It’s the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from America’s politicians. Whether it is wasteful spending, inane quotes, faulty government operations, or insulting the American public, there is always new material spewing forth from these people, usually enough to fill up half a dozen or so posts every month. Given what we know today, this month should be no different as the insanity seems to be expanding exponentially from those in office today.
This is our eighth and final installment this month and we are getting near to the end of the latest insanity from our politicians. A lot of what you will see today comes from events that happened this past summer. It is only now that we have been able to get through the recent insanity that we can now review older, but still crazy, political class insanity.
We will move onto other topics tomorrow, not because we have covered all of the current and recent past insanity but because it is getting too depressing to review such idiocy in such a short time.
1) One of the main components that drove the country to into the Great Recession and close to a worldwide financial meltdown was the fact that many Americans families bought houses that they could not afford. And the main driver of that problem was the fact that banks and mortgage dealers sold mortgages to millions of Americans that required little or no down payment on the house.
As a result American families over extended themselves, buying more house than they could afford, and many, many ended up in foreclosure. It was a brutal economic lesson to learn: do not allow someone to buy a home with so little of a down payment, tit can lead to events like the Great Recession.
Or was the lesson learned? According to a recent Associated Press report, the Federal government, via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, will encourage banks and other financial organizations to sell mortgages to Americans and require as little as 3% of the purchase prices as a down payment. Unreal, having just survived a financial meltdown because of over extended mortgage holders, the Federal government is encouraging Americans to overextend themselves again on housing.
"These underwriting guidelines provide a responsible approach to improving access to credit while ensuring safe and sound lending practices," Mel Watt, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said in a statement. The FHFA oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have been under government caretaking since 2008 because of the housing bust.
How in the world is this a “responsible approach” when the last time Fannie and Freddie allowed this type of reckless behavior the American taxpayer had to bailout both Fannie and Freddie to the tune of almost $200 billion? And according to the Associated Press report, this low down payment approach is targeted to first time buyers, the very type of people that cannot afford to overextend themselves. Insane.
This is the equivalent of getting hit with a right upper cut in a boxing match and after getting off the mat, doing the exact same thing to get hit with the same upper cut again. Has Washington learned nothing from how its behavior created the Great Recession?
2) More bad news out of Iraq, as if we have not had enough of it. According to a Washington Post report, after the downfall of Hussein in Iraq in 2003, the American taxpayer spent $25 billion to train, fund, and equip a rebuilt Iraqi army.
Iraq’s new Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, recently publicly made the announcement that the Iraqi government had been paying for at least 50,000 soldiers who simply do not exist. These so-called ghost soldiers draw salaries but review of Iraqi military rolls showed that there are upwards of 50,000 false names in those military rolls
It appears that Iraqi military officers were making up the fake soldiers and simply pocketing the salaries of these ghost soldiers. This may help explain why the Iraqi military forces folded so easily when attacked by ISIS terrorists earlier this year, many of those forces may have not even existed. How much of that $25 billion that the U.S. spent on the Iraqi forces was not reported but you can bet that a lot of that $25 billion never made it to its ended end purpose.
There seems to be no end on how many different and unique ways the U.S. Federal government and its Defense Department can waste, lose, and abuse taxpayer money. Whether it is in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere.
3) Tom Hinchey, writing for the Heritage Foundation, uncovered another National Science Foundation (NSF) disaster and more wasteful and corrupted spending. We have never been a fan of the National Science Foundation, given how it has spent taxpayer money on a whole range of inane and stupid projects that have little to do with the problems facing Americans today. For a summary of the wasteful spending, just enter “national science foundation” into the search box above.
The latest NSF stupidity comes from an audit of the non-profit National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) in November by the National Science Foundation (NSF) inspector general and the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA). The audit found that NEON billed NSF for normally unallowable costs for entertainment, lobbying, and alcohol:
· $25,000 for a Christmas party
· $11,000 for coffee services for employees
· $3,000 for Board of Director dinners (which included alcohol)
· $3,000 for t-shirts and other apparel for Contractor employees
· $83,000 for business development
· $112,000 for lobbying
· $150 million in questionable construction costs
The audit report also found that the NSF had lousy accounting controls and other safeguards in place to track spending in any phase of its funding processes. Just another project in the long line of useless and out of control projects mismanaged by the NSF.
Also included in the writing by Mr. Hinchey were other inane NSF projects that even we had not heard of but which were just as useless as the ones we were aware of and reported on:
- Senator Tom Coburn released a report in 2011 identifying more than $1.2 billion in losses from waste, fraud, duplication, and mismanagement at the NSF.
- The NSF spent $80,000 to study why the same college basketball teams always dominate March Madness.
- It spend $1 million for an analysis of how quickly parents respond to trendy baby names.
- It spent $581,000 on whether online dating site users are racist.
- And last but no least, it wasted $2 million to figure out that people who often post pictures on the Internet from the same location at the same time are usually friends.
4) Years after the Great Recession ended, economic growth in this country still stinks. Median household incomes are still trending downwards, there are about 16 million Americans who are under employed or unemployed, about 46 million Americans need Federal food assistance every month, the job creation rate is still pretty anemic, and the labor force participation rate is at a 35 year low.
Tremendous economic mismanagement by the Washington political class years after the recession ended. One reason for the bad business, job, and economic environment could be the fact that the Federal government keeps issuing thousands of new regulations every year. The Daily Caller website recently reported that the Obama administration issued an amazing 3,415 NEW government regulations just before Thanksgiving.
To see how inane this overregulation binge is, 3,415 new regulations means that on average, the Federal government issued over nine new regulations EVERY DAY during the year. So much regulation does two very bad things:
- First, business owners are faced with more and more time distracting government reporting and regulation requirements, taking time away from growing their businesses, hiring more workers, and expanding the economy.
- Many of these regulations also cost money and with more money going to an inefficient and incompetent Federal government, there is less money left in businesses to grow, hire more workers, and grow the economy.
And really, given that the Federal government has been around for well over two hundred years, do we really need nine new government regulations EVERY DAY? Or is it simply the reality that government bureaucracies have gotten so large and so out of control that they start to create work and new regulations that do not help Americans but only help justify the continued existence of these same bureaucracies? Look no further than overregulation to find out why this economic recovery is a historical worse.
The fact that the Obama administration released these new regulations just before the Thanksgiving holidays to minimize the fallout says that 1) many of these new regulations are useless and no defensible, and 2) as always, this administration is sneaky, cowardly, and as non-transparent as possible.
5) One last piece of insanity for this month. Readers of these monthly political class insanity posts cannot help but come away with the feeling that the Federal government has gotten so large and so bureaucratic that it is a very dysfunctional human endeavor. Wasteful spending, bloated bureaucracies, rampant criminal fraud, ineffective leadership, and other general incompetencies are rampant throughout the Federal government.
And probably the most frustrating aspect of the whole insanity is that usually no one within the Federal government is ever held accountable for the messes that are created. According to a recent analysis of government data by Eric Katz, using data from the website www.govexec.com, in 2013 only 9,244 workers out of the civilian Federal workforce of 1.87 million were fired for poor performance or misconduct. This comes out to an annual firing rate for misconduct or poor performance of just 0.49%, less 1 in 200 a year. Most federal firings are for misconduct, with a smaller share for poor performance.
No matter what data source you look at for the firing rate of employees in private companies, you will see that the firing rate of Federal employees is a tiny, tiny percentage of people being fired in the real world. As Eric Katz’s following chart shows, despite a dysfunctional Federal government, it is almost impossible to get fired once the Federal government hires you:
That will do it for this month’s insanity. Today we learned that the NSF is still wasting our money, billions of dollars were sent to non-existent Iraqi soldiers, we are overregulated by the Federal government which kills economic growth, the Federal is consciously recreating the housing conditions that caused the Great Recession, and despite overall dysfunction and incompetence, Federal government employees are almost never fired. 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:
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
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