July, 2017, Part 7, Political Class Insanity: Fourth Amendment Dangers and Obama's Final List Of Insanity (And Failure)

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:

1) One of the best parts of the Bill of Rights is the Fourth Amendment which protects Americans from unreasonable searches by the authorities. While Obama probably had little regard for the Fourth, given how he spied on just about every American’s electronic communications without just cause or warrants, it is still one of the most vital parts of our freedoms.

One of the most controversial recent battlegrounds of the Fourth Amendment has been the political class and all levels of government deploying cameras everywhere in public places. In many cities you can not walk down the street without a camera somewhere capturing your actions and movements, a clear, fertile ground for violating one’s Fourth Amendment rights, possibly a precursor to the worst aspects of Orwell’s “1984” world where the government monitors everything you do, everywhere you go, and everyone you interact with.

But politicians do not see it that way. They say “trust us, we would never abuse this technology (see the Obama reference above for a counter example), we would never spy on you for no reason. We believe the cameras help us to protect you from criminals and unsavory characters.” 

So who to believe: the founders who thought enough of privacy and the danger of an overreaching government bureaucracy of today’s politicians” Well, according to a recent blurb in of all places a Sports Illustrated article, betting on the Funders is the right bet:

• According to a recent Chicago Tribune article, the city of Chicago has installed a whopping 22,000 surveillance cameras throughout the city.
• From 2006 to 2013, the city of Chicago suffered through over one million crimes, a statistics that is unreal and disgraceful by itself.
• However, those 22,000 cameras helped to solve less than .05% of those million crimes, no 5%, .05%.

So ask yourself the following questions:

1. If each of those camera cost $500 to buy, install and maintain, is the $11 million that was spent worth it seeing as how they help solve less than .05% of the city’s crimes.
2. Is it worth our Fourth Amendment rights and privacy to give the political class that much power to snoop, spy, and track us when their promise of helping protect us from crime makes use of the technology less than .05% of the time?

And say that the expense and risk to our rights are not worth the expense and the .05% success rate and the invitation of those in political power to abuse the Fourth Amendment.

2) Let’s close out this month’s political class insanity with a look back at the dubious accomplishments of the Barck Obama Presidency. He has been gone for six months so it is a time to categorize his “accomplishments” and really see what a horrid presidency and unimaginable political class insanity he left behind, with much of the following information gathered by Kirsters Baish from the National Review:

1. First President to preside over a cut to the credit-rating of the United States by a major credit rating agency..
2. First President to violate the War Powers Act and the Constitution, with his illegal, immoral, and un-Constitutional intrusion into the Libyan civil war.
3. First President to be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico by a sitting Federal judge.
4. First President to run roughshod over current and established bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.
5. First President to bypass Congress and implement legislation, i.e., the Dream Act, through executive fiat, legislation that was never enacted by Congress.
6. First President to create a secret amnesty program without the approval of Congress that halted the deportation of illegal immigrants including those with criminal convictions.
7. First President to unilaterally and un-Constitutionally change dates and deadlines in a passed piece of legislation (Obama Care) without the approval of Congress.
8. First President to order a CEO of a major corporation (Chrysler) to resign.
9. First President to kill off America’s ability to put a man in space, handing that responsibility over to the Russians.
10. First President to cancel the National Day of Prayer while claiming America is no longer a Christian nation.
11. First President to have a law signed by an auto-pen without being present.
12. First President to arbitrarily declare an existing law (DOMA) unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.
13. First President to threaten insurance companies if they publicly spoke out on the reasons for their rate increases in order to protect the disaster known as Obama Care.
14. First President to tell a major manufacturing company in which state it is allowed to locate a factory in order to satisfy his union supporters.
15. First President to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect simply because they disagreed with some of his inane programs: Arizona, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana.
16. First President to side with a foreign nation over one of the American 50 states (Mexico vs Arizona).
17. First President to tell the military men and women that they should pay for their own private insurance because they “volunteered to go to war and knew the consequences” but was more than eager to give taxpayer funded health insurance to illegal immigrants.
18. Then he was the First President to tell the members of the military that THEY were UNPATRIOTIC for balking at the last suggestion.
19. First President to allow Iran to inspect their own nuclear weapons facilities.
20. First President to have blood on his hands from Benghazi to the assassinations of several police officers.
21. First President to trade five terrorists for an Army deserter and traitor.
22. First President to facilitate the Iranians acquisition of nuclear weapons capabilities.
23. First President to have a North Korean strategy called “strategic patience” which essentially meant doing nothing and allowing the North Korean nutcases eight unimpeded years to further develop nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver those weapons.
24. First President to run a trillion dollar annual budget deficit.
25. First President to run four trillion dollar annual budget deficits.
26. First President to drive the country’s national debt to GDP ratio over 100, up from a steady, stable, manageable, and long running 60% or so, endangering the fiscal survival of the country.
27. First President to give out billions of taxpayer dollars to Democratic Party supporters who operated alternative energy companies (e.g. Solyndra, A123, etc.) and get nothing in return for those dollars.
28. First President to create a major terrorist organization, ISIS, and then underestimate the ferocity and horrific nature of said terrorist organization.
29. First President to loudly proclaim a “Red Line” (in Syria and its use of chemical weapons) and then not back up the threat, allowing Russia to become a major player in Mideast affairs.
30. First President to bomb six Muslim countries in the same year, using over 20,000 bombs and missiles to make his point and killing and maiming hundreds, if not thousands of Muslims, and making current refugee situations worse.
31. First President to shred the Fourth Amendment by collecting the electronic communications of just about every American citizen without cause and without warrants.
32. First President to shred the First Amendment by using the Obama Care legislation to attack freedom of religion and weaponizing the IRS to attack freedom of speech.
33. First President to chase after and try to prosecute more government whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined.
34. First president to take time off to film a TV commercial for a comedian (George Lopez) TV show.
35. First President to waste time every year to extensively and publicly work on and publicly proclaim his picks for March Madness.
36. First President in almost 50 years to weaponize the IRS to attack Americans who disagreed with his policies.
37. First President in almost sixty years to play over 300 rounds of golf during his administration.
38. Likely the first President to spend over $100 million in taxpayer wealth for his lavish vacations to Hawaii and around the world.
39. First President to insult every Special Olympics kid in the world when he publicly proclaimed what his bowling skill was, “It's like -- it was like Special Olympics, or something."
40. First President to allow his Secretary of State to run a crime syndicate out of the State Department, trading U.S. government favors for personal enrichment.
41. First President to go to bed and then go to a political fundraiser while dozens of Americans were fighting for their lives at a U.S. consulate (Benghazi) in a foreign country.
42. First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.
43. First President to have a social security number from a state he had never lived in.
44. First President to formally authorize the assassination of an American citizen without due process of law.
45. First President to keep a dog trainer on taxpayer funded retainer for $102,000 a year.
46. First President to stand in front of the world, via the United Nations, and tell an outright lie, i.e. the Benghazi terror attack was caused by an obscure YouTube video.

It is amazing we survived the Obama administration from a fiscal, economic, integrity, foreign affairs, and freedom perspective. And today Democrats and liberals are besides themselves because Trump’s idiot son took a single, stupid meeting with a few Russians. Talk about bad priorities. 

More insanity early 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:

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org
http://www.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

July, 2017, Part 5, Political Class Insanity: Stupid in L.A., Poorer In Europe, and Busted Everywhere

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:

1) One of the biggest pieces of political class insanity that has been going for decades is the reality that the Washington political class and the government operations it oversees is extremely inefficient and crime infested. A little while ago we reported on a government inspector general report that found that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security basically lost at least $144 billion a year in taxpayer wealth due to fraud and inefficient operations. The wasted wealth gets higher if you include government welfare, food stamp, and other horribly run government operations.

All of this history is bad news. But there is some good news recently, as reported on the Dennis Micheal Lynch website by reporter Anneta Griffee on July 13, 2017:

• Recently, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that a massive set of arrests had been by the Medicare Fraud Strike Force that helped break up a ring of Medicare fraudsters.
• The fraud involved $1.3 billion in criminal Medicare and Medicaid billings.
• It is the largest bust in the history of the Justice Department and it involved arresting 412 people across the country including 114 doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel.
• In addition, 295 health care providers can longer participate in any Federal health program.
• The arrest operation involved 1,000 Federal, state, and local law enforcement officers and 350 agents from the office of the inspector general.
• The press release also said that, “Over 120 defendants, including doctors, were charged for their roles in prescribing and distributing opioids and other dangerous narcotics.” 
• Criminal charges included filing fraudulent billing schemes including Medicare, Medicaid and the military’s TRICARE program for medically unnecessary and false drug prescriptions which involved the illegal distribution of opioids.
• According to the Justice Department press release, the schemes involved such elaborate setups a, “One fake rehab facility for drug addicts in Palm Beach is alleged to have recruited addicts with gift cards, visits to strip clubs, and even drugs-enabling the company to bill for over $58 million in false treatments and tests.” and “Another illegal clinic in Houston allegedly gave out prescriptions for cash. Just one doctor at this clinic allegedly gave out 12,000 opioid prescriptions for over 2 million illegal painkiller doses. These defendants have been charged and they will face justice.”

This is obviously great news for the American taxpayer who is the real victim in this criminal activity. But let’s be clear this is one tiny, tiny step. $1.3 billion is less than 1% of the annual fraud we documented above, $144 billion. It is doubtful the entire $1.3 billion will ever be recovered and how much additional taxpayer money had to be spent on the task force and law enforcement to bring this criminals to justice, for less than 1% of the fraud. 

The numbers and waste is mind boggling even in the face of the biggest bust EVER in the history of the Justice Department. The numbers are insane.

2) A lot of people in this country think it would be great if we changed our current economic system to those that are in Sweden, Denmark, Germany or other more socialistic countries around the world. We have already shown how stupid an idea that is relative to Denmark in the following post:

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

But what about Sweden, and Germany, countries that liberals and Democrats like to point out are virtual heavens on earth from an economic perspective? Ryan McMaken writing for the Mises.org website on October 26, 2015, went through an analysis that should sober up even the most socialistic Democrat or liberal:

• According to the analysis, if Sweden and Germany were part of the United States, their citizens would rank among the lowest states from a wealth perspective.
• His analysis was more sophisticated than just dividing a country or state’s GDP by the number of citizens since that ratio can be skewed if a state or country has a lot of really, really rich people.
• Instead, this analysis “takes into account taxes, and include social benefits (e.g., "welfare" and state-subsidized health care) as income. Purchasing power is adjusted to take differences in the cost of living in different countries into account.”
• Thus, in this better and more accurate analysis approach it turns out that Sweden would be poorer than all but 12 United States states with a median income of just $27,167.
• States such as Colorado ($35,830), Massachusetts ($37,626), Virginia ($39,291), Washington ($36,343), and Utah ($36,036) have incomes that are over 30% higher than in Sweden.
• German does even worse, having a median income that is higher than just 9 U.SA. states. 
• In fact, with the exception of just Luxembourg ($38,502), Norway ($35,528), and Switzerland ($35,083), all other countries shown would fail to rank as high-income states were they to become part of the United States with most of them being far, worse than Mississippi, the poorest U.S. state.
• According to the article, “Mississippi has a higher median income ($23,017) than 18 countries measured here. The Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, and the United Kingdom all have median income levels below $23,000 and are thus below every single US state. Not surprisingly, the poorest OECD members (Chile, Mexico, and Turkey) have median incomes far below Mississippi.”
• Even the richer countries in the study only rank as middling U.S. states from a median income perspective, Australia ($29,875), Austria ($28,735), and Canada (28,288). 
• The analysis was then taken a step further and the cost of living was factored in since a median income in low cost MIssissippi might be okay vs. a higher median income in New York which has a much higher cost of living.
• When this more sophisticated layer is added on, Sweden ranks higher than only six states while German ranks higher than no state.

The analysis goes on and on and can be viewed at:

https://mises.org/blog/if-sweden-and-germany-became-us-states-they-would-be-among-poorest-states

The point to be made here is that as liberals and Democrats continue to try to push us towards a European socialistic economic system, the numbers above prove that this is a sure fire way to make every American poorer. The overreaching government intrusions into our lives not only robs us of our freedom and privacy but deprives us of economic opportunities to beas well off financially as we can be. The numbers do it lie even if politicians do. To try and be more like Sweden, Germany, or just about any other country in the world is economic suicide over time.

3) One last piece of disgusting political class insanity for today. California as we have discussed many times is going down the drain from a financial, job creation, economic, and poverty perspective. Their government liabilities, both funded and unfunded are astronomical. The state and its cities have more citizens living in poverty than any other state in the union. 40% of Los Angeles residents are so poor that they qualify for Medicaid. The LA schools massively under educate their kids. Businesses, companies, and residents are leaving the state in record numbers. State politicians have done a great job destroying what they like to call the sixth largest economy in the world.

But apparently their major screwups did not get to the local politicians running the city Los Angeles these days:

• An L.A. city commission recently voted to give members of the city’s board of education a massive pay raise.
• Board members with no outside income sources will see their board pay go from $45,637 a year to a cool $125,000 a year.
• Those get income from other sources will see their pay go up from $26,437 to almost double, $50,000 a year.
• They are getting these raises even the San Francisco Gate recently found in their analysis that the L.A. school system ranks in the lowest ten school districts in the COUNTRY.
• Upwards of half of L.A. senior high school students are not educated enough to graduate.
• The school district faces an operating expense deficit of over $400 million in the 2019-2020 school year as enrollment continues to drop as parents take their kids out of the L.A. public schools and into charter schools, private schools, or move out of the state altogether, all of which results in fewer tax dollars for the city’s public school kids.

And yet despite these massive failures, some politically connected commission people decided to vastly enrich school board members for their massive failure in serving mostly poorer kids in the L.A. school district. And the politicians running the city government let them get away with this robbery. Unbelievable insanity.

That will do it for today’s insanity: paying more for abysmal performance, wanting to be like poorer countries makes no sense, and Medicare fraud takes a minor but well deserved hit. 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:

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

July, 2017, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: Fiscal Mismanagement Around The World

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:

1) We are going to talk a lot today about how politicians both in this country and around the world are lousy economists and horrible money managers. We have talked recently about how screwed up the state of Illinois is when it comes to fiscal insolvency of its state government’s finances. It has not had a workable budget in three years, it has untold billions and billions of dollars in unfunded future liabilities, it currently has unpaid bills totalling about $15 billion, and its bond rating is about to sink to junk bond level.

But Illinois is not alone. Many liberals and Democrats in this country want us to assume the economic model of Denmark where the fallacy is everyone is healthy and happy and the government efficiently and effectively takes care of everyone’s needs. 

A recent article from the American Journal Review talked about the reality of life in Denmark, based on the experience of a Danish school teacher:

• The school teacher claims to be a school teacher in Denmark who earns about $61,000 a year.
• She does admit that there is free education for anyone who wants it and they do not have to pay for medical costs.
• But this “free stuff” is not really free since the minimum income tax in Denmark is a whopping 40%.
• Anyone earning over $80,000 a year pays an income tax rate of 68%.
• The national sales tax is 25%, somehow buying a car is taxed at 180%, and gas is taxed so high that it costs $10 a gallon, with the last two taxes precluding just about anyone in Denmark from owning their own car.
• All of these taxes add up so that about 80% of every Danish citizen’s earnings is paid out in taxes.
• The Danes average the highest amount of individual debt in the world.
• The suicide rate in Denmark is 20.8 per 100,000 residents, one of the highest in the world and almost double the suicide rate in the U.S.
• 11% of Danish adults are using anti-depressants, hardly a good sign for a happy population.

As liberals and Democrats never understand, there is no free ride, no free lunch nor free anything in life. There is always a cost and in Denmark the cost is lost freedom, lost incentive, and lost hope, with just about your whole life controlled by what is usually inept and greedy politicians. 

Overtaxing people has NEVER been a way to improve society or the lives of those that live in that society, just ask the Danes and those that live in Illinois, the home of some of the highest taxes, that are about to go even higher, in the country.



2) Let’s stay with high taxes and intrusive government and review a recent report from the fact checking organization, Politifact. It has been my experience that while Politifact claims to be non-partisan, in my opinion it definitely leans left and liberal. Thus, when it comes out and is critical of anything liberal you know it is really bad.

No one would argue that California has been dominated by the Democrats for decades so anything that goes right or wrong in that state is the result of Democrats having overwhelming control of the state government. California also has some of the highest tax rates in the country so that under taxation is not an excuse for anything that goes wrong in the state.

But finally a California politician has stated what is probably taboo among the state’s politicians, that California has the highest poverty rate in the country despite some of the highest taxes in the country: State Assembly Republican Leader Chad Mayes recently called poverty California’s No. 1 priority during a recent meeting of legislative types: "If you look at the official poverty measure in California, we’re about average with the rest of the country. But if you use the supplemental poverty measure, we are in the lead. We have the highest poverty rate in the nation -- higher than New Mexico, higher than any of the southern states, Louisiana, Alabama, higher than Idaho."

Politifact decided to fact check this assertion and their verdict: Mayes is right and he used the most accurate measure of poverty, the Supplemental Poverty Measure, a measure that not only looks at income levels and such but also considers the cost of living in the state.

But this should not surprise us. We recently reported on how 40% of Los Angeles residents are on Medicaid, indicating at least 40% of LA citizens have extremely low income levels, low enough to qualify for Medicaid under their low income thresholds.

Thus, a state government and state political class that has taxed its citizens at some of the highest rates in the country for decades and have racked up over $100 billion in unfunded liabilities, still has not been able to not be the most poverty stricken state in the union. 

Okay, two stories and two stories that show how higher and higher taxation results in worsening impacts on the citizens that have to pay those higher and higher taxes.

3) Okay, still not done on how badly politicians handle our financial matters and economies: Illinois almost at junk bond status, Denmark crushing incentive and stealing 80% of everyone’s income, and California driving its citizens into poverty.

Let’s turn our attention to my original home state, New Jersey. In a recent blog post we showed how New Jersey’s bond rating is the second worst in the country, with only Illinois having a worst bond rating. New Jersey also has some of the highest property tax, income tax, and sales tax rates in the country.

Consider my history of property tax. Back in 2005, just before I sold my middle class home in New Jersey, I was paying about about $4.00 in property tax per square foot of house (Lord knows what that tax rate is 12 years later). I moved to Florida into a middle class house and have yet to pay over $2.00 in property tax per square foot of house. In Florida I also pay no sales tax vs. the 7% in New Jersey.

And yet, New Jersey has the second worst bond rating in the country, has billions in unfunded pension liabilities, and still has some of the highest taxes in the country.

Consider that what the next governor will be faced with according to an article from the NJ 101.5 website by Michael Symons on July 9, 2017:

• A non-profit group has analyzed the state’s financial situation and has come up with some recommendations for the next NJ governor.
• Just to get close to being fiscally sane the state government may have to both reduce health benefits for retired public workers by $1.4 billion a year and raise taxes by $5 billion in taxes.
• The group was honest in their analysis and correctly predicted that given how badly the state politicians had screwed up the state’s financial situation, everyone in the state was going to feel the pain of the cuts in spending and increased taxes.
• But not taking these painful steps now would make the future realities even harder for the state citizens to swallow.
• The group’s tax change recommendations include increasing income taxes to boost revenues by 10 percent, undoing a law exempting more retirement income from taxes, raising the sales tax to 8 percent and expanding it to more services, reinstating the estate tax, taxing legalized marijuana and more.
• As an example of how bad the retirees benefit financial situation is that while the state will put $2.5 billion in the fund for the benefits this year, in reality experts say that $5 billion should be put away, a shortfall that will make the current dire situation even worse and still short fund education, Medicaid, and other state government costs.

So the story is the same, the more politicians and governments spend the worse their government becomes from a fiscal and quality perspective, be it in Denmark, California, Illinois, and New Jersey. And these states and governments end up in a vicious cycle, taxing more and more and more to fulfill the ever increasing size of government. The higher taxes drive away citizens and businesses who value their wealth and freedom which further reduces the tax base which reduces tax revenue which causes politicians to raise tax rates, and the death spiral continues.

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