May, 2013 Political Class Insanity, Part 4: Unchained Regulators, Wasteful Concrete Toilets, And More

This is a fourth in a series of posts that cover the political class insanity we have come across over just the past month or so. Every month it seems that the idiocy and lunacy coming out of the politicians in this country gets worse and more abundant, destroying wealth and freedom in the process.

As you read through these embarrassments, consider the need for term limits, as laid out in Step 29 of “Love My Country, Loathe My Government.” How much worse could it get if we replaced all those in office with new people, given the insanity they constantly rain down on us?

Today’s episode of insanity will focus on items from the latest issue of Reason magazine. Reason does an outstanding job of doing in depth research and analysis of politics and the issues facing the country, often exposing stupidity and insanity and providing solutions to problems that constantly elude our politicians.

1) The May, 2013 issue of Reason did a fabulous job analyzing the total failure of Obama’s economic stimulus program, a program that burned through over $800 billion worth of taxpayer wealth with no real economic societal benefits in return. We will do an in-depth review of their analysis in the near future, an analysis that is as thorough as it it damning of the stimulus program in total.

But today, consider some more of the moronic programs that the American taxpayer funded and the overall results:

- The Obama administration approved a grant worth $462,912.30 to a Spokane, Washington company to build and install 22 precast concrete toilets in the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri. Two pieces of insanity here:

• How does building 22 toilets in the middle of Missouri create long term, sustainable jobs and economic growth?
• 22 toilets at a cost of over $462,000 comes out to a per toilet cost of about $21,000? What toilet in what reality is worth $21,000?

Insanity.

- But apparently toilets were a recurring theme in the stimulus program. The state of New Mexico got $2.8 million to spend on new toilets in its park system while another $42 million in stimulus funds went to Alaska to upgrade toilets and other sanitation facilities in Alaska.

- A comprehensive follow up survey described in the Reason article found that:

• A whopping 59% of the companies that received stimulus funds did not hire a single worker despite the fact that the whole purpose of the stimulus program was to get people employed.
• Additionally, 12% of the companies surveyed said they laid off the people they hired as a result of the stimulus funding once the funding was exhausted.
• 6% of the companies surveyed said they kept only some of the employees they hired as a result of stimulus funding.
• Thus, 77% of the companies that received stimulus funding either did not hire anyone or their hires were short term.

Failure after failure after failure.

2) One of the main culprits in the country’s anemic economic performance over the past few years is likely the imposition of unneeded and unwarranted regulations that divert attention, money, and resources away from growing the economy to satisfying mostly unneeded government regulations. Consider what the Obama administration has done to burden the economy over the past few years:

• Obama did make a big deal when he came into office to get overly burdensome regulations off of the government’s list, stating that we needed to rid the books of “outmoded regulations,” we need to go about “reducing costs and simplifying and harmonizing rules,” and put in place regulations that were “more effective or less burdensome.” All worthy goals.
• However, while his administration did reduce existing regulations in 2012 that wiped out $2.5 billion worth of burden on the economy, his administration added $236 billion MORE in economic burdens, as measured by the American Action Forum.
• Their analysis identified the EPA as the main culprit, incurring $172 billion worth of economic burden out of the $236 billion.
• They estimated that Obama Care will require that 44 million hours of work be needed to comply with its regulations every year from businesses and individuals.
• The Dodd-Frank legislation will require an additional 32 million hours worth of compliance time every year.
• These additional 76 million hours will take time away from growing and improving the economy, creating wealth and jobs in the process.
• These 76 million hours will be done in the name of two massive government bureaucracies that have virtually no chance of being successful.
• These new regulations will crush many small businesses that do not have the time, money, and resources to comply, further dragging down the economy.

I am sure that some big government advocates will argue that every government regulation is needed. However, I would refer them to a post we did in January,

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/01/january-2013-political-class-insanity_2.html

which looked at some detailed and stupid government regulations. The most inane one was the fact that the Federal government maintains a 244 word regulation on how to label a frozen turkey. Not how to freeze it, not how to transport it, not how to store it, but how to label it.

Ridiculous regulation, as is most other government regulations that do nothing to keep us safe and have everything to do with keeping a government worker employed.

3) Political class insanity is not restricted to just Washington politicians and government, it infests state and local government also. A Reason article in the latest issue reviewed a Utah state law that prohibited restaurant patrons from ordering an alcoholic drink prior to putting in their meal order.

Yes, a current Utah law prohibits serving alcohol “except in connection with an order of food.” Thus, it is illegal in Utah to order a drink in a restaurant five minutes prior to telling the waiter what you want to eat but it is legal to order an alcoholic drink five minutes later at the same time you put your meal order in. Insanity, but a law that apparently is actually enforced, according to the article, resulting in fines that could range from $300 to $5,000 and suspension of a restaurant's liquor license.

Not only is this a stupid law in itself but it is also stupid in that it requires tax payer money to be used to hire inspectors that actually go around to enforce this stupidity. Inane regulations at the state government level by state level politicians.

4) Getting back to Federal regulations, according to existing Federal law, any new government regulations are supposed to go through a public review process called “notice and comment” in order to get input and feedback form the public on the possible ramifications and downsides of new government regulations.

But there is a loophole to this law called the “good cause exemption.” This exemption allows a Federal entity to bypass this notice and comment requirement when it, and only it, determines if a new regulation’s notice and comment option would be impractical or harmful.

Thus, we end up with Federal organizations regulating themselves, never a good thing in a democracy that strives for limited government. According to a study done by the General Accountability Office, from 2003 to through 2010, about 35% of major government rules and regulations (those having an impact of over $100 million) were not subjected to review and comment, a disgrace in itself.

However, in the past few years that percentage has risen to 40% and in 2009 and 2010 the Federal government set records for the most major rules not subjected to comment and review periods. Thus, Obama’s promise that he would operate the most transparent administration in history continues to fall apart in reality and more and more government operations are conducted in secret.

5) Myles Wilkinson of British Columbia beat out 4 million other fantasy football league players to win an all expense paid trip to the Super Bowl earlier this year, certainly the life long dream of many a football fan. However, when he tried to enter the country, U.S. Customs agents prevented his entry because he had been convicted of possessing a mere two grams of marijuana 32 years ago in 1981. 32 years ago. Apparently, he had not run afoul of any law since then but still, the Federal government would not allow him entry to see the Super Bowl.

Talk about petty, talk about bad government and political priorities. Millions of people have illegally entered the country over the years through our leaky borders, many of whom were criminal elements. But when a law abiding person legally tries to enter the country on a temporary basis, we throw him out because of something he did 32 years ago. Something that probably millions of Americans do every week. Ridiculous.

Okay, enough for today. We are working through the backlog of insanity but more to come tomorrow. Of special interest tomorrow will be a review of a current Washington politician who claims she has super powers in that she is indispensable to her constituents. Ego unchained and more 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:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
 

May, 2013 Political Class Insanity, Part 3: Fixing Unemployment In Serbia, Obama Phone Fraud, The Collapse of Detroit, and More

This is the third in a series of posts covering the latest political class insanity. In the previous two posts we have reviewed such lunacy as the U.S. defense budget which is now over a whopping $700 billion a year, the fact that the Federal government hands out over $115 billion a year in contracts that have no competitive bidding involved, the monstrosity that is Dodd-Frank, and other lunacy, which continues today.

1) A Wall Street Journal article that was summarized in the March 22, 2013 issue of The Week magazine reported that Americans are less active than ever. A new Federal government study estimated that Americans’ sedentary time outside of work has increased by about 40% between 1965 and 2009. On average, Americans take 5,117 steps a day, about half than the 10,000 steps recommended by the American Heart Association.

No matter how much health insurance is provided to Americans under Obama Care, unless you can get Americans up and walking and active, you will not eliminate one of the main root causes of skyrocketing health care costs in this country. Rather than setting up massive government bureaucracies that will never work and strangling the economy with taxes and regulations, the far better, simpler, and more effective approach to high health care costs is a public relations and public health drive to get people moving.

However, better, simpler, and effective are three adjectives rarely associated with the American political class.

2) Another Federal welfare program that has gotten out of control and is riddled with waste is the so-called “Obama Phone” program:

• The original program was started way back in the Reagan administration and provided minimal landline phone service to poor rural Americans so that they could make a call during an emergency.
• Back then, the annual cost of the program was about $146 million dollars.
• In 2008, cell phones were added to this so-called Lifeline program and the usage ballooned.
• The program, which is supposed to be only for people on food stamps and welfare, costs the American taxpayer $2.2 billion a year.
• This makes it 15 times more expensive than when it was truly for emergency use only.
• The fraud and inefficiency of the program has gotten so out of hand that even Democrat Senator Claire McCaskill was offered a free phone under the program: “I got solicitation for a free phone at my apartment, which is certainly not a building where you’re going to have people who are qualified for free phones. … There is clearly money being wasted here.” You think, Senator?
• The waste the Senator so eloquently believes to exist is staggering.
• The FCC says there are more than 270,000 people who have more than one welfare phone, which is not allowed in the program.
• The top five companies that provide phones under the program readily admit that 41% of the people who have the phones may not be eligible for the program but still get them anyway.
• Arkansas Republican Congressman Tim Griffin recently asserted: “I hear from law enforcement that these phones are often found at crime scenes and are used in drug deals. Why? It’s because you can’t trace them.”

Great program. Almost half of the participants are getting the phones illegally and fraudulently. They are being used for criminal activities, courtesy of the American taxpayer. And those that are actually entitled to a free phone may actually be abusing the privilege by asking for AND obtaining more than one free phone.

If you could get just the 41% fraud under control, you could save the American taxpayer about $900 million a year. Those savings could operate the discontinued White House tours for over 900 years or give each American household about $7.50, enough for a movie ticket or a few gallons of gas, certainly more worthwhile uses than supporting crime and fraud.

3) Detroit used to be one of the largest, most vibrant, and wealthiest cities in America. However, decades of political corruption, fraud, incompetence, and political criminal activity have resulted in the following Detroit condition:

1. Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, and it was once home to close to 2 million people. However, according to the 2010 census, only 713,000 people now live in Detroit.
2. The population of Detroit has declined by about 25 percent over the past decade. The last time the population of Detroit was this low was back in 1910.
3. Back in 1960, the city of Detroit had the highest per-capita income in the United States.
4. Today, the unemployment rate in Detroit is more than 18%, which is more than twice as high as the nation as a whole.
5. According to a report that was just recently released, approximately 60% of all children in Detroit live in poverty.
6. Approximately one-third of Detroit's 140 square miles are either vacant or derelict.
7. The city government of Detroit has closed dozens of schools and has decided to cut off public services to the heavily blighted areas.
8. According to one estimate, there are 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant residential lots in the city of Detroit today.
9. The median price of a home in Detroit is just $9,000, and there are some areas of Detroit where you can still buy a house for $100.
10. The murder rate in Detroit is 11 times higher than it is in New York City.
11. Due to budget cutbacks, most police stations in Detroit are now closed to the public for 16 hours a day.

Note: the original sources of this data can be accessed at:

http://www.isthatbaloney.com/11-shocking-facts-about-detroit-that-dont-fit-obamas-so-called-economic-recovery/

You have to work hard to be so incompetent. It is hard to fathom that a city’s politicians could be so crooked and so inept to allow a city of this magnitude to fall so far. It reinforces the fact that just because someone is in a political position, national, state, or local, does not mean that they are honest, bright, and hard working. Detroit is the personification of this.

4) Everyone knows that it has been a rough five years for the U.S. economy. Persistently high unemployment with over 23 million Americans unemployed or underemployed. Worse employment conditions for minorities and younger Americans. Record high food stamp enrollment.

Thus, one could consider the recent announcement that the Federal government was looking to grant upwards of $300,000 for an effort for “workforce development.” Although small in budget terms, anything to get Americans working might be considered a good idea.

Oops, the $300,000 was not for unemployed Americans, it was to be used to help Serbia get its unemployment rate down. Yes, Serbia. How many Americans do you think could pick out Serbia on a map? Talk about bad priorities.

The Federal government’s International Development (USAID) organization recently announced that it will award up to $300,000 for “workforce development” in the Republic of Serbia:

“Currently, there is a mismatch between private sector needs and the capacity of the existing workforce, which continues to contribute to the high unemployment rate, especially among youth.
Therefore, USAID/Serbia has identified workforce development as a means to address the broader problem of unemployment,”

Serbia??? Consider the unemployment and other economic conditions currently in place in this country as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in early April:

• The unemployment rate is about 7.6% in America, in itself very bad but much less than the combined unemployment rate and underemployment rate.
• 9.46 million Americans have dropped out of the workforce since Obama was first inaugurated in January 2009.
• The unemployment rate for African Americans in America is 13.3%.
• The unemployment rate for Latinos the rate is 9.2%.

I am sure that Serbia has some significant problems but we do also. Wasting even the relatively small sum of $300,000 is money well wasted on a Serbian problem, given our own dire economic workforce problems.

Serbia??? More political class 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:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

 

May, 2013 Political Class Insanity, Part 2: Dodd-Frank Incompetence, Empty Federal Buildings, Still Losing The War On Drugs and More

This is the second in a probably long series of posts that examines the political class insanity and idiocy that we have come across in just the past month or so. From wasting money to idiotic programs and projects, the political class in American should never be underestimated in their ability to gum up the works in everything it touches.

1) According to a Washington Monthly report that was summarized in the April 26, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, since the enactment of the Dodd-Frank financial industry reform legislation, the nation’s 20 largest banks have met 1,298 times with Federal government representatives to debate the 400 rules needed to be created to enact the law. Two thirds of those rules are still under construction despite the 1,298 meetings.

How pathetic is this piece of legislation when years after it was written, the bureaucracy and regulations to implement it are still significantly less than even one half done? Given this complexity, it is almost a lock that it will burden the economy with unnecessary paperwork, resources, and costs and probably never attain its original objectives.

Better to scrap it and start over, doing it with a lot more simplicity and elegance than thousands of pages of legislation and hundreds of thousands of pages of associated regulations that seem to have never get done. It is a good bet the legislation will be obsolete before it ever gets fully implemented. Insanity.

More in-depth insanity on Dodd-Frank can be found at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2011/11/how-is-that-financial-industry-reform.html

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/04/dodd-frank-financial-services-industry.html

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/09/september-2012-political-class-insanity_5.html

2) In our March 8, 2013 post,

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/03/march-2013-political-class-insanity_8.html

we reported on an Office of Management and Budget research report that found that the Federal government spends $1.7 billion annually for maintenance on empty buildings it owns, although some sources put the figure at closer to $25 billion, and estimates that 55,000 Federal government properties are underutilized or entirely vacant.

Now, keep these numbers in mind in light of a recent Bloomberg article that was summarized in the April 26, 2013 issue of The Week magazine. This article reported that the new headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security is scheduled to be completed in 2023 and will cost $3.9 billion to construct.

Are we to believe that of the 55,000 buildings and properties that the Federal government now spends billions of dollars a year to maintain, that none of those buildings could have been used to house the Department of Homeland Security and save the taxpayers what is likely to be far more than $3.9 billion when this is headquarters building completed ten years from now?

Why do we need to build a palace for another Federal bureaucracy when our debt is $17 TRILLION and we have 55,000 unused pieces of property laying around? The article points out that 17,000 employees of the Department will be housed there. Shouldn’t these resources be spread around the country and on our borders to protect us, “homeland security,” rather than shut up in a single, massive headquarters location far away from where terrorists are planning their next attacks? Insanity.

3) A recent Pew Research study found that for the first time ever in their survey work, a majority of Americans, 52%, favor the legalization of marijuana. This support for legalization has grown substantially from the 41% level measured in 2010.

Given that our decades long war on drugs has been a bust and now apparently more than half of America has decided that legalizing pot is okay, shouldn’t we as a nation finally begin a serious and comprehensive discussion of the drug problem in this country and end the idiocy and futility of our lost war on drugs?

How long do we think it will take the political class to come to this realization and appreciation of reality? I would put the over/under bet at 15 years during which time we would have spent trillions of dollars more and wasted millions of lives for nothing.

4) Staying with the lost war on drugs, consider an article from The Telegraph newspaper in Great Britain, that was summarized in the April 5, 2013 issue of The Week. According to the article, the North Korean government is up to their neck in selling illegal drugs across the world to support the life styles of the North Korean elite and to finance their military and nuclear weapons needs. Apparently, their embassies and missions in other countries are a main distribution channel for their illegal drug operations.

South Korean defense analysts suspect that North Korean factories are producing narcotics that are “so renowned for their purity that they are in high demand across the globe.” Thus, our failed war on drugs has not only created a violent set of drug cartels that threaten to overwhelm the Mexican government but apparently our lost war is contributing to the creation of a reckless dictator and his growing nuclear weapon power that threatens us and the rest of the world.

5) Speaking of wars, a Bloomberg report that was summarized in the March 1, 2013 issue of The week magazine reported that U.S. defense spending was more than $700 billion in 2010 and 2011, up from $287 billion in 2001. The country now spends $250 billion more each year on defense than it spends on Medicare. On average, this means that every U.S. household is obscenely spending about $6,100 of its annual income on defense.

Maybe it is time to have a serious discussion on this out of control spending. At $700 billion a year, you know there has to be tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars, of waste in a budget that size. Maybe it is time that we seriously consider not deploying hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops around the world that no longer serve any purpose except to maintain an obsolete status quo (Japan, South Korea, Europe, Australia, Kuwait, etc.), bring them home, and bank the savings rather than waste the wealth.

6) Despite a $700 billion annual budget, apparently the Pentagon has not given disabled veterans a priority when it comes to disability claims. A recent new York Times report indicated that there are about 250,000 disability claims for veterans that are one year old or older.

While the Veterans Administration has announced a plan to speed up the claims process, it is an insult to our brave fighting forces to treat their potential welfare as secondary while we spend money to garrison troops around the world for no reason. We should be ashamed of how we treat this soldiers despite having a $700 billion annual defense budget.

7) When President Obama took office in 2009, he told Federal agencies and entities to cut back on noncompetitive government contracts, calling them “wasteful” and “inefficient.” Good strategy since competitive bidding, if done properly, can insure quality at the lowest price for any program or project.

Unfortunately, he never followed through with this noble thought. According to a Business Week blurb from their March 25, 2013 issue, the Federal government money spent on no-bid contracts under the Obama administration in just 2012 was a whopping $115.2 billion, an 8.9% increase from 2009, the year Obama said to cut back on no-bid contracts.

If just a 10% savings could have been wrung out of the $115.2 no-bid billion figure via competitive bidding, the $11.5 billion savings could have been used to give a tax break of about $100 to every American household, used to fund White House tours for almost 12,000 years, or used to give every one of those 250,000 veterans with disability claims a one time check of about $46,000.

Certainly better uses of the wealth than allowing no-bid contracts to be awarded, with Business Week reporting that about 87% of those no bid contract went to defense contractors.

Disgusted yet with Washington waste and incompetence? We are just getting started with this month’s political class 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:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w 

May, 2013 Political Class Insanity, Part 1: Food Aid Explosion, Expensive Empty Bank Accounts, Another Failed Stimulus Program

It is the start of another month which always mean we kick off the month with a review of the latest insanity, lunacy, waste, and stupidity form the American political class. When we started this tradition a few years ago, we used to be able to contain each month’s insanity to a single post. Unfortunately, as time has marched on, a single post could not contain a month’s worth of lunacy.

This culminated in last month’s political class insanity which required five full days to cover. And this month is no different, with a strong possibility that we equal or possibly exceed five days worth of political class misadventures.

Thus, we will start going down the list of the latest insanity and stop when we are done. The following examples are in no particular order or structure, much like the thinking and actions from today’s politicians.

1) According to a report in the April 24, 2013 issue of the Washington Post, the Federal government will spend at least $890,000 on service fees this year for bank accounts that are empty. At last count, there were 13,712 such accounts with a balance of zero. They are supposed to be closed but apparently no one in the Federal bureaucracy has gotten around to doing the necessary paperwork yet.

$890,000 being paid for nothing could have funded the White House tours for almost a whole year. $890,000 could have kept a lot of air traffic controllers on the job for a while and not have the traveling public face the vindictive sequester cuts of the Obama administration.

The article points out that several years ago the Pentagon got caught paying over $400 for a single hammer. But at the end of the transaction, at least the Pentagon had a hammer. In this case, no one, the government or the taxpayers, has anything except nearly a million dollars wasted every year.

And even sadder, the government apparently knows what the accounts are but never gets around to shutting down thousands of accounts that cost about $65 a month to maintain. Disgraceful waste of money.

2) The Honolulu Civil Beat newspaper reported on April 5, 2013 that the U.S. Department of Energy, under the Obama economic stimulus program, had given the Honeywell corporation, a giant industrial business, $25 million of taxpayer money to operate a biofuels test plant operation in Hawaii. The objective of the funding was to create 85 construction jobs and an average of 40 long term, permanent jobs once the operation was up and running.


But several years later, Honeywell has only created about 10 permanent jobs, according to a company spokesman. In addition, only 60 construction jobs were created, not 85. If we divide the $25 million investment by the number of full time, permanent employees we come out to a ridiculous average cost per job of about $2.5 million spent per permanent job created.

Looks like another Obama administration alternative energy “bet” (Joe Biden’s words) has not panned out and has gone the way of Solyndra, Fisker, Ecotality, A123, and a myriad of other alternative energy companies that burned through taxpayer cash with no societal benefit in return.

3) Staying with the Department of Energy for a moment, a favorite waster of taxpayer wealth, consider the findings from a recent Department Inspector General report:

• The Office of Inspector General recently reviewed the use of $1.1 billion intended for use by 15 energy projects.
• The audit found that three of the project recipients received $90 million in funding.
• The project reviews of these proposals indicated that the score for each of the projects was not high enough to receive such substantial funding and that each project was suffering from financial and technical issues.
• But the Department still granted the money despite the identified issues.
• The Department awarded $48 million to one recipient whose financial stability was not close to being high enough to receive the funding but rather than addressing the underlying problems, the Department simply decided to lower the standards for the recipient in order to make them eligible for the funding.
• The report also found that the Department was not monitoring its funds properly and found an $18.3 million in questionable reimbursements claims from funding recipients which violates the Federal and Department policies.
• The DOE was found using $575 million to accelerate existing projects rather than using the money to fund other projects, as required by current policies

Little in the way of financial controls and when the limited controls were used, they were simply waived to get a project approved, basically rendering the controls as worthless. And when controls are not in place or being waived you can bet that millions and millions of taxpayer dollars are being wasted.

4) One of the big advocates for the Obama administration spending and wasting over $800 billion of taxpayer wealth in a vain attempt to stimulate the economy was Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman. If I remember correctly, he wanted the Federal government to spend trillions of dollars, not hundred of billions of dollars to stimulate the economy.

Well, we all know what a bust that stimulus effort was even though Krugman was a big supporter of it and in fact, he has been a big advocate for the failed economic programs of the Obama administration. He continues to advocate for stronger Federal government spending for the sake of Federal government spending to fix the ailing economy.

However, before you think he might be right and that his Nobel Prize makes him, and the political class, a wizard of predicting the economic future, consider one of his earlier predictions from 1998:

The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.

As the rate of technological change in computing slows, the number of jobs for IT specialists will decelerate, then actually turn down; ten years from now, the phrase information economy will sound silly.

Seems he was a little off on that prediction, it is actually his prediction that sounds a little silly. Thus, judge for yourself, when he and his advocates in government want to spend more of your money and your kids’ money and your grandkids’ money, whether or not they truly have a handle on economic principles in light of his outrageous miss on the future of the Internet. Fax machine indeed.

5) Some interesting, and depressing numbers from the Federal government’s food aid program as recently reported by the Huffington Post and other news sources:

• The current food stamp program costs the American taxpayer about $75 billion a year.
• Government sources believe that $750 million of that budget number is lost every year to fraud.
• This wasted/lost food aid money could have funded White House tours for more than 750 years.
• This fraud number is more than double the amount dollars of fraud detected annually in a 2006-2008 study on food stamp benefit trafficking, a type of fraud that involves selling Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to food retailers for cents on the dollar.
• This purported fraud is only about 1% of the annual total food stamp budget.
• However, food aid programs administered by 36 states as well as the District of Columbia, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands have no asset test for food stamp eligibility. In other words, wealthy people could get food stamps if their annual income is low enough even though they have many other assets already in their possession, making the $750 million/1% numbers probably substantially too low.
• Just such an example of underestimating the waste in the program came to light that a Michigan man who won a $2 million lottery jackpot was collecting food stamps under a state loophole that counted only income, not assets. The man took his winnings in a lump sum, which categorized them as assets.
• Enrollment in the food aid program that helps the poor, elderly and disabled is running at record high levels, with well over 46 million people now participating.
• Well over 14 million people have signed up for the benefits of the food aid program since U.S. President Barack Obama took office.

I am not advocating killing the food aid program which is a literal lifeline in these hard economic times for many Americans and their families. But at least $750 million a year, and probably a lot more, is being wasted on criminal elements and wealthy recipients who have healthy levels of assets but no healthy levels of current income.

Is it too much to ask for the Federal government to use some common sense when spending billions of taxpayer dollars?

6) Staying with the food aid program and some really depressing numbers, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Federal government is now spending $74.6 billion a year on the program, a level that is up from $30.4 billion in 2007. This program now supports a whopping 15% of Americans and its budget is now more than the COMBINED budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and the Department of the Interior.

The insanity here is the political class and others in Washington, such as Nobel Prize winners, have been totally inept at creating the right environment to grow the economy and create jobs, jobs that would hopefully lead to a diminishing of the food aid budget. Record level government stimulus spending levels, record low interest rates for a record length of time, and record levels of printing money have all failed to get the economy rolling.

The fact that this food aid government expenditure has grown so much so quickly is a disgrace, a disgrace that takes wealth away from other programs that would potentially better serve more Americans.

That is enough for now, we are just getting started with this month’s lunacy.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w