Last month we set a record by needing almost two full weeks of posts to get all of the insanity documented and discussed. Given what I see today, we will be hard pressed not to get close to or exceed that record of insanity this month. It keeps getting worse and worse and the effectiveness of the political class gets less and less.
This is our eighth post in this month’s series so the insanity continues to flow out of the political class and into our lives, our wallets, and our freedoms. This may finally be the last post for this month, a week and a half after we started documenting and discussing the insanity.
1) It always amazes me that the Federal government and Washington political class can still not do very simple things well despite the fact that they have been working at them for decades or centuries. Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security probably lose about $200 billion a year to waste and criminal fraud decades after being launched.
The IRS also wastes, loses, or fails to collect hundreds of billions of dollars every year in income taxes.
The Federal government, despite having three years lead time and spending over a billion dollars, could not build a relatively simple and working website to handle Obama Care enrollments.
The list goes on and on, major to minor screw ups that just should not happen. Nowhere was this more evident recently when the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, was hosted at the White House by President Obama.
The President decided to host the visiting Modi with a formal White House dinner that included crisped halibut, avocado, goat cheese and more, with mango crème brulee for dessert. One problem though: none of the White House staff or State Department diplomats bothered to check to find out that Prime Minister Modi was in the middle of a nine-day religious fast and was consuming nothing during that time except warm water.
How embarrassing and what an awkward position to put Modi in. As everyone sat down to the feast, he informed everyone he would not be partaking and then apologized for the situation and consoled the diners, telling them not to abstain from their meals just because he had chosen to.
What an embarrassment for the Obama administration and this country in the eyes of the rest of the world. Do your homework regardless of what aspect of government you work in and we would all be better off.
2) On September 30, 2014, the Inspector General for the Interior Department released a scathing report on mismanagement of taxpayer fund within the Bureau of Land Management (BLM):
- Apparently, management employees at the Bureau of Land Management used government charge cards to buy $799,000 worth of gift cards from vendors such as REI, American Express, Fred Meyer and Visa.
- When the Inspector General’s investigators requested supporting documentation such as purchase orders, receipts, and authorizing signatures to see if the purchases were legit, BLM staff claimed that they were “missing.”
- The inspector general report described widespread misuse of government-issued charge cards at the agency, making the “purchase card program susceptible to fraud, waste, and abuse.”
- This disgrace should not be a surprise at the BLM since in 2010, investigators tracked $70,000 of the undocumented purchases to the BLM’s Idaho State Office, where one employee had purchased personal items and gift cards worth $41,276.33.
- The employee, Maria Gilbert, was eventually charged with one count of theft of government funds between 2007 and 2011, to which she pleaded guilty and was eventually sentenced to two years of probation, six months of home detention for embezzlement, and forced to return the $41,276.33.
- Unfortunately, that was the only money recovered or employee penalized for the remaining $757,723.67 of undocumented gift card purchases that was not accounted for in the IG report.
- At least one BLM employee in the Southern Nevada District charged work time to a fire nearly nine months after the blaze had been put out.
- $3,200 of janitorial services was charged by Carson City District BLM employees to “fire suppression” of several different fires that occurred in another state.
- The Inspector general’s report ripped BLM’s management apart: The BLM demonstrated “grossly inadequate” payroll controls, “weak internal controls over purchase cards, and poor compliance with Federal policy.”
3) We have often discussed how the forty year old “war on drugs” has been a losing proposition from Day One. It has not reduced drug usage in this country, it has filled our prisons with nonviolent drug users, it has cost trillions of dollars to fail, and it has created some of the most powerful and violent drug cartels in the world.
And according to a recent article from the Personal Liberty website that was written by Sam Jolley, you can add another $7 billion of wasted taxpayer wealth to the overall cost of this lost war. According to a recent report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the United States took ten years and spent $7 billion to suppress or eliminate the production of opium in the country.
How successful was the time, effort, and money? According to the Inspector General, Afghanistgan opium production is at an all time high: “Given the severity of the opium problem and its potential to undermine U.S. objectives in Afghanistan I strongly suggest that your departments consider the trends in opium cultivation and the effectiveness of past counternarcotics efforts when planning future initiatives.” In other words, plain English: whatever you did, it failed miserably so best not to do it again and find some other process or strategy to deal with the problem in the future.
And the Inspector General’s findings did not stop with the damage that all time high opium production would mean for drug addicts around the world: “In the opinion of almost everyone I spoke with, the situation in Afghanistan is dire with little prospect for improvement in 2014 or beyond. All of the fragile gains we have made over the last 12 years on women’s issues, health, education, rule of law, and governance are now, more than ever, in jeopardy of being wiped out by the narcotics trade which not only supports the insurgency, but also feeds organized crime and corruption.”
Dire, little prospect for improvement, organized crime, corruption, not the words you want to hear after spending $7 billion to eliminate the problem and failing to do so. Again, is there anyone, anywhere in the Federal government or the Washington political class that can successfully implement any kind of successful government program? It does not appear to be, at least in the areas of opium production, government charge card management, and hosting a foreign leader.
That will do it for today’s insanity and the insanity from the past month. Tomorrow we will move on to other political class shenanigans and ineptness, returning to document more political class insanity at the beginning of next month. Until then, please visit our term limits website at:
www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
Because, how much better would life be and how much less political insanity would there be if we turned over our Washington politicians every four years or so?
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Please visit the following sites for freedom:
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