May, 2019, Part 12, Political Class Insanity: Finally Fixing Welfare, Americans Are Pervasively Ignorant, and Liberals Destroying Cities

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) Unfortunately, most of what we talk about in this blog is the ineptness, the greed, the stupidity and the ineffectiveness of the American political class. Thus, it is sometimes very refreshing when we get to talk about anything good that an American politician is doing. 

Consider some recent actions from President Trump, simple actions that actually enforce existing laws and protect American taxpayers (two amazingly simple concepts!):

• Trump is attempting to clean up our current welfare system by getting non-citizens, i.e. those types of people that do not contribute to the funding of the welfare system, off of the the welfare rolls.
• He has instructed the Federal government to enforce a Clinton era law that requires sponsors of immigrants to pay back the government for welfare benefits that are received by the person that is being sponsored.
• This process was established under the “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996,” a piece of legislation that was sponsored by two Democratic Senators, Patrick Leahy and Patty Murray.
• Up until this action, the law has largely been ignored, according to the reporting by the Daily Caller, which meant that the American taxpayer was stuck paying for unnecessary welfare benefits to non-citizen immigrants for over twenty years.
• According to an administration official: “This executive action will dramatically curb ‘welfare tourism’ and protect U.S. benefits for U.S. families. It will also ensure that immigrant sponsors cannot continue the practice of bringing in large numbers of welfare-dependent immigrants: because they will be financially liable.”
• Trump is also looking to enforce another existing law, one that was sponsored by Democrat Joe Biden back in 1996, the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.”
• This law requires Federal government agencies to consider the sponsor’s income when determining whether or not a non-citizen is eligible for welfare benefits.
• Since this action would be bundling the sponsor’s and immigrant’s income together, some immigrants may no longer meet the eligibility criteria for American taxpayer funded welfare payments.

I include the fact that it was Democrats that originally sponsored these taxpayer friendly and common sense piece of legislation. I am sure that some Democrat will call out Trump for being racist and against immigrants while in fact he is just looking out for the welfare of taxpayer Americans, something that many Washington politicians never do.

2) Ilhan Omar is a freshman Congresswoman from Minnesota. She hates the Jewish people and the state of Israel, based on her many public rantings against both, she has made any number of stupid and inane comments about any number of different subjects since elected, she has disrespected those Americans who were killed and maimed by the 9-11 attacks, she thinks that America is to blame for the humanity catastrophe in Venezuela, and she has shown herself to be lacking in respecting the opinions of others in this country.

This last trait was recently demonstrated again: In a recent interview, she stated that “ignorance really is pervasive in many parts of, of this country. And as someone who was raised by educators, I really like to inform people about things that they might be ignorant to, willingly or unwillingly.” In other words, if you do not agree with her views, you are pervasively ignorant.

Rather than work towards solutions that make the most sense, that take into the account the feelings, expertise, and viewpoints of everyone, she assumes that those that have a different view than her is ignorant and needs to be taught “the right way” to think. Not quite the best way to win friends and influence people. But given her disdain for many things that are American, hopefully she will eventually just go away and take her hate for Israel, freedom of speech, and the 9-11 victims with her.

3) Many times we have recently written how states and cities that have been overwhelmingly operated by Democrats have been spiraling out of control and not in a good way. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, have been beset by a plunge in living standards. Increasing homelessness, drug addiction, and crises of public urination, defecation, and drug use have turned once beautiful cities into cesspools of filth and disease.

But most of the source material for these posts has not been from the mainstream media outlets. They seem to have been ignoring the reality of these decaying cities, possibly not wanting to disparage their political liberal friends that have caused these problems. 

But finally, a paragon of liberal news reporting, the New York Times, in a recent article by Farhad Manjoo, on May 22, 2019, was finally a breath of fresh air from a news establishment not usually conducive to reporting failures by liberal politicians:

• Despite one of the longest economic recoveries ever, the politicians in California, despite being the home of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, two of the richest areas of the country, have turned the state of California into the “most poverty stricken state in the union.”
• About 20% of the state’s population is living in poverty.
• Out migration from the state has been surging since 2010 as people look to avoid the high taxes and growing poverty.
• Mr. Manjoo, who is from California, points out that “Across my home state, traffic and transportation is a developing-world nightmare. Child care and education seem impossible for all but the wealthiest. The problems of affordable housing and homelessness have surpassed all superlatives — what was a crisis is now an emergency that feels like a dystopian showcase of American inequality.”
• While one out of every 11,600 San Francisco residents is a BILLIONAIRE, and many, many people are millionaires, the city’s streets are filled with garbage, used drug syringes, and feces.
• Anecdotes of homeless veterans eating out of billionaire trash cans, wealthy residents crowdfunding efforts to keep a homeless shelter out of their elite neighborhood, a teacher with cancer forced to pay the salary of the person substituting for her classes, etc. abound.
• And Mr. Manjoo knows where the root causes of all these problems lies: “At every level of government, our representatives, nearly all of them Democrats, prove inadequate and unresponsive to the challenges at hand. Witness last week’s embarrassment, when California lawmakers used a sketchy parliamentary maneuver to knife Senate Bill 50, an ambitious effort to undo restrictive local zoning rules and increase the supply of housing. It was another chapter in a dismal saga of Nimbyist urban mismanagement that is crushing American cities. Not-in-my-backyardism is a bipartisan sentiment, but because the largest American cities are populated and run by Democrats — many in states under complete Democratic control — this sort of nakedly exclusionary urban restrictionism is a particular shame of the left.”

Now, Mr. Manjoo eventually does go off the rails by insisting that urban people have more rights than those that do not live in urban areas but that does not diminish the reality that he points out: long established political hacks, in this case Democratic hacks that have operated these cities for decades, have turned them into poverty stricken areas where the middle class has left, the rich refuse to help out those in need, and those in need continue to grow in terms of homelessness, drug addiction, and poverty.

Just another day of failure for the American political class: finally a recognition by a liberal media outlet that the liberal politicians in this country have failed miserably when they were in control and a freshman Congress person who thinks that the rest of us are just pervasively ignorant. At at least one small piece of good political class insanity: a President actually enforcing some common sense, taxpayer protecting laws. More insanity next month.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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

December, 2018, Part 9, Political Class Insanity: More Legal Woes for the Clintons, Taxing Our Texts, Welfare Galore for Non-Citizens and More

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) Not to be redundant, but for the past several posts we have discussed the continuing saga of the criminal investigations into the activities of Bill and Hillary Clinton. And today will be no different as Dick Morris, writing for the Western Journalism website, reports on yet another potential criminal and ethical problem facing the Clintons:

• Huawei is a major Chinese corporation.
• Its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, was recently arrested in Canada based on an extradition warrant from the U.S.
• The accusation is that Huawei conspired to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran.
• Meng is the daughter of the company’s founder, Ren Zhengfei.
• Huawei has had a long history of ties with the Clintons.
• Terry McAuliffe, a top Clinton fundraiser, once bought a Chinese car company, Green Tech Automotive, a producer of electric cars.
• McAuliffe convinced Huawei to incest in the company using a financing company called Gulf Coast Funds Management which so happened to be run by….wait for it, Hillary Clinton’s brother, Tony Rodham.
• Rodham helped Huawei employees get U.S. government visa’s.
• Unfortunately, the Federal government had already turned down previous requests for visas for Huawei employees because of the company’s relationships with the Chinese military.
• Those relationships and actions included helping Saddam Hussein install fiber optic cable in violations of U.S. sanctions of Iraq, helping the Taliban install a phone system in Afghanistan, stealing proprietary company information from Cisco Systems, and other actions in violation of U.S. foreign policies and efforts.

And yet Clinton supporters and relatives were dealing with these folks. Innocent until proven guilty but since Meng Wanzhou may get extradited to the U.S. and eventually end up in a courtroom, who knows what Clinton secrets will come out.

2) Claire McCaskill is a Democratic Missouri Senator who is soon to be an ex-Senator since she lost her re-election campaign. She has been around for a while, with a lot of that time when the Democrats controlled the Senate, which you need to keep in mind as we go forward. In other words, if she has a problem with the Senate, then she was part of the problem as was her political party.

In her farewell address to the Senate, that is exactly what she talked about, stating that the Senate was a worse place now than when she was first elected to the Senate: “I'd be lying if I didn’t say I was worried about this place," outgoing Sen. Claire McCaskill said in her farewell address, adding the Senate is "no longer the world's greatest deliberative body."

Well, whose fault is that, Senator? You were part of this deliberative body for years and years. Your political party, via Harry Reid, dominated the Senate for years. And over those years I do not remember that you ever expressed these concerns until AFTER you were defeated. Sour grapes, Senator.If you had concerns about the greatness of the Senate, you should have worked for that greatness when you were in office, something that I do not believe you did.

3) Consider some old Beatles lyrics:

If you drive a car, I'll tax the street,

If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat.

If you get too cold I'll tax the heat,

If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet.

And now if you live in California and have a cell phone, they might actually tax your text messaging capability:

• According to CNN, California regulators would like to tax your text messaging to increase the tax revenue to fund programs for “underserved residents.”
• This texting surcharge has been proposed by the California Public Utilities Commission.
• It would not be a per text tax but a flat text added onto to everyone’s cellular bill on any account that includes text message service.
• The commission will vote on the proposal on January 10 but is getting strong opposition from the cellular industry.
• The proposal may also be in conflict with a recent FCC ruling.

So, long ago if you drove, walked, sat or got cold, the Beatles said you would get taxed. To that list we may now have to add taxing your texting. So sad, is there any part of our lives that politicians and government employees do not want to get their hands on?

4) Of course there is a lot of talk about the so-called “migrant caravan” stuck on the U.S./Mexican border. These are people mostly from Central America that think they can march up through Mexico and resettle in the U.S., no questions asked. President Trump is doing the right thing, upholding the rule of law on how and where foreigners can enter the country and apply for asylum or citizenship. This process has worked pretty well for a while and is the law of the land.

But of course, as what happens often, liberals and Democrats, don’t see it that way, regardless of what the law is. They would open the borders to hordes of people from around the world, with their assumption being that these non-citizens can be turned into Democrats when it comes to voting. 

They seem to forget or dismiss the reality that allowing this to happen would crash our social safety systems and budgets, allow terrorists to enter the country, allow drug cartel and gang members to enter the country, allow criminals to enter the country, and allow those with infectious diseases to enter our country, our schools, our towns, and our society.

They also seem to forget that we have some huge, unfilled needs of Americans in distress. Millions of Americans are hungry, homeless, drug addicted, without health insurance and healthcare, etc. Maybe, just maybe we should take our limited resources and help out our fellow Americans before we start worrying about the rest of the world.

But let’s stop talking about opinions and talk about some cold hard facts about illegal immigration in this country using real, valid Federal government numbers and facts:

• A recent article by the Washington Examiner, written by Paul Bedard, pointed out that 63% of the non-citizens in this country, both legal and illegal, are on some sort of welfare plan, supported by taxpaying American citizens.
• This comes out to a whopping 4.6 million households.
• According to Mr. Bedard: “A majority of “non-citizens,” including those with legal green card rights, are tapping into welfare programs set up to help poor and ailing Americans, a Census Bureau finding that bolsters President Trump’s concern about immigrants costing the nation.”
• According to the latest government numbers, 63% of non-citizens are using a welfare program.
• For those that have been in this country over 10 years, that number jumps up to 70%, i.e. once non-citizens get onto a welfare program on average they do not get off of it and integrate into American society as productive people.

• According to the Center for Immigration Studies: “Concern over immigrant welfare use is justified, as households headed by non-citizens use means-tested welfare at high rates. Non-citizens in the data include illegal immigrants, long-term temporary visitors like guest workers, and permanent residents who have not naturalized. While barriers to welfare use exist for these groups, it has not prevented them from making extensive use of the welfare system, often receiving benefits on behalf of U.S.-born children.” 
• And if 63% and 70% were not bad enough, about half of those numbers are taken up by immigrants who are here illegally but somehow beat the system to get taxpayer funded benefits.
• The sad part is that while 63% of non-citizens are on some type of government welfare, only 35% of American citizen households are on some sort of welfare program.
• These results are pretty consistent across the biggest immigrant states in the country, i.e. non-citizens on a percentage basis get far more support than citizens:

• The same is true across different programs, i.e. food programs, Medicaid, etc., non-citizens have twice the usage rate as citizens.

So sad that Democrats and liberals would overburden our citizens and our tax system while neglecting the needs of millions of citizens to take care of the rest of the world’s needy. This is so sad especially since we all know it is not because they are great humanitarians but because they want to consolidate political power for their own greed and use. Insanity.

Another day of insanity: more potential legal trouble for the Clintons, a departing Senator’s sour grapes, taxing our texts, and illegal immigrants sucking up our taxpayer dollars. More insanity to follow, it never seems to end.

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

July, 2018, Part 5, Political Class Insanity: Creating Poverty In California, Paying For Vacations For Pakistanis, and Fiscal Stupidity In Chicago

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) California is probably the most liberal state when it comes to the local political class and voters. It has the highest taxes and the most intrusions into citizens’ private lives than most, if not all, other states. And what has all of this taxation and oppressive actions and regulations gotten the citizens of that state:

• According to a recent U.S. Census Bureau study, California has the highest poverty rate in the country despite the riches of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
• A whopping one in five residents of the state are now living in poverty.
• While about 12% of the U.S. population lives in California, 33% of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California.
• This level of poverty exists even though the state spent almost a TRILLION dollars on welfare programs from 1992 through 2015.
• And while 30% of the states citizens receive some type of welfare, 55% of immigrants in the state receive some sort of welfare, making immigration into the state from foreign countries not a good proposition for the state’s taxpayers, who, by the way, pay the highest state income taxes in the country.
• California lost more citizens who migrated out of the state in 2017 than any other state, and along with this outward migration went a high number of taxpaying citizens. 

So high taxes, high levels of regulations, and intrusive state politicians results in higher levels of poverty and higher levels of dissatisfaction with life. A real life example where more government, more politicians is a recipe for disaster, financially and quality of life wise.

Note: please see the following link where we described another, very gross example of what over active and inept politicians cause:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2018/07/july-2018-part-3-political-class.html

2) While the following example of political class insanity involves a relatively trivial amount of taxpayer money, it raises two important questions: 1) why is the Federal government wasting taxpayer money paying out this type of money for any kid and 2) why is this money being spent on kids who live half a world away:

• In 2015, the State Department spent about a quarter of a million dollars to fly 24 kids from Pakistan to the U.S.
• Once the Pakistani kids got here they visited Space Camp, Dollywood, Tennessee and Washington D.C.
• Kentucky Senator Rand Paul stated the obvious: “I think we have so many problems here at home I think we need to address before we think about spending money on somebody else’s kids. I’m not against that at all if it’s your money. The problem is our government doesn’t have any money that they didn’t first take from someone else.”
• Again, in the overall scheme, a quarter million dollars is a nit. But Congress, the Federal government and American politicians spend a lot of “nits” which eventually lead up to billions and billions of wasted dollars which eventually lead to a $21 TRILLION national debt. 

Plus, how many kids living on welfare in California, or anywhere in this country, would have enjoyed such a trip, a respite from their life of poverty, rather than flying 24 kids in from Pakistan here to have a great, taxpayer funded vacation? Insanity.

3) We often go to the politicians in Chicago for good doses of political class insanity and the latest Chicago idiocy does not disappoint:

• Chicago is likely going to test the implementation a co-called “universal income program.”
• In such a program, the local government gives away taxpayer wealth to people for basically doing nothing, providing them a guaranteed monthly income.
• According to Fox News: “Chicago alderman Ameya Pawar recently proposed legislation that would provide 1,000 families with a $500 monthly stipend -- no questions asked. The bill already has the backing of the majority of city lawmakers, and Pawar hopes to soon work with Mayor Rahm Emanuel to implement the pilot program, The Intercept reported.”
• The alderman is quoted as saying: “Nearly 70 percent of Americans don’t have $1,000 in the bank for an emergency. UBI could be an incredible benefit for people who are working and are having a tough time making ends meet or putting food on the table at the end of the month.”
• Note: as we have previously reported, this 70% number is totally bogus so we have a welfare program being proposed that is based on a lie.
• The Chicago trial would give $500 a month to 1,000 Chicago families which comes to taxpaying Chicago citizens paying out a whopping half a million a month to a very small sample of locals who get the money with no strings attached.

The rock and roll band Dire Straits once sang about this: “Money for nothing…” What insanity, free money to spend it anyway these lucky 1,000 people want. Booze, drugs, soda, rock concerts, do what you like with it. But apparently the Alderman is not good at math so let’s do some for him:

• $500 a month people comes out to $6,000 a year.
• There are about 1.2 million households in the city of Chicago.
• If the Alderman is true to his pontificating about the number of people with less than a thousand dollars in the bank, that means that about 840,000 Chicago households would be entitled to this program of free money.
• Putting all of the above numbers together, $6,000 a year per household and 840,000 eligible households, then the city government would be giving out over $5 BILLION a year.
• Since the 2018 proposed Chicago budget anticipates only $8.58 billion in revenue, this program if blown out under the current parameters would be equivalent to almost 60% of the city’s current total budget.
• And this is a city that has major budget deficit problems and this alderman wants to add billions of dollars to the problem.
• Of course, you could cut back on the number of people that get the free money. But if this alderman’s PR number of 70% is right, how do you decide since there are a lot of people in the same economic condition if the alderman is right. 
• Plus, who thinks that the people paying for this idiotic program with their hard earned tax dollars are going to sit back and accept a theoretical 60% increase in what are already obscenely high taxes? The productive people are going to leave the city making this program even more infeasible and the city government tax shortfall even more pronounced. This would put the city in a tax and spend death spiral, spending money they do not have, raising taxes, causing people to leave (see California example above) resulting in lower tax streams resulting in raising taxes, etc.

And Chicago is not the only city proposing such nonsense. We will cover that idiocy in the next insanity post. So to summarize: we have California spending itself into poverty, we have the Federal government spending for free vacations for foreign kids, and Chicago spending money it cannot afford. Insanity.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

September, 2017, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: Accounting Scandal At HUD, The Clinton Crime Syndicate Update and More, ,

It is the beginning of 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.

1) Democrats flipped out when they found out that Ben Carson was going to take over the Federal department, Housing and Urban (HUD). He had no experience in the Federal government bureaucracy, as if that was a good thing given how badly the Federal government bureaucracy actually worked and he had no housing industry experience. They seem to ignore the fact that he grew up poor in housing projects, giving him first hand experience with government housing programs, and that he is really, really smart.

So smart that just being months in the job he uncovered some really nasty goings on with HUD:

• One of the first things Carson did once in place was to conduct an audit of the HUD organization.
• The turned up an amazing $520 billion in bookkeeping errors.
• Which makes you wonder how the Obama administration and their administration of HUD somehow missed this whopping problem.
• According to the auditors: “The total amounts of errors corrected in HUD’s notes and consolidated financial statements were $516.4 billion and $3.4 billion, respectively.” 

Not bad for someone the Democrats thought was unqualified for the job. Makes you wonder how much of that half a trillion dollars in bookkeeping errors was siphoned off by criminals, political friends of the Democrats, or just pure wasteful and inefficient government. Also makes you wonder how many more trillions of dollars are also being hidden by “bookkeeping errors” throughout the Federal government bureaucracy.

2) It has always been our opinion that Hillary Clinton,while Secretary of State under Obama, was essentially operating a crime syndicate that probably even the Mafia envied. The syndicate tied together three components:

1. The ability of Hillary Clinton to grant favors and direct, or misdirect State Department affairs, to suit certain parties.
2. These parties would offer up large donations to the Clinton Foundation in exchange for access to Hillary and the favors she could grant them for contributing to the Foundation.
3. These same parties would often give husband Bill Clinton huge “speaking fees” after Hillary had granted special favors, making Bill and Hillary richer and richer.

Proof and examples of how this crime syndicate worked was recently uncovered by Judicial Watch which forced the government to release Clinton State Department emails via a Freedom Of Information Act request, as reported by Kyle Becker, writing for the Independent Review website last month:

• Many of the released emails involved Huma Abedin who was Clinton’s most trusted top aid during her time as Secretary of State and as a Presidential candidate.
• These emails had not been disclosed earlier even though Clinton claimed that all of her State Department emails had been turned over, according to Judicial Watch: “The documents included 91 Clinton email exchanges not previously turned over to the State Department, bringing the known total to date to at least 530 emails that were not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over to the State Department, and further contradicting a statement by Clinton that, “as far as she knew,” all of her government emails had been turned over to the State Department. [...]”
• Many of the emails showed how Clinton Foundation donors used their contributions for access to and favors from Hillary as Secretary of State.
• Howard Buffett, Jr., the grandson of Warren Buffett, sought a meeting for his father, Howard Sr., with Hillary Clinton to discuss 'food security,' a meeting that Bill Clinton aid Ben Schwerin tried to arrange through Abedin, which she said “we will take care of this.”
• In April, 2009, Puerto Rican telecom executive, Miguel Lausell, who supposedly made a personal one million dollar donation to the Clinton Foundation and who was a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, asked Abedin via a third party to push for an acquaintance/friend to be made U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic.
• Also in April, 2009, the Managing Director of a left wing fundraising group called Democracy Alliance emailed Abedin and asked them to “reach out” to someone who was an “extremely loyal supporter” and get that person a job at a senior level in the State Department.
• In all of these emails Abedin always appears to be amenable to providing these favors and is actively involved in the contacts.

The perfect crime syndicate set up.

3) California is not in good fiscal shape, It has unfunded liabilities in the hundreds of billions of dollars. It has high levels of short term and long term debt. It has high levels of poverty and its schools and infrastructure (streets, dams, bridges) are in horrible shape. One would hope that the state political class would be doing all it could to help its legal citizens get better services from the state government.

But as always when dealing with American politicians, hope is a concept that never materializes. According to various news reports:

• According to the Los Angeles Department of Public Social Services, the city of LA paid out about $1.3 billion in welfare payments in 2015 and 2016 to illegal immigrants living in that city.
• That was about 20% of all money paid out by the city in welfare payments in that time period.
• The Department found that 58,000 illegal immigrant families received $602 million in benefits in 2015 and 64,000 families received $675 million in 2016.
• LA county’s total budget for welfare in those two years was about $6 billion, yielding a rate of about 20% of the total budget gong to legal immigrants.

Some may call me racist but really, over a billion dollars given out to people that are not here legally to begin with? How many actual citizens could have received more and better housing options with that $1.3 billion? How many actual citizens could have received relevant job training to get them back into the workforce for that $1.3 billion? How many actual citizens could have received drug addiction treatment to help them turn around their lives? Instead, illegal immigrants, technically criminals, got to use $1.3 billion of taxpayer wealth without doing anything to deserve it.

Okay, that’s my rant for the day. Citizens getting shortchanged in California, rich people get valuable favors from a high ranking government official, and Federal bureaucracy bookkeeping errors that likely costs American taxpayers untold billions of dollars every year. More 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

Political Class Insanity and Economic Ignorance: California Update

We have often discussed the reality that politicians could not be any more ignorant of economics and financial planning than if they tried. Their economic strategies, policies, and stupidity usually make economic and financial conditions worse. Their idiocy usually comes down hardest on those that can least afford bad economic policies and environments, those at the lower economic scale in this country and around the world.

Their economic policies overseas have stifled economic growth and greatly reduced economic freedoms as we discussed in the following post:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/07/july-2017-part-4-political-class.html 

Their economic policies at the state and local government levels in this country have crippled economic development in many states and cities. Detroit and several cities in California have already essentially gone bankrupt and the state governments in Illinois, New Jersey, and California are not too far behind when it comes to economic collapse, as the following posts and discussions reveal:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/02/people-want-to-be-freeas-do-california.html

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/02/februrary-2017-part-3-political-class.html

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/10/why-californias-distressed-economy-is.html

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/07/why-california-is-failing-while.html

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/07/state-level-economic-musings-california.html

And the sad thing about these posts is that they are not all of the bad news that we have previously discussed regarding stupid politicians doing stupid economic things. I just got tired of listing all of them. 

Today we will discuss AGAIN how politicians, California politicians in this case, have managed to economically and financially wreck an entire state’s current and future financial well being. The basis of this review is an article by Scott Osborn, writing for the Joe For America website on August 20, 2017, “Point Of No Return! California Faces Imminent Financial Collapse!”:

• The state of California has incurred and is now carrying a debt load of $340 billion.
• This comes out to a whopping debt load of over $8,700 for every man, woman, and child in the state.
• But that is of today, experts peg the future debt load just for the state pension system at $1 TRILLION, about three times higher than the obscene current debt burden of $340 billion: “California is a cautionary tale for taxpayers in the rest of the country. The people of California are being burdened by an unsustainable, unfunded liability – a $1 trillion dollar government pension system. At the end of the day under California law, the taxpayers will subsidize the shortfall in the budget.”
• While California has 14 million people working in private sector jobs in the state, there is almost the same amount of people (12.6) million not working and who are living on welfare benefits.
• There are 2.1 current state and local government employees but there are 1.3 million people collecting government pensions in the state.
• There are 114 people getting government benefits in the state, either by drawing a government worker check or by getting welfare, for every 100 people outside of government paying taxes to support the 114.
• And this outrageous state government debt was incurred despite the reality that California has one of the highest, if not the highest, state income tax rates in the country.
• For many working people in California, if they moved to Texas and maintained their current income level, their tax savings would enable them to buy a new car every year.
• While there are rich Californians living in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, poverty permeates the rest of the state with homeless people creating tent cities in other parts of the state and the L.A. City Council recently pleading with governor Jerry Brown ““to declare homelessness a statewide emergency“. 
• Despite the sky high taxes, the state’s infrastructure is falling apart with even the governor recognizing the fact and calling for another $100 billion to be spent to fix the infrastructure.
• In a previous post, we cited the reality that about 40% of L.A. residents are on the Medicaid roles, indicating a very low level of income for 40% of the city’s residents.
• High taxes, bad employment opportunities, high crime, bad schools etc. have resulted in a net migration out of California of about 5 million people in the past decade.
• I would assume that a high proportion of those moving out were not welfare cases but were likely highly productive, tax paying, working individuals, which if true, would put even more pressure on the state government’s tax revenue collections.
• The author cites his success in escaping California: a 25% reduction in the cost of living, a 15% decrease in income, a $2 a gallon drop in gasoline prices, and the purchase of a livable 3,200 square foot home for less than a third of the price of a comparable home in California, and no state income tax...and a new car every year if he wanted it.

Thus, only politicians can take the most beautiful piece of property in the country, have the most residents, have the most tax revenue, have the the built in, perpetual wealth of Hollywood and Silicon Valley but yet have some of the worst schools, the worst run pension systems, have the highest debt, have some of the worst public infrastructure, and the worst economic outlook of just about any state in the union. 

Economic ignorance is too tame a term to describe what the California political class has done to the state, its citizens, and its future. Let’s just hope that the cancer that is California economic ignorance can be contained before it spreads elsewhere in the country.

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

July, 2017, Part 6, Political Class Insanity: Clueless (And Gross) In Seattle, Overreaching In D.C., And Still Poor In California

As we do every month, we review the latest idiocy, lunacy, ineptness, and general insanity from the American political class. The members of the political never cease to amaze us with their greed, idiocy, gumption, and criminal activities. And just when we think there is no new way to disappoint us and tick us off, they manage to find a way to do it, wasting our tax dollars and destroying our freedoms in the process.

The political class has been very busy this month so let’s get right to it:king county,

1) Sometimes politicians are so idiotic, inane, and weird that it is difficult to even begin to argue with their position it is so stupid. Consider a recent National Review article describing the position of a Seattle councilman:

• Seattle sits in King County in the state of Washington and near its Superior County county courthouse is a homeless shelter and other social services organizations.
• According to the the Seattle Times, the area around the courthouse has become an “unsanitary and potentially frightening” scene , one “that reeks of urine and excrement.”
• Too fix this very nasty and more importantly, unsanitary condition, two of the judges who serve at the courthouse have asked the city of Seattle to power wash away the excrement, urine, and associated smells and unhealthy conditions, which seems like a reasonable and simple solution.
• But even a simple solution is usually at odds with the warped mind of some politician somewhere, even when citizens’ health is involved.
• According to the Seattle Times,  Council member Larry Gossett “said he didn’t like the idea of power-washing the sidewalks because it brought back images of the use of hoses against civil-rights activists.”

You cannot make this idiocy up. Seriously? A simple solution to a very dangerous situation from a health perspective and this is what an elected official is worried about, that somehow power washing down excrement from a street is equivalent to fire hosing civil rights demonstrations from over 60 years ago? As always, it does not appear this politician has an alternative solution, he is just insulted that that the proposed situation is somehow offensive to him. In his mind apparently, walking around and avoiding human excrement and the smell of urine is preferable to washing down the area and making it safe for people. Totally, totally insane.

2) The Convention of States website recently listed the three worst abuses of power that the Washington political class has heaped upon the country. We have reviewed these abuses many times before but let’s do it again quickly, using the Convention of States article as a template:

1. Although the current national debt is about to hit a whopping $20 TRILLION, there is another $100 TRILLION that the Washington political class has promised to pay out over the coming years that currently cannot be funded for Social Security, Medicare and other programs. Even if you confiscated every American’s wealth in an extreme tax program, you still could not fund the $100 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities. Spending must be cut, increase taxation cannot fix this dreadful problem, a problem made doubly worse by the Obama administration which basically doubled our national debt during its tenure.
2. Not only are Americans and American businesses over taxed to fund the overspending of Washington, the Washington political class has created a government bureaucracy that is overwhelming and stifling. According to research from the American Enterprise Institute, since 1949 Federal regulations, most of which are unnecessary, have lowered annual real GDP growth by 2% and made America 72% poorer.
3. The Constitution set up the American government system as a minimal national government that was supposed to have minimal powers and pass most of the governing power to the states. But as the Washington bureaucracy and craving for power has grown, it has changed our governing system from one in which states were mostly sovereign to one in which state governments are more and more subservient to the whims and wishes of distant Washington politicians and bureaucrats.This has greatly diminished the rights and freedoms of all of us. Or as the Convention of States says, “The Founders believed that the structures of a limited government would provide the greatest protection of liberty. Not only were there to be checks and balances between the branches of the federal government, power was to be shared between the states and federal government, with the latter only exercising those powers specifically granted in the Constitution. Collusion among decision-makers in Washington, D.C., has replaced these checks and balances. The federal judiciary supports Congress and the White House in their ever-escalating attack upon the jurisdiction of the fifty states.”

Insanity and why the Convention of States effort is so necessary to reign in the out of control Washington political class.

3) For some reason, this month’s political class insanity has had a lot to say about how more and more political power (i.e. more and more socialism) usually results in less and less freedom and less and less economic upside for citizens. We have discussed the reality that high taxation and meddling by politicians in Denmark has made life much more rigid, less wealthy, and more depressing for citizens of Denmark. We have shown that socialistic countries like Sweden and Germany would be some of the poorest states if they were part of the United States. We have reviewed how the most socialistic state in the union, California, has the highest poverty rate in the union, some of the worst schools, and that its biggest city has made its citizens so poor that 40% of them qualify for Medicaid’s low income levels.

Let’s continue this discussion today, returning to socialistic California for our example of how life gets worst as politicians’ reach gets longer:

• According to the American Outlook website, 33% of the nation’s welfare recipients live in the state of California.
• Given that only about 13% of the country’s citizens live in California, something is very out of synch.
• Almost 25% of the state’s residents live below the poverty line.
• Could it be that having an intrusive, overreaching, over taxing, and socialistic political class reduces the economic opportunities and living standard of citizens in that state?

But let’s not jump to conclusions. Maybe California socialism and its ruling politicians have created a paradise in the state in other respects. Maybe the obscenely high taxation and the loss of individual freedom in the state has been made up in other ways.

Ah, nice try but not even close if you are to believe a recent article by the Investors Business Daily website:

• 62% of the state’s roads are currently rated poor or mediocre.
• There are huge cost overruns on the state’s high speed train line before the first mile of track has even been laid.
• One third of Bay area residents in a recent poll stated they are hoping to leave the area soon.
• Despite high taxation rates, California schools and infrastructure status ranks near the bottom of the fifty states.
• California residents pay some of the highest rates in the country for gas and electricity.
• The unfunded liabilities of the state’s pension funds are sky high.

So what did we learn, again, from all of this: the more that politicians meddle in our affairs, our economic well being, and our freedoms the poorer, less free, and more difficult life is with lower economic growth, higher poverty, worse roads, horrendous schools and a high degree of overall pessimism on life.

Pretty depressing stuff, as it always is when discussing our out of control political class. One more political class update for this month to follow but you can be sure that next month we will be back with more.

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