Obama, The Congressional Super Committee, and Their Deficit Of Courage

I cannot lay claim to part of today's title, "Deficit of Courage." It was the title of the lead story to the December 2, 2011 issue of The Week magazine, a story that outlined the failure of the Congressional "Super Committee" to come up with a rational way to downsize outrageous Federal government spending by a mere $1 TRILLION or so.

As you may recall, the Super Committee arose out of the pathetic political discussions from this summer during the debt ceiling crisis. The agreement was to have this Super Committee come up with a package of government spending reductions and have the entire Congress vote yes or no on the entire package. If the Super Committee failed to reach a consensus, it was agreed at that time to arbitrarily reduce government spending across the board by $1.2 TRILLION.

As we predicted at the time, as did most rational people, this concept of a Super Committee was highly unlikely to succeed. Given how dysfunctional our political class in Washington has become, forever looking out only for their own personal enrichment and perpetual reelection campaign, it was unlikely any member of the Super Committee would courageously stick their neck out and suggest doing the right thing for the country, especially with a major election year coming up. As expected, courage was in short supply with the Super Committee. President Obama also came up short big time in the courage department, taking a hands off, leaderless approach, not leading and pushing for tough budget cuts, hiding in the shadows and allowing the Super Committee to take the political hit when it failed.

And their task was relatively simple if they only had a little courage since a lot of the work in identifying wasteful government spending, criminal fraud in government programs, and redundant government programs has already been done.  Organizations such as the Cato Institute, the Concord Coalition, the Bipartisan Policy Center, Obama's own deficit reduction commission, the Congressional Budget Office, and others have already identified hundreds of ways to reduce unnecessary government spending. These efforts were detailed, thoughtful, and mostly compassionate insights on how to cut excessive government spending the least painful ways possible.

In previous posts, we had summarized the findings of these fine organizations and had added our own thoughts, easily finding a variety ways to cut over $6 TRILLION from the national debt. Such a debt reduction would allow us to reduce our taxes, reduce our government debt interest payments on our national debt, and promote growth in our economy and reduce unemployment. The failure of the Super Committee, Obama, and the political class as a whole will result in none of these positive effects.

Consider our previously documented savings just from cleaning up fraud and criminal activity in existing government programs:

1. Estimated annual loss of taxpayer wealth to fraud and criminal activity in the Medicare program = $60 - $90 billion (more on this aspect of fraud later this week where we will see how easy it is to steal from this government program.)
2. Estimated annual loss of taxpayer wealth to fraud and criminal activity in the Medicaid program = $30 - $40 billion
3. Estimated annual loss of taxpayer wealth to fraud and criminal activity in the Social Security program = $70 billion
4. Estimated annual loss of taxpayer wealth to fraud and criminal activity in just one of the Federal government unemployment benefits program = $19 billion
5. Estimate annual loss of IRS tax collection revenue due to criminal tax evasion = $197 billion
6. Total annual savings if the fraud and criminal activity was cleaned up in just these five programs = $376 - $416 billion
7. Ten year savings = About $3.8 - $4.2 TRILLION

Thus, as you can see it is not hard to find TRILLIONS of dollars worth of  Federal government savings. We can get into the TRILLIONS before we even touch outsized military spending, eliminating unneeded government departments and functions, etc.

Several recent articles from Business Week came up with several other areas of worthwhile spending cuts that the magazine suggested the Super Committee look into:

• Implement a better indicator of inflation, the so-called "chained consumer price index" which would result in government Social Security savings of $232 billion over 10 years.
• Gradually increase the age of when Medicare benefits begin to age 67, from age 65, which would save $125 billion over ten years.
• Reduce farm subsides, at a time when American farmers are one of the few domestic industries enjoying robust economic times, which would save $28 billion without much pain to the industry.
• Increase the amount that Federal workers pay into their pension system, which would save $47 billion.
• The Business Week article that included the above spending cuts totals out to about $700 billion over ten years, savings that would be increment to the $4 TRILLION or so we identified above.
• Another, subsequent Business Week article found $500 billion in savings by terminating just two unneeded military weapon programs: the next generation fighter plane, the F-35 Lightning, since our current jet fighter planes are still far superior to anything else in the world ($385 billion in savings) and also the unneeded construction of eleven new Ford -class aircraft carriers ($120 billion in savings).

Thus, just these two Business Week articles found $1.2 TRILLION in unneeded government expenses.

None of the reductions in government spending from these areas reduced Social Security or Medicare benefits, made elderly people homeless, reduced aid to needy families and kids, or increased taxes on any American. And the Super Committee could not even come up with a plan to address these disgraces of wasted resources.

It is pathetic that the Super Committee and Obama could not even find a single $1 to reduce from our outlandish Federal government budget.  But for something truly pathetic, let's go from the macro savings above to how poorly the political class spends our money at the micro level and why there is so much waste to cut from our government's spending.

An Associated Press article recently reported on a Seattle area married couple that have been having a grand time defrauding the Federal government, and the American taxpayer, over the past few years. The article reported that:

• The married couple lived in a 2,300 square foot, $1.2 million house in the Seattle area.
• The article cites the probability that the couple also owned an expensive Jaguar automobile since investigators found it constantly parked in their driveway.
• Over the past eight years the couple had taken vacation trips to Moscow, Paris, Israel, Turkey, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.
• During this same time period, the couple had collected over $100,000 in Federal welfare payments.
• Finally, after eight years, the local U.S. Attorney General's office is going after the couple in an attempt to recover $135,000 in Federal housing assistance and additional fines and penalties (why the Attorney General is not looking to lay some jail time on these people is a mystery and quite disturbing).
• Apparently, the wife applied for the government assistance by claiming that she was a single mother with two kids and assets worth less than $5,000 even though she was still married, according to the information and proof cited in the article and was living in the $1.2 million home with her successful, chiropractic practicing husband.

Micro level or macro level, is there any doubt how wasteful and incompetent our political class in Washington is? The single Attorney General in Washington state will apparently reduce our government's national debt with this single criminal case than twelve members of Congress and their staffs could do in three months of the Super Committee.

Why should any American, rich or poor, pay any more taxes to these people in D.C. when it is lost to fraud, criminal activity and waste? Why does no one in Washington, from the White House to the Senate to the House Of Representatives have any backbone at all and stand up and say, "Enough?" Why is it all we ever get is spineless political sound bites from these people as the Federal national debt soars above $15 TRILLION and hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth are wasted every year?

All good questions all with one good answer: term limits. Step 39 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" would impose term limits on all Federal politicians in order to finally get people into office who are interested in truly making a bold, positive and courageous difference and who are likely to have more courage in making these right decisions since they would not have to worry about their reelection chances, those chances would not longer exist with term limits.

As Grumpy,  a professional  Brazilian clown once said, and used as his successful political campaign slogan for a Brazilian Congressional seat, "how much worse could it get?" Same thing here, how much worse and less courageous could it get if we had term limits on our political class, which is currently deficit of any inkling of courage?


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/

The Disgrace That Is Washington - A Quick Rant

I had not expected to blog this week, given visiting friends, family and Thanksgiving. I also wanted  to take a break from the sickness and disgrace that is the political class in Washington. However, given another failure by the political class, this time the failure of the Congressional "Super" Committee to come up with a coherent deficit reduction plan, I have to speak up.

First, though, let me apologize up front. I try to run a fact based, logical, forward looking blog. I hate it when bloggers use their blog to rant and rave only about their opinions, without facts or data or logic to back up their points of view. Personal rants and emotion-based blogs do nothing to address the underlying problems and crises facing the nation today.

Only by carefully understanding the underlying root causes of our problems and using all available information and data to apply against them for a solution, can we hope to have a passionate but sound approach to problem solving.

However, I may not be as logical and unemotional tonight as I strive to be and so I apologize up front for what might degenerate into a rant.

A few facts up front:

• Since Democrats Pelosi and Reid took over Congress in early 2007, joined by Democrat Barack Obama as President in 2009, the Washington political class has added almost $7 TRILLION to our national debt in less than five years. Up until that point, every other President COMBINED had accumulated only $8.4 TRILLION in debt.
• President Obama's long term budget plan that he submitted to Congress in the spring predicted that the Washington political class would add another $9 TRILLION to the national debt in the next ten years.
• Last week our national debt exceed $15 TRILLION.
• Thus, the track that these three Democrats have put us on as a nation would bring us to a national debt of over $24 TRILLION in ten years. This is the equivalent of a debt load of over $200,000 for EVERY American household.

Obviously, we will never reach $24 TRILLION in debt because the economy will crash and the nation will by destroyed long before we reach the end of the ten years.

And what do our politicians talk about? They cannot even get together to reduce the deficit by $1.2 TRILLION OVER TEN YEARS, the objective of the Super Committee. A pathetic, disgraceful effort. It is my understanding that the following is behind the failure:

• The Super Committee has not met as a group since November 1. How did they expect to do any work by not constantly meeting? They should have been locked away in a remote site until they got the real job done, the real job being defined as more than a paltry $1.2 TRILLION, an amount they could not even get to.
• This country has a spending issue, it does not have a "revenue" issue. You cannot solve this problem, or even come close to solving it, by raising taxes on the rich.
• We have reported many times in this blog that even if you confiscated the total wealth of the richest 400 Americans, you would reduce the deficit by less than 10% over the next ten years. Since nobody has suggested that we do that, or anything close to that, raising taxes on the rich will produce significantly less than a 10% reduction in debt.
• However, the Democrats insisted that taxes be raised and would not budge from their initial $1 TRILLION tax increase proposal, no compromise at all. The Republicans started with a no tax pledge, proposed a tax increase in $320 billion and the Democrats rejected it out of hand, refusing to negotiate. As a result of their intransigence, there is no Super Committee agreement..
• President Obama was nowhere to be found in this process over the past few months, but not too busy to campaign all around the country and play some serious golf. Talk about a lack of leadership.
• Obama just came on television tonight to speak about the failure and he is basically of no use. He blamed the Republicans for the failure, despite the fact that he has added more to the budget deficit and national debt in less than three years than any other President, EVER. Again, even if the Super Committee agreed to the outrageous $1 TRILLION increase in taxes, that would account for only about 4% of the $24 TRILLION national debt track we are on.
• I know of no way to say this gracefully, but the President does "misspeak." He claims that the majority of Americans favor increased taxes to balance the budget but we reported last week on a recent Reason magazine opinion poll that shows that is not true. The President says all kinds of economists say we need to raise taxes but that is also not true. Any fourth grader, never mind an economist, can tell we have a government spending problem, we do not have an under taxation problem.
• Two years ago, the President himself said that we should never raise taxes in a recession or poor economy, it makes no sense. If it made no sense two years ago. it makes no sense now. A few weeks ago, ex-President Clinton said no taxes should ever be raised when the economy is so weak. Did President Obama read those news reports?

In a total attempt to avoid blame for not getting government spending under control, Democratic members of Congress blamed Grover Norquist for the failure of the Super Committee. Mr. Norquist is not an elected official, he was not a member of the Super Committee, he is not the President of the United States, to my knowledge he has never held public office. He runs a conservative think tank that is against raising taxes in the face of excessive and wasteful government spending. Rather than accept the fact that Congress and the political class failed miserably to rein in spending, they blame a single, unelected American for their failure. How gutless can you be?


Did it have to come to this? Politics being used by both sides of the political class to kill the nation via excessive spending? A lot of smart Americans know how to do this job because they know how to solve problems and do a little math analysis, skills that are obviously lost on the people in Washington:

1. Obama had a commission that did an excellent job of finding ways to reduce spending and reducing the national debt by TRILLIONS of dollars. He chose to completely ignore their fine work.
2. The Cato Institute has gone through the Federal budget line by line and has come up with their own plan to reduce excessive government spending by TRILLIONS of dollars.
3. The Tea Party has come up with their own plan to get spending under control with TRILLIONS of dollars in expense reductions, which it tried to present to Congress last week but were denied access to Congressional members to make their presentation.
4. The Concord Coalition has come up with a comprehensive plan to reduce excessive government spending by TRILLIONS of dollars.
5. If I had some time, I could list at least another three sources who have already done the hard work in reducing excessive and wasteful spending and I will do that by combing through past posts if anyone is interested.
6. Using these above sources, in the spring I came up with over $6 TRILLION of expense cuts based on the above work. These cuts did not have a substantial impact on most ordinary Americans including the poor, the elderly, and the needy.

No matter how you cut it, this is a disgrace. The stock market took a major hit today and it is probably a good bet that the nation's credit rating is going to take another hit. All because every politician in Washington, from the President down to the freshmen in Congress need to be shamed into oblivion at the next election. They are are so worried about their personal political careers that they are incapable of showing any kind of courage or sanity when it comes to getting government spending under control.

At $15 TRILLION, we, as a nation, do not have much time left. We are officially a leaderless nation right now, the people in the White House and Congress are without a doubt, incapable of governing efficiently, wisely, and unselfishly.

We are about to waste another year of a leaderless government with the scavengers in Congress and the White House busy collecting their campaign funds and planning their continued reign over a sinking ship. We need a new crew that will right the ship, fix the spending leaks, and send Obama, Reid, Pelosi, the Super Committee and the rest of them out to sea and retirement in a life boat.

Sorry if this comes off as a rant, I promise to do better in the future of sticking to facts and logic. But I am convinced we are currently leaderless and that scares the life out of me.