claiming that, “There is no action, just promises.”

Commitments already being missed, the widespread and increasing use of coal across the world, and no penalties for failure. Trump got this one right.

Still a good thing to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science. More to follow.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

"Meet the New Boss, Same As The Old Boss"... or The Failed Foreign Affairs and MIlitary Strategy Of The Obama Adminstration

Back in 2013, President Obama made the following quote and claim: “A decade of war is now over.” Which is good since given the following warlike actions the U.S. is involved in, I would hate to see what it would be like if the “decade of war” was NOT over:

• The Obama administration recently sent 300 troops into the Ukraine to train Ukrainian troops.
• The Obama administration is debating whether to give the Ukrainians actual weapons as opposed to only the non-lethal aid it has been providing.
• The Obama administration recently sent 3,000 troops back into Iraq to support the fight against the ISIS forces.
• The Obama administration is flying air attacks against ISIS forces throughout the Middle East.
• The Obama administration sent many, many tanks and jet planes to Egypt when the Muslim Brotherhood was in charge.
• The Obama administration spent well over a billion dollars in inserting U.S.military resources into the Libyan civil war.
• The Obama administration is still launching drone attacks into Pakistan to combat the Taliban with a recent attack killing two civilian hostages including an American.
• The Obama administration is still launching drone attacks into Yemen to fight any number of different enemies after having abandoned the country and leaving about half a billion dollars worth of military equipment behind for those enemies to put to their own use.
• The Obama administration has a fleet of warships assembled in the Middle East to prevent Iran from shipping weapons to its allies in Yemen with a potential armed and physical confrontation narrowly avoided in the past week when an Iranian convoy of ships headed for Yemen turned back.
• The Obama administration has doubled the number of U.S. troops it is keeping in Afghanistan this year, to 10,000 troops, and is now allowing the Pentagon to directly support Afghanistan forces in battles against the Taliban, a significant change in strategy from previously saying that U.S. military forces would only conduct counter terrorism operations, whatever that is. 
• The Obama administration still has tens of thousands of troops stationed in Japan.
• The Obama administration still has tens of thousands of troops stationed in South Korea.
• The Obama administration tens still has tens of thousands of troops stationed around the world in dozens of countries.

Obviously, we were being sarcastic. Like most of Obama’s other campaign and Presidential promises (e.g. most transparent administration ever, will reduce the annual Federal spending deficit in half, if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor under Obama Care, etc.), the “decade of war is over” is either an outright lie or incompetence on the administration. You cannot claim the decade of war is over when you are involved in at least a dozen different war situations around the world.

The Obama administration thus has degenerated into nothing more than an old Who song, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Despite his promises, we are still sticking our noses, and our military, into other countries’ affairs at great expense to the American taxpayer, just like just about every other President has done. Step 30 and its military strategy from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government” would have prevented us from getting involved in these dozen war zones and others: "Bring back all nonessential deployed military personnel to the United States.This will save money and help our reputation as a freedom loving, non-imperialistic nation.”

But now we have no strategy, no exit plan, this administration has got us so entangled into so many war situations that it is difficult now to tell who our allies are and who are friends are. We are heading off Iranian arms shipments to Yemen with our Navy but allowing Iran to help in the fight against ISIS. We are working with the Saudis in the Yemen mess but the Saudis do have sympathies and relationships with ISIS since both are Sunni based religious entities. We said we were limiting our military exposure in Afghanistan but then turned right around and expanded it. The list of conflicts and confusion goes on and on which is not unexpected when you do not have a strategy and seem incapable of formulating a coherent one.

But it should come as no surprise. This administration, and those that came before it, are generally operated by people that have no strategic planning ability or smarts:

• Obama Care is an ill conceived and expensive insurance plan failure when it should have been a strategic, well coordinated public health campaign.
• Giving tens of billions of dollars to failing and bankrupt alternative energy companies is not an energy strategy, it is crony capitalism. 
• Trying to have single, centrally controlled education curriculum that serves millions of kids like Common Core is not a strategic answer to our failing public schools it but rather just another bloated Washington bureaucracy.

That is why term limits is so important. The current set of Washington politicians have failed miserably at everything they try to do, with the dozen failures of Obama’s foreign policy listed above just the latest example. That is why we urge all of our readers to go to our term limit website to learn why term limits are so very important and critical to our future:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

We leave today with two depressing quotes that naturally arise as the failures of this administration mount:

- In May, 2013, President Obama stated these words at the National Defense University: “America is at a crossroads. We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us.” Given the foreign affairs and military mess and conflicts stated above, it is obvious that his administration has not defined the nature and scope of the problem since there is no apparent and effective strategy in place to define our place in the world. 

- Which leads us to the recent insights from historian Robert Kagan: “We’re sort of seeing the world order cracking around the edges. The only thing Obama can hope is that it doesn’t completely collapse while he’s still President.”

My, the “hope and change” theme has fallen far from its lofty perch in 2008. The only thing left for this hope and change President now is to hope current foreign affair and military crisis situation does not change for the worst until he gets out from under the mess he has created after his second term ends.

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

By The Numbers, Part 2: Obama's Numbers Sink Further, Poverty Numbers Rises Despite Trillions of Dollars And More

This is our second post in a three part series themed, “by the numbers.” In this series, we look at the reality of the numbers facing our country, whether they are polling numbers, government statistics, or from other sources. By looking at the numbers, it is easier to determine the reality of our world and the issues that we face rather than using the hatred, prejudices and lies of our political class. Their purpose is not to resolve issues using reality but to ensure their perpetual reelection chances by stoking emotions rather than understanding the numbers. 

So let’s continue our analysis today using the real world’s numbers to determine our real world situation, a situation driven by our politicians’ bad decisions and selfishness.

1) According to reputable sources, we have previously discussed the fact that all levels of government within the country spend about a trillion dollars a year to help the less advantaged in this country, a spending level that has been increasing steadily over the years. At this level of expenditures, you would think that our politicians would have eliminated poverty long ago.

And you would be so wrong, at least according to a recent analysis by the U.S. Census Bureau. According to their analysis, over one in five kids in the U.S. today are living in poverty. In 2012, there were 15,437,000 children under 18 years old, or 21.3%, who were classified in the “below poverty” threshold, according to the Census and a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report entitled, Poverty in the United States: 2012.

When President Johnson declared “war on poverty” back in 1964, the percentage of American kids living in poverty was 22.7%. Fifty years and $22 TRILLION later, the American politician class has only been able to reduce the level of kids living in poverty from that 22.7% to the current 21.3%. And even though the percentage has decreased slightly, I would bet that the absolute number of kids living in poverty is much higher today than in 1964 given that the population of the United States is so much more 50 years later.

Einstein once said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. After 50 years and TRILLIONS of dollars with no substantial improvement in the number of kids in poverty, I would say that our politicians fit that definition quite well. Insane. 

2) Consider what the we spend for national defense in this country, as estimated by the Cato Institute:

• On average, every American spends about $1,900 every year for national defense.
• $1,900 figure is roughly four and a half times more than what the average person in other NATO countries spends on defense even though these countries boast a collective GDP of approximately $19 trillion, 18 percent higher than the United States. 
• South Koreans spend about a third as much on national defense than Americans even though we spend billions of dollars every year protecting that nation from its northern neighbor.
• Americans also outspend people in Japan by more than four to one even though we have troops and military assets posted in that country to help with its defense.
• Thus, despite having a national debt that is fast approaching $18 TRILLION, we continue to pay for the defense of our allies as if the Cold War never ended.
• While the United States spends 16.8% of the budget on the military, Japan spends a measly 2.4%. 
• South Korea’s share of military spending is only 11% of their GDP, and they having a crazed and hostile regime on their northern border. 

As Cato points out very well: “The U.S. Constitution stipulates that the federal government should provide for the “common defence.” But the document never talks about providing for the defense of other nations. We could have revisited our alliances after the end of the Cold war. We could have paid more attention to the culture of dependency we created among our allies. Instead we continued to spend vast sums on the military, discouraging others from developing their capabilities, and removing their will to use their militaries in ways that could have advanced both their and our security. Today, our wealthy allies are little more than wards of Uncle Sam’s unending dole, and they will remain militarily irrelevant so long as we continue along our present path.”

Well said, we are providing military welfare for allies that are more than capable of paying their own way while many in this country suffer for the exporting of wealth to wealthy and underpaying allies around the world.

3) Where do logical people want to live? Most of then tend to migrate to areas within the country where they get to keep more of their hard earned wealth and income. Usually, this means living and working in states where there are lower and fewer taxes, as shown by the following graphic from the website www.howmoneywalks.com:

















The states with the highest income taxes have had a net loss in taxpayer Adjusted Gross Income of $107 billion, and the states with no income tax have had a net gain of $146 billion. In other words, there’s been an exodus from high tax states to those with no taxes. 

Thus, even though the politicians in those red states above thought they could get more state government revenue by having a higher tax burden, on average those states shrunk their tax base by about $12 billion per state in the past 15 years, probably wiping out any benefit of raising taxes on a continually shrinking tax base. Back to Einstein's insanity observation.

4) According to a recent Fox News poll, the country’s citizens do not have a really good feeling about Obama’s performance in office relative to his predecessors:

• A majority of those polled say the Obama administration is less competent than Bill Clinton's administration. 
• And in what has to be an ego deflating finding, a plurality of those polled say it is less competent than George W. Bush’s administration.
• Sixty-eight percent say the Obama administration is less competent that the Clinton administration. 
• Forty-eight percent say it is less competent than Bush's, compared to 42 percent who say it is more competent. 
• Seven percent judge Obama's and Bush's administrations the same.
• Fifty-five percent say that the Obama administration has made the country weaker; 35 percent say his administration has made it stronger.

Now I am sure some of my liberal friends will dismiss the findings out of hand since they saw the word “Fox” associated with the poll. That’s fine but understand that this is not the only poll out there or that we have discussed that shows how poorly Obama’s performance is being perceived. Just yesterday we showed that according to a CNN poll, he receives approval ratings for major issues that never exceed fifty percent on any of those issues, a finding consistent with this Fox polling. 

That will do it for today. But we will need one more day to do our “by the numbers” analysis to show that we are living with the worse and most inept set of politicians in our history, as measured by the numbers. That is our reality, politicians that do the same thing over and over at every increasing spending levels but never resolve any major issue of our time.

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

March, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 1: Defense Budgets Out of Control, Government Real Estate Out of Control and Government Partying Out Of Control

It’s the beginning of the month which means it is time for another dose of political class insanity, idiocy, screw ups, and wasteful spending. Every month we need to take a week or so of posts to cover all of the many inane acts that politicians all over the country impose on ordinary Americans, acts that almost always cost us money or freedom. Previous discussions of political class insanity can be accessed by looking at the early posts of previous months from the list of dates on the right side of this screen.

Unfortunately, when we started doing this feature four years ago, we could usually cover a month’s worth of insanity in a day or so. Over the years, we have needed more and more time each month to get our insanity reviews done, indicating that our political class decision making and actions are getting worse over time. There is little doubt that the trend will continue this month also.

1) We have often discussed the reality that the U.S. continues to needlessly deploy over a hundred thousand troops just in South Korea, Japan, Europe, and other parts of the world, at a cost of billions and billions of dollars a year. These deployments may have served a purpose at one point in our history but now are unnecessary relics from our military past. 

More recently, the current Presidential administration has involved U.S. military resources in an illegal and ill fated military conflict in Libya, has stationed 2,500 U.S. Marines in Australia, and now has placed U.S. troops, or “advisors,” in upwards of a half dozen African nations. In addition, in the past six months, the President has threatened to militarily intervene in Syria and his Secretary of State has floated the idea of having U.S. troops serve as peacekeepers in the Israeli and Palestinian conflict.

All of this costs money, as the following chart shows, U.S. military spending vs. major all countries around the world (double click on graph for a larger view):



As you see:

• The U.S. spends almost $600 billion a year on defense, a cost that is equivalent to well over $5,000 a year per U.S. household.
• This is four times more than what China spends on defense despite China having orders of magnitude more people than us.
• This is about eight times what Russia spends on defense.
• In fact, the U.S. probably spends more than most of the nations on this chart COMBINED.

This chart proves that we really need to find a way to rein in the insane defense spending by substantially cutting the deployment of U.S. military resources around the world along with reducing other other excessive and wasteful defense spending. We simply cannot afford the cost of what the political class is spending in this budget item, getting very little in return. 

2) Let’s look at another chart, a chart which partly explains why the military industrial complex in this country spends almost $600 billion dollars a year:

This chart comes from a recent Cato analysis and report which counted up the number of physical buildings that the Federal government currently owns. Cato and the chart point out:

• The top three occupants of Federal buildings are the Army, Air Force, and Navy who in total occupy at least a whopping 180,000 buildings.
• This comes out to an almost incomprehensible 3,600 defense related buildings in every state on average. Another possible reason for an annual defense budget of almost $600 billion a year?
• In total, the Feds own over 300,000 buildings.
• But it gets worse. The government also leases 55,000 buildings, for a total of 361,000 buildings.
• But there is still more insanity. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of buildings that it owns AND leases, the Federal government owns and leases another remarkable 486,00 pieces of real estate such as parking lots. 
• The General Services Administration reports that the annual operating costs for all the buildings and structures is $33 billion. 
• Although the current market value of the buildings is unknown, a government report estimated the replacement value in 2007 at $1.5 trillion.
• The Federal government even admits that at least 77,000 of the assets are under used or unneeded.
• Some of them have been ignored for so long that they are in what Cato calls an “alarming state of deterioration.”

Obviously the Federal government needs to do a good spring cleaning of its real estate holdings. Selling these assets to private investors would 1) put them to better use than the non use they are receiving today, 2) would save American taxpayers billions of dollars a year in annual maintenance, administrative, security, and repair costs, 3) would reduce Federal government energy costs in keeping these facilities with power, and 4) would not contribute to our already outlandish national debt in the long run.

One problem is that the government does not know exactly what it owns, what condition those assets are in, and what real estate assets are excessive or unused. The GAO says that the government has a “lack of accurate and useful data to support decision making” on its vast property holdings. 

How insane is that, the Federal government has gotten so large and unwieldy that it does not even know what it owns? If a private business ran itself like that, not knowing what assets it owned or where those assets were located, it would soon be out of business. When government does it, the problem goes unattended for decades and the taxpayer gets stuck with the bill for the political and bureaucratic incompetence.

Nevertheless, it is time for Washington to clean up this mess that it has been causing for decades, spring clean and bank the savings regardless of how unglamorous the clean up is. Anything else is just plain insane.

3) The political class spends and wastes our money is so many ways, not the least of which is how politicians and government bureaucrats party. Consider some of the party expenditures the Washington political class has treated themselves to over the past few years using our tax money:

• The White House staff currently has five chefs on staff at a cost of over $550,000 a year. Why five chefs, do they all prepare one part of every meal? Too excessive even for the President, especially when over 20 million Americans are unemployed or under employed, almost fifty million Americans receive food assistance, and our national debt is now over $17 TRILLION. Cut it down to two chefs and show at least a little empathy for the rest of America.
• In 2013, Joe Biden went to Europe for just two days where he and his staff rang up two nights of hotel expenses that exceeded $1 million. $1 million just in hotel expenses. I would not expect the Vice President to stay in a Motel 6 but I also do not think that $1 million for just two nights of lodging is respectful of taxpayers either.
• In the past few years the IRS has spent about $50 million on its conferences, often held in very nice surroundings outside of DC. A 2013 conference in Anaheim, California cost the American taxpayer $4 million and included some hotel rooms that went for $1,500 a night. Expenses also included $17,000 just for conference speakers one of which spoke about “Leadership In Art,” a topic that has nothing to do with tax collection and tax law.

Other such nonsense and cases of taxpayer wealth can be seen at:

http://www.theminorityreportblog.com/2014/02/22/video-party-time-on-the-taxpayer-dime/

That will do it for today, just day one of this month’s political class insanity. A defense budget out of control, government real estate out of control, and politicians and bureaucrats partying out of control. All paid for by the American taxpayer who gets virtually nothing in return for these expenditures.

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

How About More Hate Control Before More Gun Control, Part 4 - Protecing Our Kids, Protecting The Second Amendment, No Tax Increases, it Can Be Done

This is the final post in our series on how to protect ourselves and our families from violence and gun play without shredding the Second Amendment in the process. We have discussed how the political class is again not looking for the root causes of the violence that happened in Newtown, Connecticut last month, instead focusing on the “what” of the incident, guns were used to kill innocents, rather than the “why” of the incident, why and how could someone become so irrespective of life and humanity. As a result, we will end up with less freedom via more government control without solving the root causes.

We have discussed several real life examples of how Americans and their legally owned weapons defended themselves, their families, and their assets from violent criminals, an option that some politicians would like to see eliminated via more draconian gun control laws.

We discussed the fact that more stringent gun control laws do not reduce violence. We reviewed examples of where higher legal gun ownership resulted in less crime but lower gun ownership, more restrictive gun control laws resulted in higher rates of violent crime (e.g. Chicago). We reviewed scientific studies that proved this point and other studies that pointed to the legal overmedication of Americans as a high potential cause for mass slayings like Newtown, not the availability of guns.

We concluded from all of this discussion that outlawing or severely restricting the ownership of guns by responsible Americans will result in more violence, will not cause violent criminals to turn in or register their guns, or solve the problems like what happened in Newtown.

But there is a simple, better way to protect our kids without endangering the rest of the population, without shredding the Second Amendment, and without viciously dividing the country again along political lines. On December 24, 2013, we proposed a way to protect our kids in while in school from violence and gun play without raising the taxes on any American:

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

• 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)
• Moroccan pottery classes (part of a $27 million grant from U.S. Agency for International Development)
• Efforts to promote caviar consumption and production ($300,000)
• The building of a robotic squirrel named “RoboSquirrel”- part of a $325,000 grant from the National Science Foundation
• Promotion of specialty shampoo and other beauty products for cats and dogs ($505,000)
• Corporate welfare for the world’s largest snack food producer, PepsiCo Inc. ($1.3 million)
• Government-funded study on how golfers might benefit from using their imagination, envisioning the hole is bigger than it actually is ($350,000)
• “Prom Week,” a video game that allows taxpayers to relive prom night ($516,000)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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
• 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
• Speed reading faces – $30,000. NSF funds used to study whether people can determine a person’s sexual orientation with just a glance.
• Fighting obesity with giant graffiti carrots – $13,000. Anti-obesity funds pay for a giant graffiti mural focused on sustainability.
• 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
• 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
• 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).
• 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.
• 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
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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Since this blog post and the solution it proposed, we found out that:

1. President Obama signed legislation that will guarantee that he and his family, along with former Presidents, will have armed, Secret Service protection for life.
2. The school that President Obama’s kids attend is protected by 11 armed guards everyday in addition to the Secret Service detail assigned to protect his kids.

If the President can provide trained, professional armed guards for his kids in their schools, why can’t we do the same for every American kid while in school? The above math indicates it is possible if we just cleaned up wasteful government spending a little bit.

But there is another way to finance such a program, without raising taxes on any American, if we only could force the political class in Washington to stop spending and wasting taxpayer wealth on themselves and start spending it on our KIDS.

In our January 6, 2013 post, we revealed excessive and useless wasting examples of politicians spending our money on themselves. A few examples include the following disgraces:

1. Georgia Senator Isakson - Arranged a $4 million earmark for Northrop Gruman in exchange for a $7,000 donation and arranged a $1.6 million earmark for Scientific Research Corp. in exchange for a $2,900 donation. (Source: Seattle Times)
2. Hawaiian Senator Inouye - Secured a $135 million taxpayer financed bailout after intervening on behalf of a poorly managed, non-qualifying bank. Why? Inouye had most of his net worth invested in that bank. (Source: Hawaii Free Press)
3. Illinois Senator Durbin - Arranged a $1.6 million earmark for Gentex in exchange for a $2,000 donation and arranged another $1.6 million earmark for Epir Technologies in exchange for a $2,700 donation. (Source: Seattle Times)
4. Rep. Corrine Brown (D - Fla.) - Between 2005 and 2010, Brown helped secure $21.9 million for six clients of a lobbying firm where her daughter works.
5. Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D - NC) - Butterfield has helped obtain $817,500 over the past few years toward revitalizing buildings in Wilson, N.C. The lawmaker owns 19 properties within three-quarters of a mile of the project.
6. Rep. Norm Dicks (D - Wash.) - In 2008, Dicks, as an appropriations chairman, secured a $1.82 million earmark for a Washington state environmental agency where his son worked as executive director.

These are just six random examples of politicians wasting our money on their families and their careers, money that could be spent protecting OUR kids. You can visit the dozens and dozens of other examples of similar waste at that January 6th post.

If you did read that post and added up the amount of waste that the political class in Washington dispenses for its own goals every year you would find it sums to $711.6 million. Since, on average, it costs about $55,000 a year to staff a police officer throughout the country, if the political class had used $711.6 million in taxpayer wealth to put an armed police officer in schools rather, than divert the taxpayer money to their financial backers or their friends and family, as outlined in detail in our January 6, 2013 post, we could have armed protection in another 13,000 schools protecting our kids.

Since we have already calculated above that terminating just 22 wasteful government projects would allow us to staff armed officers in about 39,300 schools, this additional savings would put armed police officers in 52,300 schools or about 40% of our schools. No taxes raised, no Second Amendment shredding, just good solid trained protection in over 50,000 schools FOR OUR KIDS! It is that simple.

All it requires is for the Federal government to stop spending over $2 billion a year on stupid, inane, useless projects and programs and stop the political class from using taxpayer money to grease their reelection campaigns and the personal wealth of themselves and their family members. You decide what are the better spending priorities, I know what my answer is.

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