What Does A Paula Poundstone Comedy Skit Have In Common With President Obama's Failed Economic Policies?

As I observe the Obama administration flail away at trying to "fix" the economy, I am reminded of an old Paula Poundstone comedy monologue/skit that she did several years ago. She was discussing that whenever you see a horrid television show, or a very bad movie, or a terrible television commercial, you need to remember that someone, somewhere actually wrote that bad idea down on a piece of paper. In fact, that idea was probably rewritten several times, from first draft to the final, wretched version. Some group of people at the television network, movie studio, or advertising agency thought that this final version was great, prior, of course, to it hitting reality and failing miserably. The original skit and the deriding of a bad Snickers commercial, even though we got the best of a bad idea, can be seen at the following link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulM4E08J8Lo&feature=related

The same can be said of Obama's economic revival ideas. Somewhere, someplace, someone actually wrote the following failed ideas down on a piece of paper. As with Ms. Poundstone's observations, these ideas probably went through several iterations until we got to the point where this administration thought they had the very best ideas. Until, of course, these ideas hit reality and failed miserably:

• Cash For Clunkers - did not result in incremental auto sales and just gave away taxpayer money to people that were likely to have purchased an auto anyway, with or without the taxpayer gift.
• Cash For Appliances and Cash for Caulkers - see Cash For Clunkers
• H.A.M.P - This program, which was supposed to help stretched homeowners stay in their homes and avoid foreclosure, was deemed a failure by the watchdog set up to track its results. The watchdog claimed that the program wasted $50 billion in taxpayer funds without making any kind o f significant progress towards its goal. (The Week magazine - September 3, 2010 issue.)
• TARP - unnecessary and a waste of hundreds of billions of dollars. While this program was passed under the Bush administration, Obama and most Democrats supported it.
• Economic Stimulus Program - another waste of hundreds of billions of dollars. Someone in the Obama administration wrote down the threat that if the stimulus was not implemented, unemployment could go to 8%. It was implemented, and unemployment soared past 8% to the 10% range. The stimulus program wasted billions of dollars on programs that had nothing to do with job creation and wasted many more billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement programs that were not in need of improvement. For example, the Associated Press investigated stimulus bridge expenditures in late 2009 to find that about half of the bridges that underwent refurbishment were not in need of refurbishment. Who wrote down that fine idea, fix things that do not need to be fixed?
• Perpetual Extension of Unemployment Benefits - by continually extending unemployment benefits, the national debt gets larger and larger and the incentive to go back to work gets smaller and smaller. Thus, the unemployment rate never changes but the national debt level does. Why go to work if you can get anywhere from $400 to over $500 a week for not working. Why work for $10 an hour to make $400 a week when you can do nothing and still get $400 a week? I understand the need for unemployment benefits, the need to help someone over a tough patch. However, at some point that help has to end. Today I looked for a part time job in the Tampa Bay market on Craigslist. Over a thousand vacant job listings and postings came back. There are jobs out there.
• Bush Tax Cuts - I believe that the Obama administration, at one point in time, wanted to roll back the Bush tax cuts for all Americans. Under political pressure, Obama is now digging in his heels and saying only the rich should get their tax cuts repealed and higher tax rates installed. Great idea, who wrote that one down? Who thought that it would be great to take billions of dollars of disposable income out of the fragile market and economy, disposable income that could have been spent on movie tickets, new cars, restaurant visits, vacations, and other job producing activities?
• New Infrastructure Stimulus Package - the latest idea that this administration has obviously written down is to spend another $20 billion in stimulus funding, this time exclusively on infrastructure improvement. Several problems with this concept. First, we saw from the first stimulus program that funds were spent to fix/refurbish infrastructure that was not in need of fixing. How do we know that this will not occur under this program, resulting in much more wasted taxpayer money? Second, let's assume that the $20 billion is actually authorized and creates many high quality jobs at an annual rate of $50,000 a year? That would result in the one year creation of 400,000 jobs (absolute best case and these jobs would likely disappear after the money ran out after a year), while almost 15 million Americans are out of work. Thus, this idea might reduce the number of unemployed by only 2-3% (400,000/15,000,000).

Paula Poundstone's observation is so true: just because an idea is written down, and rewritten several times, does not make it a good idea, call it the Snickers Effect.

What should be done about the economy? Several good idea come to mind:

1. You must keep as much disposable income as possible in the economy to spur sales and spending, that is what would create jobs. Steps 3 and 4 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" covers this area of tax rate reduction as does Step 10 under Social Security reform.
2. You need to remove the uncertainty that the Obama administration has injected into the economy and the way businesses think and plan, uncertainty that includes how much more they will have to pay for health care taxes under Obama Care, how much more they will have to pay in taxes under Obama's inane Cap and Trade carbon program, how much more they will have to pay in taxes if the Bush tax cuts are not renewed, etc. Given all of this uncertainty, businesses and individuals are hunkering down and will continue to do so until there is some clear cut plans, strategic thinking, and leadership coming out of the political class from BOTH parties.
3. You must reduce the size of the Federal government and the outstanding and outrageous debt levels, that this administration is incurring, in order to free up capital and income to grow the economy. This blog has suggested several ways to reduce the size of the Federal government that easily saved $200 - $300 billion a year. These ideas range from bringing home almost all foreign deployed U.S. troops, cleaning up the massive fraud in Medicare and other government programs, and reducing the Federal headcount, a headcount that has grown considerably since Obama came into office. The Cato Institute is currently going through each Federal Cabinet department, one by one, and finding a remarkable amount of budget and waste that can be cut out of the bureaucracy that is the Federal government. The Concord Coalition, a non-partisan organization, is about to embark on a national road show to discuss and identify areas for waste reduction in the Federal government. This coalition is chaired by a former Republican Senator (Rudman) and Democratic Senator (Kerry). Steps 1 and 44 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" provide a plan for accomplishing this need.

The current flailings of this administration to come up with just one worthwhile economic idea indicates a lack of an overall strategic plan for fixing the economy. This administration just keeps throwing out tactical programs that do not fit into an overall integrated strategic structure. As a result, they do not understand the root causes of our economic problems and cannot address those root causes. Until the political class starts planning and worrying about America and not their political futures or "energizing their political bases", they will be no better than a Paula Poundstone comedy skit. Unfortunately, for us, the American public, the joke will continue to be on us.

Our new 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.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/

Miscellaneous Musings About The State Of The Country and The American Political Class

No overall theme today, with Congress recessed for vacation and most of the White House personnel also on vacation, the well of ideas is running a little dry. However, a number of news items have come about in the past week or so that are worth pondering and how the principles and steps in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" might be used to remedy some of these issues and problems:

- A recent article from the Associated Press on September 3, 2010 reported on a skirmish between Mexican armed forces and a large number of suspected drug cartel members in a Mexican state close to the U.S. border. We have recently talked about the rising problem of drug gang and cartel violence and potential for that violence to spill over into the U.S. The fact that Mexico is using soldiers to storm drug cartel properties gives you a scary idea of how big the problem is becoming, so big that local police are now no match for the gangs. After the fight, police confiscated 25 guns, grenades, and 4,200 rounds of ammunition. No wonder the army had to be called in. This problem continually comes back to the recommendations in Step 26 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." We must find a way to take the profits out of the drug trade in whatever way possible before the drug trade horror Mexico is going through now migrates over the border to us. We must move on this problem as soon as possible before the legitimate government of Mexico collapses and who know what takes it place. American politicians have dodged this problem since Nixon, Step 26 is a way around them to address the issue.

- An article in the September 3, 2010 issue of The Week magazine talked about the dreadful state that the housing industry is in right now. Specifically, it talked about the Home Affordable Mortgage Program or HAMP, the Obama administration program that was intended to help struggling homeowners not default on their mortgages. According to Obama's own watchdog on the program, not the Republicans, the program added $50 billion to the national deficit while failing to "put an appreciable dent in foreclosure filings." Combine this failure with the $8,000 home buyer tax credit failure and you can see that the political class really does not know how to manage the housing market. All their programs do is waste taxpayer money and wealth. The best solution: downsize the government out of many of these functions as outlined in Step 1 and let the free market fix itself.

This is what John Tammy writing in fortune.com recommends. His view, and the view of "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" is "to let housing and mortgage securities find their natural, market clearing levels." Once reality returns to the housing market, things will pick up. Mr. Tammy believes that all of these failed government programs only "elongated what remains a painful downturn." The market is too big and to complicated for our politicians to fix, we should have taken our lumps earlier and we would have been that much closer to a true turnaround and recovery as opposed to Obama's short term, wasteful and ineffective gimmick programs.

- Also in that same issue of the Week, a short article discussed how the Federal Department of Education had awarded $3.3 billion to nine states and the District of Columbia to institute school improvement programs. Nice idea but, in general, our public schools are failing, they do not need improving, they need to be revolutionized. Giving out a few billion dollars here and there will have very small, localized success, if that. We need to take a more ground breaking approach rather than tweaking what we already have. The public education sector is way too big to be leveraged and dramatically improved by a few measly billions of dollars.

Step 27 form "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" would provide the blueprint for developing this revolution in public education. It would likely include some ideas form around the world that were written about in the August 23, 2010 issue of Newsweek magazine:

• Understand that family stability and circumstances are a large part of a child's education success so find a way to understand and overcome family dysfunctionality when it impedes the learning process.
• Finland has found a way to enforce strict and rigorous learning standards that have resulted in minimal drop out rates. What could we learn from the Finns to address the horrendous dropout rates in some of our public school systems?
• Studies indicate that the right type of effective pre-schooling (not HeadStart) "does more for a child's chances in school and life than any other educational intervention."
• Some school districts, both domestic and around the world, spend up to 60% more time in school than the typical American student. These other kids arrive earlier to school, leave later, and some even go to school every other Saturday. Chile extended its students' school hours so much that they end up getting an extra two years worth of schooling by the time the graduate high school.
• Bad teachers equals bad learning. Good teachers equals good learning. Sounds simple but we are not generally doing it in the United States. In Singapore, the article states that school systems are very choosy about who they hire to teach, they provide training and continuing education to their teachers, they evaluate teachers' performance regularly, and only top teaching performers get bonuses.
• Provide individual tutoring for those students that are having learning problems.

These are some ideas that are working around the world when it comes to education improvement and excellence. Step 27 would mold these and other ideas into a coherent strategic education blueprint for the country. Certainly it would be more successful than the incremental approach of both the Bush and Obama administrations.

- Also in that same issue of Newsweek was a story by Babak Dehghanpisher regarding the growing relationship between Iraq and Iran. According to the article, trade between the two countries, which was $7 billion in 2009 is expected to double very soon. Wouldn't that be a kick in the teeth that after all of the money we spent and the casualties that our armed forces endured in Iraq that Iraq became an ally of our mortal enemy, Iran? Talk about diplomatic and strategic planning incompetence. This is where Step 30 would come into play. This step would 1) return all non-essential U.S.military personnel to the Untied States in order to save money and be less intrusive into other's affairs and 2) help ensure that we never do another venture like Iraq again without considering all of the potential ramifications. Years and years of fighting and wasted resources just so that we can make life easier for Iran. Pathetic.

- Our favorite source of blog material Vice President Joe Biden was at it again this week, highlighting what he thought were the great contributions that the Obama administration's stimulus package made to America. In the Associated Press article from August 27, 2010 that reviewed the VP's claims, was a short history in the area of mapping out the human genome. The National Institutes Of Health, a Federal entity, burned through $3 billion of taxpayer money over a ten period to come up with the first draft of a human genome. However, in 2009, a Stanford professor reported that he sequenced his own genome in a week at a cost of $48,000, using a $1 million machine. Let's see, which effort was more efficient: the government approach that took ten years and $3 billion or a private citizen who did his own in a week on a budget less than $50,000. No brainer.

This is the type of stuff that Step 1 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" would clean up. By considerably downsizing government and allowing individuals and businesses to keep more and more of their wealth and taxes, efficient innovation and economic growth will happen much quicker and cheaper than believing that huge government bureaucracies can do the job better. Government cannot to it better than individuals, this genome area is just one example where we waste so much money for so little in return from the political class.

- An August 27, 2010 Associated Press article discussed how recent Federal agent raids across the country had apprehended 370 immigrants in ten different states. Two things were distressing in the article. First, these immigrants were not just arrested in border states, they were from such states as Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Nebraska, certainly not what you would call border states. Thus, our immigration problem is really a nationwide problem. Second, the 370 people arrested were from 50 different countries including such dangerous and anti-American countries as Iraq and Syria. From a homeland security perspective, it is just a matter of time before the drug gangs and deteriorating government control in Mexico results in more anti-American people coming into the country.

Step 29 provides a way to come up with a strategic immigration control process that would hopefully seal up our borders, regulate who gets into the country and optimizes the type of immigrant we allow in to our country. Hopefully, Step 29 would enable the political class to finally solve the open sore that is the illegal immigrant problem that is humane, rational, and doable.

When you muse like this you sadly realize that we have some very serious problems in this country, problems that have been with us for a long time, and we have no coherent political class leaders that seem able to address and solve these problems. As we have said many times in this blog, politicians do not know how to strategically do problem solving. Their only priority is their continued time in office. "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" provides the strategic structure and steps needed to coherently solve our problems. It is not that hard, you just want do do it. Unfortunately, I see absolutely no one in Washington who wants to do it.

Our new 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.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/

Ain't No Sunshine (And Solar Power) When The Political Class Gets Involved

Singer Bill Withers once sang: "Ain't no sunshine when she's gone." Great song and the inspiration, along with a recent Associated Press analysis, for this blog post, indicating that there is no sunshine and no solar power when the Federal government and the political class that operates it get involved.

According to the Associated press report that was issued on September 1, 2010, the Federal government, through the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in the Interior Department, operates a first come, first served land leasing program that is supposed to foster the development of solar energy on Federal government lands. Under this program, companies could submit a plan and pay a fee to develop a solar energy production facility on the Federal land that they wanted to lease. They could control the solar development potential of that land forever even if they did not develop a solar energy capability on that land. Consider the history of the program, according to the AP article:

• In 2005, Congress gave the Interior Department a deadline of finding a way to generate 10,000 megawatts of electricity from renewable energy on public lands by 2015. 10,0o0 megawatts could power about five million U.S. homes during peak usage hours.
• However, Congress and the Interior Department never properly staffed the program, with the Bush Administration focusing the Interior Department on the development of oil and gas leases.
• As a result, according to the article, the small staff working this program have been overwhelmed by the administration of the program, resulting in companies getting the solar energy rights to Federal land but basically just squatting on the land and not generating any power.
• The staff has given out these land rights to numerous companies without ever discerning whether these companies had viable and workable plans to develop renewable energy on Federal land, with the result being that the most choice and prime sites have already been given out with no facilities being build to take advantage of these sites. According to an Interior Department official: "People were making solar applications on Federal lands not knowing what kind of technology to propose and how to develop the land."
• While the companies holding the rights to the land cannot sell their stake to another company, if the company holding the rights is bought up by another company, those land rights follow to the new company, they do not revert back to government control. Thus, just having paper access to the government land for solar development created wealth in the private sector without benefiting the American taxpayer, when several of these companies holding the land rights were bought out.
• Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, has jumped into the giveaway and one of its subsidiaries has filed 52 of the 354 applications for the rights. Goldman is not stupid. They are not solar power developers, they are investment bankers. The recognize the value of these land stakes and for a minimum amount of money they can tie up valuable real estate assets until it suits them to do something with their claims. Goldman and its subsidiary have filed absolutely no plans for any solar facilities so far.
• Five years after Congress set up the program, there are no working facilities on any of the Federal lands designated for solar power sources. The Obama administration has identified 14 "fast track" projects that it wants to be approved by the end of the year. That is approved, not operational. Making an of these plans operational would take several more years at the earliest, according to the article.

What a disaster. Legitimate solar power developers cannot get access to government lands because start up and/or incompetent companies and individuals, along with an investment bank, beat them to the Interior Department's bureaucracy, a bureaucracy that handed out rights willy nilly with a too small of a staff and too few resources available to properly screen out the best and worst applicants. As a result, the government has managed to gridlock the sun. Unbelievable.

Thus, it could easily be ten years from the time that Congress authorized the program in 2005 to the time we finally get any energy flowing. The incompetence is overwhelming. Wasted time, wasted government taxpayer money spent on administrating a failure of a program, and stranded natural resources sitting in prime solar energy territory.

And probably nobody, either in the Interior Department or those sitting on the Congressional committees responsible for implementing these plans, will face an consequences for this failure. They are all complicit in giving away government and taxpayer assets and getting nothing in return. It is a modern version of highway robbery. As with most every government programs, there are lots of people in charge, from the President (in this case, Bush) to Congress to Interior Department leaders but no one is responsible for this failure of a program. As a result, our dependency on fossil fuels and foreign energy sources continue to grow since 2005 with no progress made to change that trend.

Several steps from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" would help to ensure that this type of failure happens less frequently when it comes to government oversight and project management:

1. Step 1 would significantly downsize the overall size of the Federal government over a five year period, resulting in fewer but more important projects being undertaken by the Federal government, projects that are hopefully managed better. This focus on fewer but more important programs would force down accountability to lower levels of government. This downsizing would make it clearer who was both in charge and responsible since the red tape and previous bureaucracy would be gone and the hiding places from responsibility would disappear. Failure in this new era of accountability would result in severe career consequences, much like it does in the private sector.
2. Step 34 would remove Congressional members from their committee posts if they did not fulfill the responsibilities of that committee. This would result in politicians being replaced on the interior department committee or subcommittee that should have stayed on top of this project to ensure that taxpayer assets were not wasted and stranded.
3. Step 23 is the most important step. This step describes what is needed to develop a sane, rationale and doable national energy strategy and policy based on fact and reality, not politicians' focus on getting re-elected or satisfying those lobbyists who can get them re-elected. One reason why this solar on Federal lands program failed is that it is a standalone tactic, it is not a tactic within an overall strategic plan. Develop the overall plan and philosophy and then develop the tactical plan underneath the strategy, complete with deadlines and deliverables. Then you can manage the strategic plan and tactics together, identifying and remedying problems sooner since they pose a risk to attaining the overall strategic goal. It is not hard, companies in the private sector do it all the time to survive. Government rarely does it, usually resulting in failed laws and disappointing outcomes.

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone, ain't no sunshine being turned into cheap, domestic and clean energy when strategic planning is gone and replaced by political class incompetence. Grid locking the sun, who would have thought that possible?


Our new 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.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/

Mexican Drug Cartel Violence - Getting Worse and Closer Every Day

While the nation's War On Drugs strategy has not changed over the past four decades, despite its general overall ineffectiveness, the world of illegal drugs has been changing, radically and violently, all around us. Consider the following sample of news stories from just the past few months:

• A Washington Post article on May 9, 2010 reported that drug cartel gunmen were probably behind the assassination of the country's national police chief, hitting him with nine bullets outside of his home in Mexico City. The article also reported that this is just one of 6,000 drug cartel killings over the past two and a half years which also includes the assassination of the Federal police agency's organized crime leader. Two and half years, 6,000 deaths or about 200 people a month are dying as a result of the drug cartels.
• An August 20, 2010 Associated Press article reported that six town police officers were recently arrested in connection with the assassination of a town mayor in northern Mexico. Included in the six was a police officer whose job responsibility included guarding the mayor. The six are alleged to be employed by the local drug cartel.
• An Associated Press report on August 245, 2010 reported on fired bullets that had hit El Paso's city hall at the end of a work day, bullets that likely originated from the Mexican side of the border. The AP article also reported that bullets hit a university building, resulting in the closing of a major highway. It is believed that the bullets were a result of the drug wars and gangs battling along the U.S./Mexican border. El Paso police reported that they cannot do much of anything since the gunfire originated in a foreign country. The police reported that some of the bullets were apparently from guns capable of sending a round over a mile in distance, certainly a high powered weapon of choice of the drug gangs.
• On a more grisly note, the AP reported on August 26, 2010 that a Mexican drug gang was likely behind the massacre of 72 Central and South American migrants on a ranch just south of the United States border. Apparently, besides dealing with the trafficking of illegal drugs, the drug cartels also traffic in illegal aliens, often holding them for ransom from their families. They sometimes also force their kidnapped victims to become so-called foot soldiers in carrying drugs north into the United States. A few days later, two car bombs exploded near to the prosecutor's office responsible for looking into the massacre.
• An MSNBC story from August 30, 2010 reported that Mexico's Federal police agency had to fire nearly 10% of its force this year for failing to pass tests designed to check for corruption and association with drug cartels.

Massacres, stray bullets coming over our border into our cities from high caliber weapons, car bombings, slain elected officials and law enforcement officials, and government and police corruption, not a pretty picture. The situation is moving very quickly and in the wrong direction when it comes to the whole illegal drug problem, causing one Mexican government official to state his worry that the country was becoming ungovernable as a result of the drug problem and the related gangs and violence that it causes.

Unfortunately, our political class is not moving quickly at all in this matter. We are still mired in the Nixon era "War On Drugs" that has done nothing to stop the flow of drugs, has increased the violence in both our country and Mexico in drug related affairs and has wasted untold billion of dollars in the process. I am not a drug culture expert, a drug user, or a drug dealer. However, I am smart enough to see a large problem getting even larger that will eventually spill over into our country as the drug gangs get more powerful, richer, better armed, and more brazen.

That is why Step 26 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" is so important. Step 26 would impanel a panel of expert Americans from a wide range of disciplines to examine where we are now relative to the drug problem, look at the economics of the whole situation, weigh arresting vs. treatment options, examine successful approaches to the problem from other countries including legalization and decriminalization, and come up with a coherent set of alternatives that the American public can debate and vote on.

Waiting for the political class to to the same is not going to happen. It has not happened since Nixon, there is no reason to think it will happen soon. This set of politicians are too worried about their next election and not taking the strong and courageous steps of actually recommending new approaches to this problem, lest they alienate some voters. As a result, the world moves quickly and in this case violently forward, while we sit and wait. Step 26 would eliminate that wait.

Our new 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.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/