Love My Country, Loathe My Government

Monday, October 27, 2014

Wastebook 2015 - The Unrelenting Wasteful Spending of Washington

Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma has been one of the very few politicians in Washington who have taken the time to identify and document the incredible amount of taxpayer wealth that the government wastes every year. From funding stupid science projects to criminal fraud to inefficient and ineffective management of government operations, the incompetence of the Federal government and the politicians that oversee its operations is truly insulting to those of us that fund their ineptness and waste. Previous years' examples of wasteful spending as identified by senator Coburn can be accessed in this blog by entering either “coburn” or “wastebook” in the search box above.

The Senator’s annual summary of wasteful spending is entitled Wastebook followed by the year of its publication. He has just releases “Wastebook 2015” and trust me, as you will see below, the wasteful spending on idiocy continues unabated under the Obama administration. Before we go into the latest Wastebook results, let’s do a quick review of the major wasteful spending examples that we have previously exposed in this blog:

Medicare and Medicaid likely lose over $100 billion a year to waste, fraud, and inefficiencies.
Social Security easily loses over $100 billion a year to waste and fraud.
The IRS readily admits that it fails to collect almost $400 billion a year in taxes owed.
Obama’s debt reduction commission recommended that over $100 billion a year could be removed from the Pentagon’s budget without compromising national security; I contend that this is a substantially low ball figure.
The Navy recently spent almost $300 million to build two ships to near completion, decided that they were not needed, and then spent another $10 million to junk them.
The State Department spent $60 million to build a consulate in Afghanistan and then realized that it could not be defended against a terrorist attack and abandoned it without ever using it.
The National Science Foundation annually wastes billions of dollars on such inane projects as a video game that simulates prom week, determining when dogs became man’s best friend, and other such nonsense.

You get the idea. We have a Federal government bureaucracy that is out of control when it comes to smartly spending our tax dollars. And that out of control spending has resulted in about an $18 TRILLION national debt with nothing to show for it. And we got to $18 TRILLION by wasting money like the following “Wastebook 2015” items:

1) According to Coburn’s research, the National Institute of Health’s Center for Alternative and Complimentary Medicine spent $387,000 to study the effects of Swedish massages on rabbits. This is the same government organization that says it does not have a big enough budget for Ebola vaccines but apparently has enough for rabbit massages.

2) The Department of Interior spent $10,000 to monitor the growth rate of saltmarsh grass, i.e., the government is paying people to watch grass grow.

3) The National Science Foundation has granted more than $200,000 to a research project that is trying to determine how and why Wikipedia is sexist.

4) At a cost of $371,026 the National Institute of Health funded a study to see if mothers love dogs as much as they love kids.

5) The Federal government granted $804,254 for the development of a smartphone game called “Kiddio: Food Fight.” The game is intended to teach parents how to convince their children to try and eat new healthier food choices. I guess telling your kids you cannot leave the table until you eat your vegetables is no longer a valid way of child rearing like it was for my mother.

6) The National Endowment for the Humanities has provided $47,000 for undergraduate classes that teach students about laughing and humor.

7) The National Science Foundation spent $856,000 to teach mountain lions how to walk on treadmills as part of a research project whose aim was to better understand mountain lions’ instincts.

8) A Government Accountability Office (GAO) study found that the Federal government has recently paid more $700,000,000 to over 57,000 government employees who have not shown up to work for a variety of reasons. In some cases, workers accused of serious misconduct are reportedly getting paid to stay home and do nothing. The Department of Defense (DOD) has the highest number of paid leaves on record. During the three years that ended in September 2013, DOD put 8,600 employees on leave for one to three months, close to 900 for three months to a full year and 123 employees for more than a year.

9) The country that put men on the moon, the United States, no longer has the capability of putting a man into orbit, relying on the Russians to put an American in orbit at the outrageous cost of $70 million per astronaut per trip. Once up in space at the International Space Station, more money is wasted on such idiotic projects as the design and creation of better golf clubs.

10) The Coast Guard has reduced its focus and resources on drug and migrant interdictions and but now offers free patrols for private yacht parties.

11) The IRS has mistakenly given over $4 billion to identity thieves across the country since it was too incompetent to identify thousands and thousands of bogus tax returns.

12) The Federal government spent $331,000 to see if people would stab voodoo dolls when angry and hungry at the same time.

13) That same government spent $171,000 to study the gambling habits of monkeys, finding out that monkeys share “our unfounded belief in winning and losing streaks,” a completely useless finding for every single American.

14) Coburn said that the Defense Department has budgeted $80 million over four years to build a Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit, and is spending some of that taxpayer money collaborating with Hollywood costume designers along the way. No use having a Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit if it does not look cool. As if $80 million was not enough to waste, Coburn’s research cited one industry source that estimates that $1 billion would eventually be needed to build just a single prototype.

15) The report estimated the annual level of waste related to food stamp fraud at about $3 billion.

16) In 2012, the State Department funded a gathering of world musicians from around the world in Florida, where they participated in a flash mob.

Unbelievable. Hundreds of billions of dollars wasted every year for nothing in return. Millions of Americans are homeless and hungry but the government spends money on rabbit massages.

Thousands and thousands of veterans are not getting the medical care they need but the government spends money the gambling habits of monkeys.

Tens of millions of Americans cannot afford health insurance or health care but the government spends money on voodoo doll research.

Millions of Americans are fighting destructive addictions to tobacco, alcohol, and drugs but the government spends money on treadmill walking lions.

Pathetic leadership from the American political class. Especially from Obama who apparently has broken another campaign promise when he promised to go through the Federal government “line-by-line” to weed out waste.

So the next time a politician or a big government loving friend says that taxes need to be raised to fund essential government work, ask him how the massaged rabbits are making out. Until the Federal government and those that operate it stop the insanity of these types of spending, no American should pay one cent more in any kind of taxes.

Step 1 From “Love My Country, Loathe My Government” was custom made for this tragedy. Step 1 would reduce Federal government spending by 10% a year for fives years. This approach would bring the Federal government spending in line with its tax revenue stream, it would result in focusing the government on just essential projects since it would not have the budget to do these kinds of frivolous projects, and it would help out those in our society that really need the help vs. the well connected that really need nothing, including our tax dollars.

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.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Friday, October 24, 2014

October, 2014, Part 2, By the Numbers: the Numbers Say, "Hell In A Hand Basket"

Every month or so we do a regular feature in this blog called “by the numbers.” Rather than believe the drivel and spin that the American political class generates to make themselves look better than their actual performance in office, we go beneath the headlines to look at what is really going on by looking at the underlying numbers of our reality.

I once worked for a boss whose favorite saying was: “there is nothing more devastating to an opinion than the proper number.” that is what we do in this numbers series and what we will try to do today.

Today is the second update in the “by the numbers” theme. The first update ran yesterday.

1) I make a point never to quote news, data, or reports from Fox News, not because they are liars or wrong but because my liberal friends and family automatically assume what they are saying or reporting has to be wrong solely because it is Fox reporting it. However, I will make an exception to our first discussion point today since it is a Fox poll whose findings generally conform to what Americans are telling Gallup, Pew, and other reputable polling organizations.

A recent Fox poll asked a simple question with simple answer options: given the realities going on around the world, poll participants were asked if “everything will be fine,” or if it’s going “to hell in a hand basket.” A whopping 58% chose the “hell in a hand basket” option while only 32% said “everything will be fine.”

Why would Americans be so pessimistic about the future? Consider what is going on around the world and how the current Presidential administration has failed to react to these crises or show any ability to formulate responses to these crises:

China recently became the largest economy in the world, is quickly building up their military, and threatening the sovereign and economic interests of countries throughout Southeast Asia.
Russia has annexed parts of the Ukraine with no one or no country having any kind of viable response that would discourage further Russia land grabs in the future.
The Israelis and Palestinians just recently stopped fighting each other, not because they reached a peace agreement but because they got too tired to carry on.
ISIS, the worst terror organization in the history of the world, is marching across broad stretches of land in the Mideast and threatening to export their terror agenda around the world.
Libya is a failed state with different mobs and terror organizations carving up the country while being bombed by planes from Egypt and the United Emirates.
Besides the obvious problems with the plague of Ebola in western Africa, different Islamic terror groups are weakening governments throughout the entire African continent.
In Central and South America, political corruption and drug cartels are overwhelming governments, resulting in mass migrations up to the southern border of the united States and those many resultant problems.
Many European countries are all facing mountains of debt, high unemployment, and furious citizens who are finding out that government promises cannot be financially met.
In addition to an economic crisis, swiftly growing Muslim populations throughout Europe add to domestic stress and conflicts.
Domestically, the Obama administration has turned into a beehive of scandals. Fast and Furious resulted in the death of a U.S. border agent and at least dozens of innocent Mexican citizens. Obama has turned the IRS into his own personal political harassment machine, stifling the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans. His administration abandoned over two dozen Americans in Benghazi, his administration has been the least transparent of any recent Presidency, he illegally exchanged five high value target prisoners for an Army deserter, etc., etc., etc.
His economic policies have increased the number of Americans requiring food assistance by almost fifty percent, have allowed record high unemployment rates for record lengths of time, have added over five TRILLION dollars to the national debt, and wasted over $800 billion on an economic stimulus program that failed miserably.
He has violated the Constitution and existing law so many times that he should have been impeached and removed from office any number of times over.
Rather healing and narrowing the racial divide in this country, he has remained silently and thus, implicitly encouraging administration officials, Congressional allies, and others to play the race card against any American who dares to have a different opinion than this President, resulting in a widening and increasing bitterness of the country’s racial divide.
Rather than fixing government so that basic government functions are provided in an efficient and effective manner, government waste, corruption and outright government fraud has grown and expanded, at a terrible cost to taxpayer wealth, under Obama.
Obama helped develop and deploy the worst piece of legislation ever put forth from Washington, Obama Care. This legislation that will add over a TRILLION dollars to our national debt, has already caused 5-6 million Americans to lose access to their preferred doctors, hospitals, and medicines, narrowed consumer choice for their medical needs, created and raised taxes that affect every American, exposed millions of Americans to easier identity theft via a botched data systems approach and deployment, and caused a myriad of other problems while never having a chance to reduce medical costs in this country.
Obama put forth lofty promises that ended up being empty actions or outright lies, lies that are too numerous to review here.

I wonder not why 58% of the country think the country is going to hell in a hand basket, I worry why far more Americans do not see the reality of the hand basket.

But the Fox poll is not the only poll and numbers crying out about the bad direction and karma of the country. Consider some recent results from a Politico poll:

In a recent Politico poll that was done the hardest-fought states and Congressional districts of the year, two-thirds of likely voters polled felt that the United States has lost control of its major challenges.
Only 36% of those polled felt that the country is “in a good position to meet its economic and national security” hurdles.
A whopping 84% of voters say that ISIS is a “serious” threat to the U.S. homeland with 43% saying it poses a “very serious” threat. Just 12% said ISIS is not a serious concern.
Most voters believe their health care costs will rise under Obama Care.
57% feel they their personal health care costs will increase, while only 7% said they will decrease. 41% of Americans want the whole legislation repealed.
38% of those polled said George W. Bush was better at operating the Federal government while 35% said Obama did a better job. A quarter of respondents said the two men were equally competent, or incompetent, depending if you are an optimist or pessimist..
Only 22% of poll respondents said they had a lot of confidence that the government is doing everything it can to contain the contagious disease. 39% they had some confidence, while a third said they had little or no confidence.

Two different polls from news organizations, two different sets of numbers that usually reside on different ends of the political spectrum but the same basic set of numerical results and conclusions: we are not confident about the future and we are certainly not confident that the current members of the political class are able to contend with and resolve those issues.

The numbers do not lie and either do the conclusions they point us to. “Hell in a hand basket” might be a crude description of the nation’s mood but it is an accurate one, the numbers do not lie even if Obama and most of the Washington political class do. When Fox and Politico agree, you know that their numbers and findings are probalby accurate.

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:

Thursday, October 23, 2014

October, 2014, Part 1 - By The Numbers: Economic Fallacies, Deceptions, and Realities

Every month or so we do a regular feature in this blog called “by the numbers.” rather than believe the drivel and spin that the American political class generates to make themselves look better than their actual performance in office, we go beneath the headlines to look at what is really going on by looking at the underlying numbers of our reality.

1) The Federal government recently announced the latest economic numbers and those in the Obama administration were touting the fact that the official unemployment rate, the U3 unemployment rate measure, had finally gotten below 6%. That’s the headlines but what are the underlying numbers and realities:

The Obama administration promised that unemployment would be down to below 6% by 2012 because of the $800 billion wasted on the economic stimulus package. Thus, even with the failed stimulus spending, we are two years late at reaching the promised goal.
These awful unemployment rate results were achieved over the past few years despite having spent the stimulus money, had record low interest rates for a record length of time and enjoyed an energy boom, all of which should have led to an economic boom and record low unemployment.
The labor force participation rate in September slid from an already three decade low 62.8% to 62.7%.
This is the lowest rate in over 36 years, matching the February 1978 lows.
While 232,000 Americans found jobs, the number of citizens that are not in the labor force, rose to a new record high, increasing by 315,000 to 92.6 million.
At a rate of 232,000 people finding jobs a month, it would still take six years for the current 17 million Americans who are unemployed or part time employed to find a full time job, assuming hat no one with a job today lost it in the next six years.
A record 55,553,000 women 16 years and older did not participate in the labor force in September, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This means that 55,553,000 women in the United States did not have a job and did not actively seek one in the past four weeks.

Thus, despite Obama’s claim that the recovery is taking hold years after the recession ended, there are fewer Americans working today, and fewer women, than when Obama took office. That is not a successful Presidency when you look at the numbers.

2) The Heritage Foundation recently had their economic analysts look at the economic numbers also. Salim Furth, Ph.D., researches and explains how public policy affects economic growth as senior policy analyst in macroeconomics at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis. His analysis of the underlying numbers in this economy has found that:

Median wages are lower than they were when Obama took office and continuing this year despite some growth in the employment numbers.
Gross domestic product (GDP) is growing but the growth rate number is far less than forecasters expected at the time Obama came into office.
The Congressional Budget Office had forecasted that GDP growth would exceed 4% a year from 2011 to 2013. Instead, it struggled to reach even 2%.
The labor force participation rate among adults between ages 25 and 54 has fallen steadily through the weak Obama recovery, from 82.8% when he took office to 81.1% most recently.
One reason for the unimpressive employment and economic growth numbers is the reality that all of the new barriers to investment created by this administration and its excessive generation of regulations and laws, every day more businesses are closing their doors than opening them, resulting in a business failure rate is much higher than it used to be.

Mr. Furth’s conclusions: the economy is still very weak and anemic if you look at all of the numbers.

3) James Sherk, also from the Heritage Foundation, finds that while some things in the economy is are improving, there are still major problems in the underling numbers and the realities they represent:

Despite the drop in the unemployment rate, the government’s payroll survey also reported that average hourly earnings fell $.01 to $24.53 an hour.
Over the past year, average hourly earnings have grown just 2 percent–just a half-percentage point faster than inflation. Mr. Sherk concludes that employers apparently see little need to raise real wages to attract employees.
One of the reasons why the U3 unemployment rate fell below 6% was the reality that, despite 232,000 people finding jobs, 315,000 people dropped out of the search for jobs, artificially lowering the official U3 unemployment rate.
The employment-to-population ratio also remained at a flat but low 59.0% rate for the fourth consecutive month, implying that the somewhat improving job growth and unemployment figures in past few months have not translated into an increase in the proportion of Americans with jobs.
The employment-to-population ratio among 25-54 year olds dropped in September, dropping from 76.8 to 76.7%, showing that the growth in employment rates remains anemic even for Americans in the prime of their working years.

Mr. Sherk’s conclusion: “The labor market has clearly improved this year. But it also remains far weaker than the headline figures suggest. American workers could definitely use a more robust recovery.”

Mix in the following set of numbers on top of the above analyses:

About 17 million Americans are still unemployed or under employed.
The number of Americans on government food assistance programs is almost 50% higher than when the recession hit despite years of “economic recovery.”
The U6 unemployment measure, a more comprehensive and better number for looking at the unemployment picture, is still stuck above 10%, a disgraceful result of a terrible economic recovery.

The numbers do not lie. The Obama administration and this set of Washington politicians have created and presided over the worst economic recovery in recent history. And they have created these economic numbers despite massive government deficit spending, record low interest rates for a record length of time, and an energy boom.

4) We have often shown how low taxes, low state government debt, and low regulations make for a more vibrant state economy and happier citizens than those states with high taxes, high debt, and high amounts of government regulations. Most recently, we proved these conclusions where we compared so-called “Sinkhole States” with “Sunshine States.”

Paul Bedard, writing for the Washington Examiner on September 30, 2014, looked at another set of numbers to show high taxes, high debt, and high regulation states suffer, along with their citizens, vs., low tax, low debt and low regulation states:

The Census Bureau recently reported that population growth has shifted to southern states, resulting in the eleven states that make up the Northeast being bled dry of representation in Washington to the tune of 40% fewer members representing those states in Congress since 1950.
While the states from Pennsylvania to Maine had 141 House members in 1950, they are down to 85 today, a drop of some 40%
Critics blame rising taxes in northeastern states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut for limiting population growth to just 15% from 1983 to 2013 while the rest of the nation grew more than 41%.
California and Texas combined have more House Of Representatives than the eleven northeastern states combined.

The American legislative Council concluded: “This result is one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in American history. This migration is shifting the power center of America right before our very eyes. The movement isn’t random or even about weather or resources. Economic freedom is the magnet and states ignore this force at their own peril.”

In other words, as we have shown many times previously: the numbers prove that low taxes, low debt, low government regulations results in good economic numbers and, in this case, stronger government representation. Maybe if Obama and his economic advisors had looked at these numbers and results, his economic recovery legacy would not be as pathetic as it turned out to be.

Besides the obvious lessons learned today of low taxes, low debt, and minimal government regulations leading to great economic results and numbers, the other important lesson is to not just look at the numbers that the political class want you to see. Step behind the curtain and look for the reality of all the numbers. There you will find the truth of our country’s government and economic health, a truth that politicians usually do not want us to see. More numbers and realities 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:

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

October, 2014 Part 7, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Screwing Up Cubs' Games, Ignoring Freedom of Information Act Requests, And More

Over the past few years, but especially over the past fourteen months, we have had to devote more and more posts each month to the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. This legislation, without a doubt, is the worst piece of legislation ever passed, likely passed by the most inept and useless set of Washington politicians that this country has ever had to endure. The disasters from this law include at least the following downsides:

It has and will continue to increase the national debt
It will leave tens of millions of Americans still uninsured ten years from now
It has restricted overall economic growth
It raised taxes on all Americans in dozens of ways
It has reduced the job growth rate in this country
It has turned many full time workers into part time workers or into unemployed workers
It has generally increased the cost of health insurance, both premiums and deductibles, over what was available in the insurance market before it was passed
The Constitution was violated any number of times when the Obama administration unilaterally and illegally changed components of the law without the permission of Congress or the American people
The American people were lied to over and over, directly by the President and Democrats in Congress, on the negative ramifications of the law
It has caused millions of American to lose access to the current insurance policies they had
It has caused millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred doctors, preferred hospitals, and in many cases, current medicine treatments.
It has likely increased the volume of people visiting hospital emergency rooms
It has caused thousands of doctors to retire early or change professions in order to not deal with the bureaucracy and idiocy of the law
It has exposed the inability of the Federal government and various state governments to develop, launch, and operate any kind of successful program
It has exposed millions of Americans’ personal financial information to identity thieves
It never addressed, and thus, never resolved, the root causes of our escalating health care costs in this country.

I am sure that I omitted some of the negative ramifications of the legislation but you get the idea. To review past discussions of past disasters from Obama Care, enter ”the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above. The latest disasters start here, which should wrap up the latest bad news from the worst piece of legislation ever written.

1) Judicial Watch recently filed a law suit against the Washington D.C. Obama Care Small Business Health Exchange. Why? Consider this abuse of the rules that every other American citizen has to live but which are merely suggestions for those in D.C.:

Under D.C. law, only local small businesses that have 50 or fewer employees can participate in the D.C. Small Business Exchange.
Now, compare that law/rule against how many people work for Congress. And, guess how many employees Congress claims to have? Judicial Watch puts the number of Congressional employees at almost 20,000 people.
And I doubt any sane person would call any part of the Federal government “small” since it spends almost $4 TRILLION a year.
But according to government documents obtained by Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act request, the House of Representatives and the Senate claim to have only 45 employees each, less than even the number of elected officials in both houses BEFORE counting their staffs.
This is what Congress claimed when it put its 20,000 or so employees onto the Washington D.C. Obama Care small business health insurance exchange.
Someone from Congress actually signed the following statement attesting to the claim that Congress was a “small business:” “I've provided true and correct information to all the questions on this form to the best of my knowledge. I know that if I'm not truthful, there may be a penalty.”
Who that person was could not be ascertained since the actual names of the signatories were blacked out by the D.C. Exchange.
The government documents show that as of this month, there are at least 12,359 members of Congress, Congressional staffers, their spouses and dependents who now purchase their insurance through the D.C. Small Business Exchange.
Since there are only a little over 14,000 participants in total on the D.C. Obama Care Exchange, that means that almost 90% of this “small business” exchange’s customers are Congressionally related.
Judicial Watch sued since this infraction is clearly illegal under current D.C. law.

While being illegal, you might ask why anyone would care? But remember that according to the Obama Care law, if anyone gets Obama Care health insurance under the Federal exchange, the law explicitly states they are not eligible for a taxpayer funded subsidy to help pay for it.

So in order to protect their own wallets, the Washington political class decided that 1) Congress qualifies as a small business, 2) Congress has less than 50 employees, 3) lying on the exchange application form was okay, and 4) they are eligible to get insurance, and hopefully matching subsidies, under the D.C. small business exchange. If Obama Care is so good, why do the people that passed it go to such extremes to get out from under it.

2) The following story is a little funny in that it points out just one of many, many unintended consequences of Obama Care. One would have never thought that Obama Care legislation would negatively impact a major league baseball game at Wrigley Field in Chicago but it did.

But first, a little background. If you have over fifty full time employees on your business staff in the Obama Care world, you have two choices. You must either provide a full menu of health insurance options or be fined $2,000 a year per employee as an Obama Care penalty if you do not provide insurance.

Since many businesses cannot afford to provide health insurance for their employees or cannot afford to pay the fine, they have been working feverishly finding ways to get the number of full time under 50. That way they do not have to provide insurance, they do not have to pay fines, and they can still stay solvent and viable.

Now, back to baseball. In the summer, the San Francisco Giants were playing the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley field in Chicago when the rains starting coming down. It was raining so hard, that the umpires pulled the teams off of the field and told the grounds crew to put the rain tarp down on the field.

However, the grounds crew could not get the tarp down in a timely manner which made any chances of completing the game after the rain passed impossible. Now, one could say that the Cubs have an inept grounds crew since rains and tarps have been a part of baseball for over a century. But the Chicago Sun-Times says that part of the problem was that the team’s grounds crew was understaffed because the Cubs were trying to keep hours down because of Obama Care:

“The staffing issues that hamstrung the grounds crew Tuesday during a mad dash with the tarp under a sudden rainstorm were created in part by a wide-ranging reorganization last winter of game-day personnel, job descriptions and work limits designed to keep the seasonal workers – including much of the grounds crew – under 130 hours per month, according to numerous sources with direct knowledge.

That’s the full-time worker definition under “Obamacare,” which requires employer-provided healthcare benefits for “big businesses” such as a major league team.”

Who would have thought that poorly written legislation in Washington would screw up a baseball game and baseball fans’ enjoyment in Chicago?

3) Despite a Freedom of Information Act request by the Associated press last year, the Obama administration refused to turn over government documents pertaining to technical difficulties and shortcomings relative to information security in the Obama Care data systems operations.

The administration claimed that making such information public would make the already bad data security situation even worse by giving important information to hackers: "We concluded that releasing this information would potentially cause an unwarranted risk to consumers' private information," government spokesman Aaron Albright said in a statement.

The Associated Press asked that the denial be reconsidered but the Obama administration still denied access. Which led Dan Metcalfe, a former director of the Justice Department's office of information and privacy who's now at American University's law school, to state his disgust with the government’s secrecy: "Here you have an example of an agency resorting to a far-fetched privacy claim in an unprecedented attempt to bridge this legal gap and, in the process, making it even worse by going overboard in withholding such records in their entireties."

If the problems have all been fixed and the data operations are now secure as we have been told, why not release the requested AP information that Associated Press requested since hackers would not be able to do anything with any released information? Or is the real reason for the non-compliance is that a year after the botched rollout and failed data systems, the Obama administration has still not fixed the problem and Obama care customers are still at risk of identity theft?

That will do it for now, Every day, every week, every month the Obama Care legislation is screwing up some part of Americans' lives. From higher premiums and deductibles to lost insurance coverage to narrow networks of doctors and hospitals to adding to the national debt to screwing up major league baseball games, this is a piece of legislation that ever stops giving….bad news.

And it is a piece of legislation that will never resolve what it set out to resolve, the ever escalating high cost of health care in this country since it never addressed the root causes of high health care costs:

American eat too much.
Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
Americans do not exercise enough.
Americans smoke too much and drink too much alcohol.
America’s food chain is filled with too many bad, unhealthy products, much of which is the direct result of faulty government food subsidies.
America’s medical tort system needs to be reformed.
America’s insurance companies must be able to more easily compete across state lines.
Government waste and criminal fraud in government health care programs drain much needed resources from actual health care improvement efforts.
America is aging and much research is needed to attack and cure aging diseases such as dementia, Parkinsons, Alzheimers, etc. before the aging of America and its resultant diseases overwhelm the nation's health care system.

Obama Care addresses none of these root causes and thus, has no chance of being successful. But at least its disasters give us something to read and shake our heads at in frustration. More disasters 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:

Love My Country, Loathe My Government

Monday, October 27, 2014

Wastebook 2015 - The Unrelenting Wasteful Spending of Washington

Friday, October 24, 2014

October, 2014, Part 2, By the Numbers: the Numbers Say, "Hell In A Hand Basket"

Thursday, October 23, 2014

October, 2014, Part 1 - By The Numbers: Economic Fallacies, Deceptions, and Realities

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

October, 2014 Part 7, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Screwing Up Cubs' Games, Ignoring Freedom of Information Act Requests, And More

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