July, 2018, Part 6, Political Class Insanity: Fiscal Insanity In Stockton, NYC Politicians on the Take, and More Disasters Form The Iranian Nuclear Deal

It is another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us.

Let’s get started:

1) In our last post we discussed the idiocy of a Chicago city government proposed pilot program that would give $500 a month to 1,000 city households with no strings attached. This is a program under the theory of a universal income that somehow people are entitled to get money without doing a darn thing for it. 

We easily showed how stupid that program could end being, theoretically adding over $5 billion to a city budget which is currently only about $8 billion. In other words, where are the city politicians going to get the money to roll out this program? And how long do we think that working, taxpaying residents are going to stay in Chicago when they are working so hard so that city politicians take their money and give it to people that are not working at all or as hard?

But politicians in Chicago are not the only idiots thinking this is a good idea:

• Politicians in Stockton, California have also proposed a similar program.
• Keep in mind as you read this that Stockton politicians have already driven the city to file for bankruptcy with their inept handling of the city’s finances but that bad experience is not stopping them from proposing this program of financial nonsense.
• The politicians hype that this program will guarantee that no one in Stockton, population of 300,000, “lives in poverty.”
• A hundred city residents will get $500 a month to do anything they want with it over an 18 month trial period.
• The city will then decide whether to rollout the program city wide.
• The program has the backing of a number of Silicon Valley billionaires who, of course, will not have to pay the tab for the program if and when it rolls out.

So many problems with this type of thinking:

• You already bankrupted the city by not having enough taxpayer money to cover city expenses, where are you going to get the type of money to pay for this program long term?
• If the money can be spent on anything then what stops a person from wasting it on drugs, booze, gambling, hookers, etc.?
• While anyone would enjoy getting $500 a month with no strings attached, this amount, $6,00, a year is not lifting anyone out of poverty as promised by the city advocates for this type of nonsense.

Let’s do some simple math and easily show how stupid this program is: 

• Assume that 10% of Stocktons’ population is eligible for the program after the trial, or 30,000 participants.
• At $500 a month, $6, 000 a year, the annual cost of just handing out the money would be $180 million a year without counting administrative expenses.
• The 2019 total revenue stream for the city is expected to be $704 million.
• Thus, this program would consume over 25% of the city’s current revenue stream which would mean more 25% more in taxes on those working and living in the city which would likely cause some productive people to leave and seek a place with less taxation which would reduce city revenues which would mean higher tax rates and we are now in a financial death spiral.

So we have a program that would never fulfill its primary objective, i.e. lift people out of poverty, would increase taxes causing outward migration which would reduce city tax streams which would require tax increases, etc. Idiocy.

Oh, one final note that Stockton and Chicago politicians should be aware of. Socialist leaning Finland has already tried a program like this. They ended up shutting it down and not rolling it out, leading one to assume that it was a financial disaster. Thus, if a socialist nation like Finland opted out of a socialist program like this, what makes you think you can make it work? 

2) Airbnb is a highly successful program what allows citizens to easily rent out their homes or apartments to strangers in order to maximize the value of their real estate. The rentals are usually short term, days vs. months. For example, if a person owns a home in a good beach town and is going to be away for a period of time, rather than allow that home to sit vacant, Airbnb facilitates that homeowner finding someone who would like to visit that good beach town for a short amount of time.

Everyone wins. The home owners gets rental money, the renter finds interesting places to stay that are often less expensive than staying in a hotel, and Airbnb makes a profit from setting things up. It is classic free market economics, a willing seller easily getting hooked up with a willing buyer.

Unless you live in New York City. According to a recent National Review article by Kyle Smith on July 19, 2018:

• Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city town council are putting together legislation that would make it more difficult for Airbnb to function in the city limits and force Airbnb to give the city the names of its city customers who rent out their homes vias the Airbnb service.
• According to the article: “Consider how viciously anti–New Yorker this law is: You’re going to be out of town for two weeks on vacation, or to look after a sick relative, or on business. You could make thousands of dollars renting out your home on Airbnb. But it’s illegal. It would be legal for you to host a guest while you yourself are still living at home for those two weeks — but how is City Hall supposed to monitor whether you lay your head down on your own pillow each night? It would take a Stasi-level surveillance regime to catch all of the violators. The law creates the predicate for massive government intrusion into private home-sharing transactions.”
• This type of over regulation caused Airbnb listings to drop a dramatic 50% in San Francisco when that city implemented a similar city ordinance, robbing that city’s residents the opportunities to earn extra money from an asset they own.
• De Blasio has increased his “Office of Special Enforcement” by four fold over the past several years to make sure that city inspectors can make sure that Airbnb customers toe the line which is forcing people to forgo the hassle of dealing with the city via Airbnb and thus losing out on extra income.
• The article points out how stupid this over enforcement is: “You might think that if an apartment is safe enough for a family of New Yorkers to live in it full-time, then it’s probably safe enough to rent out some of it for a few days.”

Now, you might try and make the case that de Blasio and the council are just trying to make sure that everyone stays safe and that is why there is such over regulation and enforcement. But you would be wrong since the article correctly points out that the mayor and council are beholden to special interest groups and that is why they are using their governmental powers to unfairly cripple one industry (Airbnb) that does not contribute to their election campaigns and favor an industry (the hotel industry and its union members) that does finance their election efforts:

• New York City average hotel room stay prices peaked in 2014 and have decreased since then, corresponding with the rise in Airbnb’s popularity.
• In response, the hotel industry paid out almost half a million dollars in campaign donations in 2013 and 2017 in an attempt to buy political influence.
• City council speaker Corey Johnson got $15,600 of that money and the anti-Airbnb bill sponsor Carlina Rivera got $33,800 of that money.
• De Blasio himself and his campaign organization, “One For New York,” received $400,000 from a hotel union related group.

Just another instance where greedy politicians have stepped into people’s personal lives not to make those lives better but to protect and prosper form their positions of power. Disgustingly insane.

3) Let’s wrap up today’s insanity with a quicker hitter from Iran. Remember how Obama’s nuclear weapons deal with Iran was supposed to minimize the risk that an nuclear armed Iran would pose to the world? We have previously discussed how this was one of the worst international agreements that this country ever made: shoddy inspection requirements, backroom deals that were not disclosed to Congress or the American people, late night, secret shipments of cold cash worth over a billion dollars to the worst terrorist sponsoring nation in the world, an aborted illegal attempt to find a way to use the American banking system to funnel billions more to the Iran regime, and the refusal to shut down an Iranian-backed group’s heroin trade.

To this list of failures we add another. According to Alice Green, writing for the Punching Bag website on July 19, 2018, the Iranians now brag that they have stockpiled 950 TONS of uranium. Iran’s Nuclear Chief Ali Akbar Salehi recently made that pubic claim of 950 tons, adding that this is enough uranium to run 190,000 enrichment centrifuges. Even worse, he claims that 400 tons of that uranium stockpile was imported since Obama signed the nuclear deal with Iran back in 2015. Salehi also claimed that Iran has completed construction of a new factory to help build the rotor blades for those centrifuges.

Way to go Barack, much like Obama Care, the nuclear deal with Iran is nothing more than a continuing array of disaster after disaster.

That will do it for today’s insanity: Iran continues its march to atomic weapons, New York politicians are on the take, and fiscal insanity and stupidity in Stockton. One more set of insanity 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: http://www.reason.com http://www.cato.org http://www.bankruptingamerica.org http://www.conventionofstates.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

September, 2015, Political Class Insanity, Part 7: Clintons Get Rich Mafia Style and Social Security Still Giving Out Free Money

It is the start of another month which means it is time for our monthly review of the latest political class insanity that continually spews forth from America’s politicians. Their actions, words, quotes, incompetency, and general ineptness continue to reinforce our theory that we are currently being served by the worst set of politicians in the history of the nation.

As you read about the latest shenanigans and ineptness of the political class, keep in mind what should be their priorities in these difficult times and compare this list to what they are actually working on:

• NBC recently reported that ISIS forces are getting larger and stronger despite the Obama administration spending billions of dollars on a failed air campaign and military strategy.
• The stock market is in free fall.
• Job creation is barely keeping up with population growth.
• Wage growth is anemic, growing just .2% in the second quarter, the lowest quarterly growth since 1982.
• The labor participation rate is at the lowest level in decades because the Obama economy cannot generate enough jobs.
• Thousands of veterans are still not getting the medical care they were promised by the Federal government.
• 46 million Americans are still receiving monthly Federal food assistance.
• Our borders still leak and thousands of illegal immigrant criminals continue to walk our streets
• A record number of police officers have been assassinated in the past week.
• Major programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are hurtling towards insolvency and lose hundreds of billions of dollars every year to fraud and mismanagement.
• Our kids are still getting lousy public educations at most public schools.
• The IRS and other government functions seem to be getting their computer systems hacked on a regular basis, exposing tens of millions of Americans to identity theft potential.
• Obama Care is a failure along so many dimensions as health care costs continue to soar despite the Obama promise that they would decrease.
• Annual Federal deficits, while down, are still about half a TRILLION a year meaning that even though the Federal government is collecting more in taxes than ever before, it still cannot run a balanced budget.

Again, keep these real crises in mind as you read what our politicians are actually doing.

1) Back in the 2012 Presidential elections, Democrats made a big deal out of the reality that Mitt Romney was quite wealthy. Romney had earned his money the hard way via smarts, hard work, and business skill. Despite his honest accrual of millions and millions of dollars, the Democrats and liberals branded him as out of touch and unworthy of being President, simply because he was wealthy.

Which is interesting since the leading candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, at least for today, given how much she is slipping in the polls, is Hillary Clinton. According to Vox.com, since 2007, Hillary and Bill Clinton have earned $141 million, mostly by running a racketeering operation that involved Hillary dispensing State Department favors at the expense of the American taxpayer and the recipients of those favors paying Bill hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single speech. These earnings had nothing to do with creating value for society and creating jobs for Americans in the process, something Romney did in the course of getting wealthy.

In fact, according to Vox, the Clintons have paid more in taxes since 2007, a period of eight short years, than Republican candidate Jeb Bush made in total income from 1981 to 2013, a period of 32 years. Wonder if the liberals and Democrats will be consistent with Hillary and do what they did to Romney in 2012, assuming that Hillary is still around by election time.

2) We could talk about political class insanity related to the illegal and often unethical dealings of Hillary Clinton but that would probably take weeks and weeks to cover, given that it seems everyday we find that she broke laws and government rules and guidelines in many important ways and areas. But today, let’s just cover a tiny example of the shenanigans and self enrichment that went on while she was in her position as Secretary of State for all it is worth.

The following shenanigans were documented in a Briefing Article in the July 3, 2015 article of The Week magazine:

• In 2005, Bill Clinton and mining powerhouse Frank Giustra took a trip together to the country of Kazakhstan.
• There, the two dined with that country’s dictator President, Nursultan Nazarbayev.
• Within days of that dinner, Giustra acquired uranium mining rights in that country that resulted in a financial windfall for himself.
• In 2006, he donated $31 million to the Clinton Foundation.
• Eventually, he sold off his interests in the uranium mines to Russia’s nuclear agency.
• Since the interests included some U.S. uranium mines, Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State had to sign off and approve the sale, after Giustra had donated $31 million to her foundation, a serious conflict of interest. 
• Although not mentioned in the article, I would bet that somewhere along the line of these transactions Bill Clinton gave a speech for a few hundred thousand dollars.
• In another case of shady dealings, the government of Algeria gave the foundation $500,000. Two serious problems arose as a result of this dealing. First, the donation was never reported which was a condition of Hillary being Obama's Secretary of State. Second, surprise, surprise, shortly after the donation, Algeria was cleared by Hillary’s State Department to receive a 70% boost in U.S. military export authorizations which now included chemical and biological agents.
• And finally, while Secretary of State, Clinton oversaw the approval of $376 BILLION in weapons sales to 20 countries who had donated to her foundation (again, no article mentions of how many speeches Bill gave and was paid for by those twenty donors but odds are it was a lot of them). 
• This level of weapons approvals was 100% higher than what happened during the entire Bush administration.

Shady dealings with shady characters, spreading hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons and likely violence around the world, massive conflicts of interest, faulty bookkeeping, and in general, running a racketeering operation that the Mafia would admire. And she wants to be the next President of the United States. Insane.

3) Ali Meyer, writing for the Free Beacon on August 4, 2015, reported that one of our most inept Federal agencies, the Social Security Administration (SSA), had overpaid some Americans a total of $371.5 million in disability benefits from 2009 through 213, as reported by a Government Accounting Office (GAO) report. Besides being wasteful and unfair to taxpayers, it is especially bad news given the reality that the disability fund is expected to go broke sometime in 2016.

The GAO found that: “During a time of growing concern about the solvency of the DI trust fund, it is important for SSA to take every opportunity to help improve the financial status of the program.”  To do their analysis, the GAO randomly selected 20 disability beneficiaries for review and found that:

• In all 20 cases, SSA’s internal accounting controls and processes failed to detect and prevent over payments. 
• In seven of those 20 cases, SSA did not detect over payments for more than a decade, and each of these individuals received $100,000 in overpaid benefits.
• And for the final insult to taxpayers, one of these seven individuals received benefits in the 1980s and was approved for disability benefits 14 years later in 1994. The GAO found that this individual received $200,000 in over payments for more than 20 years.
• And finally from the “you cannot make this stuff up category," the SSA’s “internal controls” rely on beneficiaries themselves to self-report over payments. In other words, the SSA relies on those bilking they system to tell the SSA that they are bilking the system since the SSA has no clue when it is wrong.

Since the disability insurance program is the nation’s largest cash assistance program for workers with disabilities, the $142 billion it paid out in 2014 makes you wonder how many of those billions and billions of dollars were incorrectly paid out if the small sample of 20 in the GAO study showed EVERY beneficiary was overpaid. 

That will do it for today: billions and billions of dollars lost every year due to the ineptness of the SSA, the Clinton racketeering project, and Hillary making Romney like money with no societal benefit in return. More insanity tomorrow.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

May, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 3: Rewarding Government Incompetence Via Bailouts, Budgets, and Failures

This is our third post in this series which is covering the political class insanity and idiocy that has arisen in just the past month or so. The first post in this series can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/05/may-2014-political-class-insanity-part.html

It is unknown how many more days we will need to be dedicated to the ongoing insanity of our politicians but I am quite sure we will not wrap everything up today.

1) Yesterday, we discussed the fact that the final bill has come in for the taxpayer bailout of General Motors and that the company’s ineptness and the government’s meddling cost the American taxpayer just over $11 billion. This comes out to the equivalent of every U.S. household sending a check for about $100 to the Detroit car maker to cover its mistakes.

According to an article in Moneynews on May 2, 2014, the final bill on their entire set of buyouts has now been tallied. Including the General Motors loss, the overall American taxpayer loss on the bailouts has come to about $40 billion. This is the equivalent of every American household sending a check out for about $350 to bailout the big auto makers and banks.

The really distressing part of this final report is the fact that the American taxpayer still faces a potential, worst case liability of $190 billion that could be needed to bailout Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This potential hit comes out to the equivalent of each household paying out about $1,650 each to cover this ticking time bomb, all because the political class meddled in the housing market without really knowing what they are doing. Pathetic.

2) It is amazing how many different ways government officials can screw things up in so many different ways. According to an audit done by the EPA’s Inspector General, the EPA's international affairs office lost track of about 200 passports required to be in its possession, according to a new report from the agency's watchdog. The EPA Inspector General found that 199 of the 417 employee passports reportedly in the possession of the Office of International and Tribal Affairs couldn't be located.

The office failed to enforce its own passport guidance of having staff return passports after travel. The report found: "Lack of compliance with agency guidance may put the agency in the position where sensitive personally identifiable information is not being adequately protected." The EPA agreed with the audit findings, agreed that it had violated its own rules, and was taking steps to remedy the situation. 

All of which raises a few questions:

• The EPA has been around for decades, has it not figured out how to keep control of sensitive information like passports?
• Has any fraud or crimes been committed as a result of the organization losing track of almost two hundred passports?
• Has anyone been fired (doubtful) for not following the organization’s own rules and guidelines?

Only the political class and the government it operates can screw up in so many different and unique ways, with not accountability for the screw ups.

3) Political class insanity is not confined to Washington. The Associated Press recently reported that state Democrats in Illinois are trying anyway possible to approve $100 million in Illinois taxpayer wealth to woo those responsible for deploying the Barack Obama library to deploy it to Illinois.

The problem, as reported by the Associated Press, is that the state has roughly $7 billion in past due vendor bills and a $100 billion shortfall in its employee pension programs. The state’s financial position is so serious that the governor wants to make permanent a three year-old tax increase, which was set to expire next year, to avoid making huge budget cuts. 

Given the dire financial situation, isn’t it pretty insane to divert $100 million to build a library? Talk about a sad state of priorities and please, do not tell me added tourism dollars will more than offset the $100 million cost. First of all, all politicians always underestimate the actual costs on every government expense so you can be pretty sure that the $100 million estimate will eventually balloon to several times that size. And second, do we really think the world’s citizens are going to beat a path to south Chicago to visit the Obama library? Doubtful. 

3) With all of the political class shenanigans going on, it is no surprise that we have been reporting and discussing many recent Inspector General reports that have uncovered much of that insanity. The Treasury department, which houses the IRS, had a recent audit uncover the fact that more than 2,800 IRS employees are facing disciplinary actions.

While the lack of discipline by almost 3,000 IRS employees is distressing enough, the Inspector General report also uncovered the following disgraces:

• Those 2,800 employees facing disciplinary actions received more $2.8 million in monetary bonus payments. 
• Those 2,800 employees also received 27,000 worth of additional time-off bonuses and more than 175 quality step increases (which allows employees to receive promotions faster).
• More than 1,100 of the 2,800 employees have “substantiated Federal tax compliance problems” yet they still received over $1 million in cash awards, $250,000 in time-off awards and 69 quality step increase awards within the same year the IRS proved the employees hadn’t fully paid their income taxes.

Thus, in the unreal world that is Washington and the Federal government, misbehaving can get you a lot of incremental pay at taxpayer expense along with a lot of other extra perks even if you do not pay your income taxes. Good work if you can get it. Imagine how much IRS employees get that are NOT facing disciplinary actions.

4) Although the numbers are not very large, the growth rate of these numbers is increasingly worrisome. 231 Americans gave up their citizenship at the end of the George W. Bush administration in 2008, the end of the Bush administration. By 2012, just four years later, that annual 231 number had more than quadrupled to about 1,000 and had tripled to 3,000 by 2014. 

Again, the numbers are not large but the growth in the number of Americans giving up on their country is distressing. These are Americans who most likely have become so fed up with the conditions and government and political class insanity that they are willing to give up their citizenship, move to a foreign land, and forego their past for what is increasingly being viewed as better opportunities overseas. 

That trend is probably not because the Washington political class has improved economic opportunities in this country, has respected and increased freedom in this country, or have shown any penchant for caring for the country before taking care of the personal ego and financial needs. Such a shame when our politicians are so bad that citizens are willing to forego their homes and citizenships for a better life elsewhere.

5) Speaking of bad cost forecasting by the political class, consider the unfolding nuclear disaster in South Carolina. As the Soviet Union dissolved two decades ago, Russian and U.S. officials decided that reducing each country’s nuclear arsenal would be a good idea and that the nuclear material taken from the disabled nuclear weapons should be processed into nuclear fuel rods that could be used in nuclear reactors to generate electricity. The final agreement included plans to convert 34 tons of weapons grade plutonium into fuel rods to be used on commercial reactors.

The U.S. conversion was going to take place in South Carolina. The initial estimate to complete the job was put at $1 billion and was to begin in 2007 and be finished by 2016. However, as always, the political class did another lousy job at cost forecasting:

• The U.S. Department of Energy has already spent $5 billion on the project despite the overall original estimate of $1 billion.
• The Department estimates it will take another $6 to $7 billion to finish the job just to build the facility to do the conversion.
• It will take at least another $20 billion to do the conversion once the facility is built.
• It will take another 15 years just to complete the conversion, at least 13 years beyond the original estimate.
• Thus, the entire effort will cost about $30 billion, assuming no more cost surprises, which is about 30 times higher than the original estimate and 13 years later than the original time estimate, assuming there are no more time delays.

Unreal that any estimate or forecast could be off by so much. As a professional statistician and business forecaster, I know I would have been fired long ago if my forecasts were off by a factor of 30. One has to believe there was intention deception to get the project started by low balling the cost estimate, that is how far off and pathetic the cost estimation was.

But the insanity does not end there relative to the Department of Energy:

• The Department of Energy has put a hold on the project for now with no date on when to restart the program, essentially wasting billions and billions of dollars with absolutely nothing to show for it, as described by Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists: "It’s a major fiasco. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted, it’s a classic boondoggle."
• But it is not the first time the Department has screwed up badly. Costs for a nuclear waste treatment facility in the state of Washingotn have almost tripled over the original cost estimate.
• A uranium processing plant in Tennessee was supposed to cost $1 billion but will likely cost $11 billion and is currently running a whopping twenty years behind schedule.
• And the final insult to injury relative to the South Carolina effort: the cost of uranium from other sources has fallen by about 70% over the years making any fuel rods that eventually come out of the South Carolina conversion effort priced far to high to be useful to commercial reactors.

A lot of detail to prove again that one should never, ever trust a government program’s cost estimate, whether it comes from Washington politicians or government bureaucrats. The next time that a government program or project comes in on budget and on schedule will be the first time it comes in on budget and on schedule.

So let’s review. The political class has wasted billions on bailouts, it has wasted billions on energy programs that never succeed, they have lost passports, they reward unruly IRS employees and they cause Americans to give up their home and heritage to move overseas. Seems about right for one day of political class insanity, tomorrow is another day of the same.

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 3: Rubber Duck Races In Wisconsin, Ambassadorships For Sale, The Would-Be Terrorist Nun, and More

This is our third post in this month’s series of political class insanity. Every month we review the latest lunacy, idiocy, disrespect, and wasteful spending of the American political class in all facets of their incompetence. Unfortunately, their level of incompetence seems to be getting worse as it takes longer and longer each month to cover how damaging they are to our wealth and our freedom.

Let’s see what insanity we uncovered today:

1) Tax time is approaching so it was timely to read some words from Sandra Block of Dailyfinance.com that appeared in the January 28, 2014 issue of The Week magazine. According to her research, in 2013 the IRS was able to only answer 61% of calls from taxpayers. This appears to be just picking up the telephone, where they failed 39% of the time. Ut does not include the number of times they answered the phone and gave out the wrong information.

Additionally, the average wait time for a call that was actually answered by the IRS was a disgraceful 18 minutes. And this is the same government agency that is supposed to be the hub in implementing the 2,000 plus page Obama Care legislation. If the IRS cannot do the job they were originally set up to do and have been doing poorly for decades, it is highly unlikely they will do any better handling the Obama Care complexities and bureaucracy.

2) Former U.S. Congressman Mel Reynolds resigned from Congress in 1995 after being convicted of statutory rape, something that you really do not want a standing U.S. Congressman to be convicted of. While serving in prison for that conviction, he was also convicted of bank fraud. Yes, that is correct, WHILE IN PRISON he was convicted of a serious financial crime.

Recently, he was back in the news when he was arrested in Zimbabwe on pornography charges for allegedly taking lewd photos and videos of models and prostitutes. Again, this was a U.S. Congressman at one time, which is insane in itself. Even worse, though, despite the conviction on rape and the conviction on bank fraud, a political peer, Bill Clinton, took care of him by commuting his original prison sentence in 2001.

How many ordinary Americans do you think Clinton would have pardoned if they had been convicted of both statutory rape and bank fraud? I would bet none since they are not part of the political class inner sanctum where insanity and felony convictions are inconveniences more than anything.

3) One of the major budget items in the Federal government across many Federal departments is to protect the country from terrorists. I do not now the exact numbers but I would venture a guess that annually we allow the Federal government to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to protect us from attack.

For those hundreds of billions of dollars you would expect us to have the absolute best terrorism and security protection in the world, in the history of the world. That would probably be a gross inaccurate assumption, however, based on an article that appeared in the February 28, 2014 issue of The Week magazine:

• According to the article, an 84 year old nun was recently convicted for breaking into one of the supposedly “most secure” nuclear facilities in the country.
• Note, that I did not say “tried to break in,” she actually made it inside the facility.
• Once inside, she threw around human blood in protest of nuclear technology besides hanging banners and spray painting peace signs.
• She was one of three people who got in after cutting through a chain link fence around the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
• Not only did they get through the fence, they actually got inside the uranium processing and storage facility.
• Although she was sentenced to 35 months in jail, she pleaded with the judge to put her away for life to honor her protest and principles.

So let me get this right. We pay hundreds of billions of dollars to protect ourselves, our families and our country from terrorist attacks and an 84 year old nun with two accomplices, one 64 years old and one 58 years old, can cut a chain link fence and get close to the uranium in a government facility. Does not seem like we are getting good value for our money in this government area.

The really terrifying thought is if an 84 nun can do this, imagine what a determined terrorist or terrorists could do inside a domestic nuclear facility, who did not want to just hang banners or spray paint some walls. That is the true insanity of what a farce the Federal government’s anti-terrorism efforts are.

4) We have often made the case that government in America is like Jabba The Hutt from Star Wars, a gross, obese entity that cannot get out of its own way. Often, one part of the government does not know what another part is doing or how one part of the government passes a law or regulation that makes no sense to another part of government.

The first Jabba example this month comes from the political class in the state government of Wisconsin, as explained in the February 28, 2014 issue of The Week magazine. One part of the state government in Wisconsin, the state legislature, passed a bill that legalized rubber duck races in the state. A rubber duck race is defined to be when participants throw hundreds of plastic duck toys into a river and watch them race to a finish line. The fact that the state legislature is working on such nonsense is a piece of insanity in itself.

However, another part of the state government in Wisconsin, the Justice department, warned that the legislation might be breaking state gambling laws. Thus, budget shortfalls, failing schools, and other state issues are being neglected while at least two parts of the state government try to decide if rubber duck races are legal. Pathetic.

5) The other Jabba The Hutt issue is going on in New Jersey. That state, along with a host of other northern states, are suffering through one of the coldest and snowiest winters in a long time. This is causing state and local governments to run out of rock salt that is needed to keep their roads clear of snow and ice. There has just been too much needed this year to keep up with the high snowfall levels.

The problem could be easily solved if a non-U.S. ship containing 40,000 tons of rock salt that was being shipped from Maine to other areas would be allowed to dock and unload. This is obviously the simple, needed remedy to keep the roads clean and protect Americans from accidents.

But obvious and simple are not two traits of the American political class, as witnessed by this situation.. It appears that a 1920 Federal law allows only U.S. ships to move goods from one U.S. port to another. Since the rock salt, all 40,000 tons of it were loaded on a non-U.S. ship, that ship is not allowed to dock in an American port and unload, even it means saving lives and protecting the health and welfare of Americans.

You cannot make this nonsense up. Local and state politicians are asking for an obvious waiver to this 94 year old law in order to do their jobs and keep the roads clean this winter. However, according to an article in the February 28, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, Federal government authorities say that the waiver is unlikely to be granted, safety of Americans be damned. Lunacy of the utmost degree.

6) We have covered this issue already but additional information is now available so it is worth reviewing again. We had previously reported that 53% of President Obama’s nominees to be foreign ambassadors for the United States were either political allies or people who had raised at least a half a million dollars for the President’s election campaigns. According to an article in the February 28, 2014 issue of The Week, this is almost twice the rate of previous administrations.

Thus, the President was more interested in rewarding his political allies and election financers than putting experienced State Department career diplomats into important government positions overseas. Better to take of one’s friends than to put the best people in the right places to optimize U.S. interests. 

The additional information on this travesty came out when many of these nominees went before Congressional committees for review and approval:

• The nominee to be ambassador to Norway admitted he had never been there, did not speak the language and ended up insulting the current government in that country in a number of ways. He mistakenly referred to the prime minister of Norway as the president and mistakenly called the existing majority party in the Norwegian government an extremist “fringe political entity" which it is not.
• The nominee to be ambassador to Argentina cannot speak Spanish, a nice asset to have as ambassador to a Spanish speaking country.
• A television soap opera producer, with no foreign service experience, was named as the potential ambassador to Hungary.
• Jennifer Rubin, writing in the Washington Post correctly stated that such a practice “is a grave insult to competent foreign service officers.”
• Jacob Heilbrunn, writing in the National Interest correctly stated that sending wealthy campaign fund raisers to foreign lands as ambassadors is not optimal since “it signals to the host country that the U.S. doesn’t take it very seriously.”

How embarrassing for our country and how disappointing for this Presidency. We are sending amateurs overseas as rewards for winning an election and we are doing it at unheard of levels. So much for “hope and change,” it is just politics as usual or even worse, not better.

That will do it for today. Amateur hour in the State Department, rock salt held captive by a 94 year old law, the importance of rubber duck races in Wisconsin, a nun that foiled the Federal government’s entire anti-terror effort, and more. More insanity tomorrow if you dare. In the meantime, please join our term limits effort at:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

Because if rubber duck races are the priorities of our current politicians, how much worse could it get if we replace them all and see what happens?

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

September, 2012 Edition, Political Class Insanity - Part 1: The Simpsons, Our Do Nothing Congress, Obama's Fake Twitter Followers and More

As most of our readers know, at the beginning of every month we review the latest insanity, idiocy, and head scratching actions that emanate from our politicians at every level of government. If their wasting of our wealth via high taxes and destruction of our democracy and its freedoms were not so horrendous, their actions could actually be classified as comical. However, they do waste both our tax money and our liberties so "funny" rarely is the final summation each month.

As we have gone through time, we have found it necessary to go to more than one post to capture all of the monthly craziness. This month is no exception, our political class has been busy at work on the trivial and unresolved issues of our times, as illustrated below:

- According to an August 21, 2012 article by Bloomberg, the Post Office Inspector General issued a report critical of the Post Office relative to the special edition Simpsons television show stamps the Post Office issued back in 2009 and 2010. Rather than making them "Forever" stamps that could be sold and used indefinitely into the future, the Post Office decided to value them at the current cost of a first class stamp.

The Postal Service paid $1.2 million and ended up printing one billion of the commemorative Simpsons stamps. Unfortunately, according to the Post Office Inspector General analysis, only 318 million of the stamps were sold between 2009 and 2010. Since the remaining 700 million stamps were never sold and became relatively obsolete once the cost of postage was raised, the Post Office ended up destroying 70% of the one billion stamps they had produced. Simple math would compute that since about 70% of the stamps were destroyed and the total run was for $1.2 million, this one Post Office misadventure wasted over $800,000.

The Inspector General report estimated that this type of Post Office waste occurs every year to the tune of about $2 million. These numbers raise the obvious questions:

1. Why are these types of stamps not produced and sold as Forever stamps that can eventually be sold forever and the taxpayer investment never wasted?
2. Why was production of one billion stamps done before the demand for those Simpsons stamps was known? No rational company in the private sector would do their entire production of any product all at once. They would phase it in over time as they gauged demand. Apparently, modern inventory and production processes have not yet penetrated the Post Office.
3. If the Post office wastes $2 million EVERY year with these types of shenanigans, has not anyone learned from this type of mistake at any historical point in time? Have they learned nothing about their business or do they really not care since at some point in time the American taxpayer will always make up for their waste? Insanity.

- Many times and in many ways we have used some very simple math to show how inefficient, ineffective, and how stupid the Obama administration's economic stimulus plan was. The simplest math was to use the administration's own numbers to show that the cost per job of the stimulus was ridiculous:

• The Congressional Budget Office final cost estimate of the stimulus cost was about $830 billion.
• The administration boasts that the stimulus "created" or "saved" 2.7 million jobs.
• If we divide the jobs created estimate into the cost of the stimulus we see that the cost of each job, on average, was over $300,000 each!
• Since the average household income of an average American household is about $50,000, it cost the Federal government six times more to create a job than what an average job would pay in a year, hardly an efficient program.
• And as we have shown many, many times, the estimate of 2.7 million is likely way too high, making the average cost of each job created much more than the already obnoxious average of $300,000 per job.

But the fun with bogus political class math just got updated in the past week or so. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was bragging about how effective his Department spent taxpayer money within the overall economic stimulus program:

"Yeah, we spent $48 billion and we put 65,000 people to work in 15,000 projects in two years with no problems. I’m very proud of that. I know that the governors can spend this money because over two years we gave them $48 billion, they created 65,000 jobs in 15,000 projects. This is doable. We’re going to get the money out and get people to work.”

Note: The actual interview and actual words of the Secretary can be viewed at:

http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/20/lahood-im-very-proud-of-dot-stimulus-spending-at-738000-per-job-video/

Let's do the math: $48 billion to put 65,000 people to work comes out to about $738,000 per job, more than twice as expensive than what the unacceptable overall average was for the stimulus program. And he is proud of the fact that it cost three quarters of a million for each job created. How this is not a problem is lost on me.

Now, one could make the claim that at least we ended up with some infrastructure put in place or repaired for the $48 billion. That is probably a true statement to some degree as opposed to much of the rest of the stimulus program where no value added was created.

But we know and have reported on an Associated Press investigative report that of the more than two thousand bridges in this country that were repaired using stimulus money, over one thousand of them were not in need of repair, that is how bad the waste was.

Thus, if we assume that the stimulus program was handled and managed so poorly that half of the money spent was wasted on worthless projects like the bridge repair program, the cost of $738,000 was really double since half of the expense was wasted, bringing the average cost per job to almost $1.5 million for each job created. Pathetic. Note: the details of the Associated Press bridge article can be read at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2010/01/2009-year-end-review-good-bad-and-ugly_02.html

- Many times we have called for the termination/elimination of the Federal Department of Energy because of its inability to provide any tangible benefit for the tens of billions of dollars it receives every year for the past few decades. An Associated Press article from August 18, 2012 did not make their case any stronger for not being shut down for incompetence.

According to the article, the Y-12 National Security Complex is the responsibility of the Department of Energy and is known as the Fort Knox for highly enriched uranium:

• It is the source for nuclear weapons production for the United States. 
• The complex produces the uranium parts for every nuclear warhead in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, takes apart old nuclear weapons and is our primary warehouse for military uranium.
• It is designed to withstand earthquakes, tornado-force winds and the crash impact of an airplane.
• It supposedly could also withstand a ground attack.

Obviously, this is one Federal facility that merits the very best security possible.

Unfortunately, several weeks ago, an anti-nuclear crusading 82-year-old nun and two fellow protesters were somehow able to walk onto the facility grounds and walk around for a while before they were found and apprehended. The three intruders claimed that they did not try to hide what they were doing and actually got a full  half mile into the supposedly secure facility. According to the article, this area contained signs that threatened to shoot intruders.

According to court documents, they used bolt cutters to get through three fences which set off security alarms in the process. During the two hours they wandered about, they were able to spray-paint and throw blood on the walls of the facility.

Obviously, this is a very serious piece of political class insanity. Supposedly secure radioactive materials and weapons and an 82 year nun gets deep into the complex. Unbelievable. Thank goodness painting and blood throwing was the extent of their aggression. How much money to we think the American taxpayer pays every year for this level of shoddy service?

- The website, Bankrupting America, had an interesting analysis earlier in August. They looked at the last week of Congressional activity in August before it was adjourned for a five week recess. They started by estimating how much the last week of the recent Congressional session cost the American taxpayer:

1. During that week they estimated taxpayers spent roughly $100 million on Congress.
2. Speaker of the House: $223,500/52 = $4,299
3. House and Senate Majority and Minority Leaders: ($193,400/52) x 4 = $14,877
4. Other Representatives and Senators: ($174,000/52) x 530 = $1,773,462
5. Average weekly budget for all House offices: ($1,446,009/52) x 435 = $2,096,421
6. Average weekly budget for all Senate offices: ($3,409,093/52) x 100 = $6,555,958
7. Non-salary money allocated for Congress: $4.656 billion/52 = $89,538,462

The website goes onto list out what Congress accomplished, or failed to accomplish that week, a week that is usually pretty productive as our politicians usually try to get things done before rewarding themselves with a lengthy, five week vacation:

•House Of Representatives - Agricultural Disaster Assistance Act of 2012. SAVINGS: $256 million over 10 years compared to current baseline, about $26 million a year.
•House of Representatives - Provide for expedited consideration of a bill providing for comprehensive tax reform. COST: $0
•House of Representatives - Amend title 5, United States Code, to make clear that accounts in the Thrift Savings Fund are subject to certain Federal tax levies. SAVINGS: Recovery of $24 million in unpaid taxes.
•House of Representatives - Federal Employee Tax Accountability Act of 2012. COST: $1 million in 2012
•House Of Representatives - Passed a bill that would extend all of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for one year for every American.
•Senate - Reduce the number of executive positions subject to Senate confirmation. COST: $0
•Senate - Passed a bill that would extend some of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for some Americans.

Let's sum it up: the American taxpayer paid out $100 million for this pitiful performance, a performance that will not change during the five weeks that Congress and its current set of politicians are out of town. Pathetic value for our money as taxpayers.

- A New York Times article from August 22, 2012, which was cited in an August 244, 2012 USA Today article, reviewed how easy it is to actually purchases fake Twitter followers for your account. Obviously, buying Twitter followers is an easier way to make you look more popular than you actually are. For a penny or so a follower, you can get thousands of new fake/non-existent followers for a minimal charge without doing any hard work to actually earn them.

Let's see, easy to get, fake, no hard work involved, fake build up in prestige, sounds like an American politician's playbook. And it is, since according to the two articles, about 70% of President Obama's 18 million or so Twitter followers are fake, they do not exist, they were bought and paid for. Apparently, there are services out in the market that can scan the followers' list of any Twitter account and weed out those that are legit and those that are fake. And over 12 million of Obama's followers are fake.

And politicians want us to believe them when they promise to do something during their campaigns? I do not think so, especially when they lie about their Twitter accounts. Since Obama lied when he said he would cut the deficit in half, he lied when he said he would shut down Gitmo, he lied when he said middle class people would not see any tax increases, etc., he lied when he said he would provide positive hope and change, he lied when he said he would be bipartisan, etc., it should come as no surprise he lied about Twitter.

Let's review. Politicians lie, they waste our money, they cannot protect our security, they cannot manage a simple stamp inventory project, and they produce nothing of legislative importance. Yep, sounds like a typical month of political class insanity. More idiocy and craziness tomorrow.

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/