Love My Country, Loathe My Government: May 2015

Sunday, May 31, 2015

Washington D.C.: The Land Of Do As I Say, Not As I Do

It has always been a nagging question for me that why do the politicians that make laws and the associated penalties in this country often never have to abide by the very laws they make:

For example, annual Federal budgets are supposed to be turned in on time but under the Obama administration that deadline has been missed all but one year but no one ever paid the criminal price for missing that deadline.
The President is not supposed to be able to start wars without Congressional approval but our military intervention into the Libyan civil war went unpenalized by anyone in the administration.
Washington politicians made a grand showing when they passed a law to ban insider trading on stock picks by Washington types and then snuck in a counter law to make it almost impossible to be caught doing insider trading by Washington types. Overall, though, they still made it illegal for you and I do do insider trading.
The Washington politicians passed OBamaCare legislation that required them and their staffs to be bound by the law and then successfully appealed to Obama to get them illegally exempted by the law they passed.

Other examples abound of “do as I say but not as I do” but you get the idea. This theme popped up after reading a recent article in Reason magazine. In light of the scandal of Hillary Clinton illegally and unethically using a private email process while Secretary Of State, so far without criminal penalties, the article pointed out that she was not the only member of the farcical “most transparent administration ever” to have broken the law...without paying the criminal price:

On March 17, 2015, the administration quietly deleted the part of the Federal register requiring the White House Office of Administration to be subjected to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
This past March 18, 2015, the Associated Press reported that the Obama administration had established a new record for having the most FOIA requests denied, with one third of those denials being overturned when appealed.
Prior to the Obama administration, over half of all speedy processing requests for FOIA claims were granted but by last year only one in eight speedy claims were granted.
Back in early 2013 EPA head Lisa Jackson resigned after it was discovered she was using a secret, illegal webmail address named “Richard Windsor.”
Afterwards it was discovered that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Attorney General Eric Holder also used illegal email addresses to hide their actions and communications.
Adding insult to injury, the Justice Department, the organization led by Holder, had the audacity to claim that these secret hidden email accounts did not “in any way impact compliance with FOIA requests.” Yeah, right, then why did Holder and others think it was a good idea to have those hidden accounts? I hate it when Washington types think we are that stupid.
Given that Holder fought hard to keep his official communications secret in the botched and deadly Fast and Furious program, one can only imagine the scandals lurking in the emails he tried to keep hidden and secret.
After five years of trying, The Associated Press finally got FOIA access after it filed a lawsuit against Hillary Clinton’s State Department for Clinton’s emails.
Let’s not forget the fact that tens of thousands of IRS email messages were “lost” after it was discovered that the IRS and possibly the Obama administration used the IRS to hassle political opponents and deny them their First Amendment rights.
Staying with the First Amendment abuse theme, the administration hassled and spied on journalists including, but not limited to: twenty Associated Press writers and editors, Fox News national security reporter James Rosen, and the prosecution of more whistle blowers than all previous Presidential administrations combined.
This First Amendment abuse led New York Times reporter James Risen to declare that the Obama Presidency is “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation.”

Let’s be honest. If we did not file our taxes on time like the Washington politicians failed to file a budget on time, we would be prosecuted and fined and/or in jail.

If we lied to the IRS about personal documents or hid evidence from law enforcement like Washington types hid their emails from legal and justifiable requests, we would be in jail.

If we abused others First Amendment rights by denying them freedom of speech or aggressively went after people that told on us like the Obama officials went after whistle blowers, we would be in jail.

We would be in jail but those in Washington that write the laws that would put us in jail somehow always avoid jail or any kind of penalty for breaking the law and violating the Constitution. Which, is often the case, we end up again confronting the need for term limits for all Washington politicians.

We need to clean house and finally put some honest people into office that actually do and act as they say like the rest of America is required to do. You can help start that process by visiting our term limit website at:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

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

Friday, May 29, 2015

May, 2015, Part 2, I Am A Global Warming Doubter and a Believer in Science: Forecast Model Fails

Every month we revisit the theme, “I am a global warming doubter and a believer in science.” The theme started when I got tired of people like Al Gore and others yelling and slandering anyone who dared to disagree with their view of global warming, since then rebranded as “climate change.” Yelling and demeaning people is no way to win them over to your view, which is what the Al Gores of the world are still doing.

Thus, we set off to explore ALL science, research, and realities relative to global warming, not just the handpicked science that global warming advocates cherry pick. What we have found through the years is that it is very realistic and in tune with the real world to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science.

Much science and research has been shown to debunk Al Gore’s way of thinking and slandering. And we have brought counter evidence to his view of the world every month for years. To access those previous posts, just enter the search term "I am a global warming doubter”in the search box above.

Our intention is to start an adult, mature, science based conversation based on all available information. That has certainly not been the intention of Al Gore types. They have wanted to browbeat their views into disbelievers heads. And even if they are right about global warming, which we have proven they are quite possibly wrong about, they come up with no plans that would reunite the world around a solution.

They only want the United States to curtail their carbon footprint, a reduction that would be dwarfed by the increasing carbon footprint of the rest of the world, especially China and India. All they would end up doing is briefly forestalling their end result while crippling the economic growth and vitality of the United States.

With that background, let’s look at what the global warming/climate change hysteria has brought us in the past month or so. Our first post this month can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2015/05/may-2015-i-am-global-warming-doubter.html

Since then, the following global warming myths have come to light:

1) Al Gore, Barack Obama, and other global warming alarmists are always telling us that almost all scientists agree that man made global warming is growing in intensity, that the “science is settled.” Many times in this blog we have shown that to be an outright lie and now we have another example of a scientist disagreeing with their assertion.

Dr. Phillip Lloyd is a South African based physicist and climate researcher. He conducted a study where he examined so-called ice core-based temperature data going back 8,000 years in an attempt to understand global temperature changes in the past century or so. His finding: global temperature changes over the past hundred years fall well within the natural variability of the past 8,000 years.

Dr. Lloyd does have some serious credibility going for him since he is a former member of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC), the main international body that has been pushing the man made global warming position for the past few decades. His findings are obviously a direct contradiction of that IPCC effort.

His findings include the calculation that the statistical standard deviation of Earth's temperatures over the past 8,000 years was about .98 degrees Celsius.That is higher than the lower .85 degrees that some climate scientists have estimated the world has warmed in the past hundred years: “This suggests that while some portion of the temperature change observed in the 20th century was probably caused by greenhouse gases, there is a strong likelihood that the major portion was due to natural variations,” Lloyd wrote in his study.

“Natural variations.” Not humanity’s burning of fossil fuels, not the use of coal, natural variations. Seems that Al Gore and others have either overlooked or decided to ignore this little piece of statistical reality. Natural variations. According to Dr. Judith Curry, a climate scientist and expert at Georgia Tech: “The magnitude of natural climate variability over the past 1000 years and even the past 100 years is hotly debated,” Curry added. “Personally, I think the role of natural climate variability has been substantially underestimated in our interpretation of recent climate change.”

This is not to say that man is not contributing to climate change, It does say that 1) the science is not settled, 2) global warming advocates continue to ignore science that is not compatible with their views, and 3) we are not going to have an adult conversation until ALL scientific data and realities are factored into to any future actions.

2) Let’s look at some more science and research that Al Gore types probably do not want us to see. A recent research paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that climate change models hyped by global warming/climate change advocates are infested with “flaws that make them close to useless as tools for policy analysis.” Furthermore, these assessment models: “can be misleading and are inappropriate as guides for policy,” argued economist Robert Pindyck. Nonetheless, the government has continued to use them to impose burdensome regulations that negatively affect the economy.

These models forecast global weather patterns will become more extreme over time with global warming causing more hurricanes and droughts. But this analysis shows that extreme weather is not going to get worse because of global warming, meaning the move to curb global warming by punishing power plants is not going to solve a fictitious problem but severely increase energy costs and hurt economic growth.

These findings were summarized by economist Robert Murphy in an interview with the Daily Caller: “The estimates [from the climate models] keep bouncing around all over the place, and the estimates are driven by very controversial parameter choices, not objective assessments given by physicists and climatologists. In any event, the public should realize just how ‘unsettled’ the economic side of the carbon debate is.”

Now an economist is not trained to do climate science. But an economist is trained to build, use, and assess statistical models and this economic entity found those climate models, the models that global warming advocates base their hysteria on, to be faulty and near useless.

3) One big component of global warming advocates view of the world is that the ice caps are melting because of man made global warming and that eventually, if enough of the ice caps melt, there will be devastating flooding of coastal regions around the world. In fact, Al Gore predicted that there was a reasonably good chance that the entire North Pole ice cap could melt by the year 2014, another forecast that failed miserably.

Additionally, the UK’s Guardian newspaper recently reported that fifty scientists held a meeting in Tasmania to brainstorm ideas on how to better predict the size of the Antarctic ice cap. They held the meeting since there has been such a build up in the size of the ice cap, researchers cannot get close to the South Pole to do their own direct measurements. The Guardian reported that in 2014 ships “couldn’t get anywhere near” the Australian Antarctic Division’s research site on Antarctica.

In addition, the Russian research vessel Akademik Shokalskiy got stuck in ice on Christmas Eve, 2013 on its way to show how global warming was impacting Antarctica. After being stuck on the ice for a week , an Australian icebreaker was sent to rescue them….and then it became temporarily stuck itself in the expanding Antarctic ice pack.

This past April, the Antarctic sea ice reached record levels for the month, 116,000 square miles higher than the previous record set in 2014.

So in summary, the one thing we definitely learned to today is the “science is NOT settled.” Whether it is a past member of the global warming center at the U.N. speaking out against the U.N.’s flawed position or economists debunking forecast models or the reality of growing ice caps that are at odds with the forecast models predictions, the science is not settled. And it is okay and actually quite prudent to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science….despite what Al Gore says.

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, May 28, 2015

George Orwell's 1984 and American Today - A Country Under Surveillance

Today we are going to look back on two previous posts we have done, one from 2011 and one from 2013. Congress is currently debating what changes to make on how the Federal government spies on its citizens. This debate is critical to preserving our liberties, our rights, and our privacy as supposedly guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

However, it seems that most of the Washington political class is intent on usurping these rights and freedoms, first by the Patriot Act and then by an NSA running wild, collecting all sorts of electronic information and communications of American citizens without warrants and without the basic right to do so. Thus, the reason for reviewing both of these posts, both of which were focused on showing how the dictatorship which arose in George Orwell's novel, "1984," is actually a blueprint for what is going on today in America.

What is interesting is that the first post from 2011 predicted what was going on and going to happen, the details of which we did not find out about until after Edward Snowden showed us how the NSA was already collecting just about every form of electronic communication of every American, something that was predicted in 1984:

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

The second post from 2013 is very similar form the first but provides another perspective since by the time that second post was created, the horrifying details from Snowden were now public.

Hopefully, after reviewing the warnings from these two posts you will contact your Congressional representatives and demand they get the NSA and the rest of Washington under control from a spying on Americans perspective. Tell them that we do not want to live in a Orwellian world:

WEDNESDAY, MAY 4, 2011

George Orwell, 1984, iPhones, And Freedom

Most of us are familiar with George Orwell's classic novel, "1984." This novel created a dysfunctional future where freedom, liberties and democracy have been replaced with an ever present, ever paranoid, and ever vindictive ruling class. Individuality is crushed and society is totally controlled in support of the state and Big Brother.

One of the more distressing aspects of Orwell's vision was the ability of the state, the political/ruling class, and government to be ever aware of where a person was, what they were doing, and what they were saying:

When this was written, it was no more than a scary, science fiction aspect of the future. However, according to recent news reports, as summarized in the May 6, 2011 issue of The Week magazine, this concept is still scary but is no longer fiction or in the future:

Nathan Goulding, writing in the National Review, reported that two data scientists uncovered the fact that Apple's iPhones, iPads, and iTouches can store a user's GPS locations, store their movements for up to a year, and send this information back to Apple for storage and analysis
The Goulding reporting claims that this is being done now, without getting the consent of the user or without the user being told what information is being collected on their habits and movements.
According to Jordan Robertson of the Associated Press, there are no laws on the books that make this behavior illegal or would prevent Apple (and other smartphone manufacturers) from sharing this data with other parties without an individual's permission.
John Naughton writing in the London Observer recalled a ten year old quote from Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems: "You have zero privacy. Get over it." Mr. Naughton concludes that McNealy is probably right.Scary, scary stuff, in my opinion.

You cannot live in a free country if you have no privacy. You cannot live in a free country when every sound you make could be overheard and every move you make could be scrutinized. The possibility of abuse without proper judicial and legal protection is staggering. If you do not think this is the case, consider two examples of how it could be abused:

First, in the March 18, 2011 issue of The Week magazine, a short article reviewed how the Chinese government is planning to install a massive tracking system that will monitor and track the location of every Chinese citizen that has a cell phone.

The government claims this massive process would help them to ease traffic congestion, a very weak argument.

Critics of the program, however, believe that the system would allow the authoritarian Chinese government to track and follow dissidents and journalists.

This would allow the government to learn of protest sites, clandestine meetings, etc.The Chinese system sounds a lot like what could be done quite easily if the U.S. government ever decided that it also needed this individual citizen information to "ease traffic congestion." You have to be suspicious when something that exists in America is very close in scope and capability to what the repressive Chinese government is also doing.

Second, who is to say our political class would not abuse this system for their own good? We know that President Obama has already tried to silence or minimize the reach and influence of Fox News. We know that Nancy Pelosi recently said that elections should not be as important as they are currently treated. We know that a Colorado congressman wants to allow elected officials to serve 25 years at a time. We know that those opposed to some aspects of President Obama's health care reform bill were branded as racists, Neanderthals, Ku Klux Klan members, gerbils, un-American,etc. by members of the ruling political class, simply for expressing an honest difference of opinion.

There are constantly assaults on our freedom in this country, almost always from the politicians that are running the government of this country. No, it is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that this tracking system would be abused by those that currently rule the country. It happened in George Orwell's world and it is happening in China, the possibility of it happening here is no longer science fiction.

To fight back this onslaught on freedom, several steps need to be implemented as soon as possible:

A smartphone user needs to be granted the option of not having his or her movements or conversations tracked. Traditionally in this country, you are innocent until proven guilty. The premise should still hold and you should be able to opt out of any tracking.
The government, via a politician or law enforcement official, should not be able to access your smartphone information without a signed, court order from a judge, after the government agency has proven its case for probable cause of a crime. This is the process for getting a search warrant for a home, it should be the same for searching a person's smartphone history.
If a court order is granted and the result of an investigation turns up no illegal activity on an American citizen, then that citizen needs to be told what information of theirs was obtained and why. This would ensure that law enforcement or other government agencies to not go on fishing expeditions without cause if they are forced to come clean after an investigation is over and the smartphone user is found innocent of all suspicions.

These three steps are very similar to the three steps in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," as it applies to the Patriot Act. (Steps 20 - 22). In fact, this whole situation needs to be framed as a subset within a national discussion on the whole idea of the Patriot Act and what needs to be done to better balance national security against national freedom.

Privacy is essential for a democracy to flourish and allowing someone to know where you are and who you are talking to without your permission is not privacy, even if it would help out the local traffic jam.

THURSDAY, JUNE 20, 2013

Government Gone Wild, Part 8: Three More NSA Whistleblowers Come Forward, Part One Of Their Tale Of Their Bravery

This is the ninth installment in a series on government snooping and the destruction of the Fourth Amendment as it pertains to the Federal government and the NSA’s confiscating just about every form of electronic communications of every American under the false guise of fighting terrorism. This Orwellian and creepy snooping has resulted in skyrocketing book sales of George Orwell’s dismal prediction of a future dictatorship in this country in the novel, “1984.”

In fact, you can still take the quiz that asks you to choose whether a certain aspect of government intrusion and spying is from Orwell or from the Obama administration at the following link:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/06/government-gone-wild-part-4-orwell-or.html

The first installment in this seemingly never ending review of the Fourth Amendment destruction can be accessed at:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/06/government-gone-wild-part-1-verizon.html

Today’s discussion focuses on three more NSA whistle blowers who have come forward to verify that the original whistle blower, Edward Snowden, who truly upended the apple cart of government snooping secrecy, was correct in his facts and in his actions to come forward as a concerned American who was scared about us losing our freedom and privacy to the Federal government.

This now brings the total number of outed whistle blowers on this administration’s secret surveillance of Americans to at least six. We have Snowden and the three new NSA whistle blowers. We have California Congresswoman Maxine Walters who publicly told the world in February that Obama had a giant database containing every American’s electronic communications. We also have Shia LaBeouf who told Jay Leno in a 2008 interview that an FBI movie consultant told him that the government was listening in on up to 20% of Americans’ phone calls, an assertion that is in complete conflict with President Obama’s claim that the government was NOT listening to our phone calls.

The claims and accusations made by the three new NSA whistleblowers are just as scary and dire as Snowden’s. They were interviewed together in a June 16, 2013 USA Today article and interview. The entire article can be accessed at:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblower-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/

Some of their more serious assertions and claims from the article are just as creepy and scary as Snowden’s:

Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe worked for the National Security Agency for many, many years and actually were deeply involved in developing the very systems that are now snooping on every American without due process or cause.
According to the article, for years the three whistle-blowers had told anyone who would listen that the NSA collects huge swaths of communications data from unwary U.S. citizens with their audiences ranging from their immediate supervisors to Congressional committees to Federal investigators, and now the news media.
Although they had spent decades in the upper management levels of the NSA designing and managing the current data-collection systems, they are speaking out now because they now believe their systems and work have been turned against Americans.
Like Snowden and the brave State Department employees who spoke out because of the unnecessary murders of four innocent Americans at the Benghazi consulate, these three brave Americans have also been investigated as criminals and forced to give up careers, reputations and friendships built over a lifetime of serving America.
Drake: “And we are seeing the initial outlines and contours of a very systemic, very broad, a Leviathan surveillance state and much of it is in violation of the fundamental basis for our own country — in fact, the very reason we even had our own American Revolution. And the Fourth Amendment for all intents and purposes was revoked after 9/11. …” Comment: Destruction of the Fourth Amendment, as witnessed by insiders who were close to the mechanism that did the destruction.
Radack: “He [Snowden] is someone who exposed broad waste, abuse and in his case illegality. ... And he also said he was making the disclosures for the public good and because he wanted to have a debate.”
Binney: “Ever since ... 1997-1998 ... those terrorists have known that we've been monitoring all of these communications all along. So they have already adjusted to the fact that we are doing that. So the fact that it is published in the U.S. news that we're doing that, has no effect on them whatsoever. They have already adjusted to that.” Comment: Which gets to our position yesterday, do we really think that the terrorists are that stupid to use basic, unencrypted communications modes?
Drake: “I mean, it's [the Verizon secret court order to give up telephone information] the first time we've publicly seen an actual, secret, surveillance-court order. I don't really want to call it "foreign intelligence" (court) anymore, because I think it's just become a surveillance court, OK? And we are all foreigners now. By virtue of that order, every single phone record that Verizon has is turned over each and every day to NSA. There is no probable cause. There is no indication of any kind of counterterrorism investigation or operation. It's simply: "Give us the data." ... “ Comment: Scary observation and actual fact that we are now all “foreigners” in our own country.
Drake and Binney: “One is that the FBI requesting the data. And two, the order directs Verizon to pass all that data to NSA, not the FBI. What it is really saying is the NSA becomes a processing service for the FBI to use to interrogate information directly. ... The implications are that everybody's privacy is violated, and it can retroactively analyze the activity of anybody in the country back almost 12 years.”
Binney: “Now, the other point that is important about that is the serial number of the order: 13-dash-80. That means it's the 80th order of the court in 2013. ... Those orders are issued every quarter, and this is the second quarter, so you have to divide 80 by two and you get 40. If you make the assumption that all those orders have to deal with companies and the turnover of material by those companies to the government, then there are at least 40 companies involved in that transfer of information. However, if Verizon, which is Order No. 80, and the first quarter got order No. 1 — then there can be as many as 79 companies involved.” Comment: So the assertion by this administration that only top line telephone call information and only Verizon information was confiscated is probably bogus.That concludes the first half of the story that these three brave whistleblower/American heroes told USA Today. We will conclude their stories and insights tomorrow along with our conclusions of what needs to be done to fix this liberty sapping situation.

Call your Congressional representatives now before it is too late. Protect the Fourth Amendment.

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, May 27, 2015

Fixing Public Education Despite The Washington Political Class

One of the great ills of our times is the less than adequate job that our schools do in educating our children. Consider some statistics that were researched in the development of our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government:"

•In 2006, the Program For International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted their tri-annual study of educational attainment by fifteen year old kids from fifty seven nations.

•In science literacy, the United States finished below the overall average and trailed the scores of kids from twenty two other nations.

•In mathematics literacy, the U.S. finished well below the overall average and trailed the scores of kids from thirty one other nations.

•Countries such as Estonia, Slovenia, and Macao finished higher than the U.S. in both categories.

Looking at more recent statistics on education, a December 26, 2010 issue of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) also addressed the poor performance of our public school system. The main feature in the article was a bar chart that displayed the percentage of 15 year olds performing at the advanced level in math proficiency many countries, including the United States, and every one of our fifty states.

The output from the graph was based on the work of Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and two others. They were very careful to accurately adjust and slice the raw data from the testing that was done to exclude the impact of the following factors, factors that had been used as excuses for the poor performance of American kids in the past:

• They only looked at math test scores since math is math, it is not affected by language or culture, as much as language skills.

• They adjusted for household income and wealth using reliable proxies.

• They adjusted for whether or not the there was a college educated parent in the child's household.

• They adjusted for whether or not there was a race impact.

• They adjusted for how much each state spends per student in their states' public schools.

The bottom line conclusion after trying to look at the data from every conceivable angle? Now matter how you cut it, the United States does a horrid job of preparing public school students for proficiency in math. How bad is it:

• Only 6% of U.S. 15 year olds performed at an advanced proficiency in math.

• This places them behind 30 other nations including Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Slovakia, far poorer countries.

• The top three performing countries, Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, had about four times as many of their students performing at high math proficiency.

• Only two states, Massachusetts and Minnesota, had more than 10% of their kids performing at high levels which were behind sixteen other nations.

• New York state, which spends the most on public education per student, $17,000 per year per student, had only 6.3% of their students perform at high proficiency, trailing 30 countries and 15 other U.S. states.

• A 2010 study found a very high correlation between how well teachers are trained and how well students perform. In the United States, researchers tested 3,300 middle school math teachers-to-be in almost 40 states. They found that these future math teachers performed at about the same levels of would be teachers in Oman and Thailand and far behind teachers in Taiwan and Singapore. (Note: for Thailand, only 1% of their 15 year olds perform at a high proficiency level in math; for Oman, it was not even listed in the graph discussed above).

These horrid results have been attained even though the American taxpayer has probably spent over a TRILLION dollars at the Federal government level to try and do a better job of educating our kids. We have been doing the same thing and taking the same approach for decades without anything positive to show for it, bringing to mind a famous Albert Einstein quote: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

But we should expect nothing less from a set of politicians that care only about their own greed and ego, making sure that established entities such as teachers’ unions are protected and keep donating to incumbents’ reelection campaigns.

But what if did did education a different way in this country? Could we finally get our money’s worth and hopefully get some of our money back without endangering our kids; education? Consider a different approach that actually exists today and exists within the shadows of the Washington politicians and bureaucrats that get nothing right:

The following success story comes from an article written by Akash Chougule who is the senior policy analyst at Americans for Prosperity.
The Opportunity Scholarship Program in Washington D.C. serves almost 5,000 students, 95% of whom are African-American.
The program funds private-school tuition for poor families in order that their kids can go to schools they would otherwise not be able to afford.
The Federal tax dollars spent on the program accounts for a minute 0.0005% of the federal budget.
Ninety one percent of the students in the program graduate high school compared with 56% for D.C. public schools.
Families who benefit from the Opportunity Scholarship Program have described it as “a godsend for our children,” a “life-saver,” and “our salvation.” One father is quoted in the article saying, “I truly shudder to think where my son would be today without it.
The program was set up by the Bush administration when it was funded with $20 million of funding while at the same time DC public school, who would lose students to private schools under this program so that the public schools would not be financially disadvantaged.
But giving more money to schools does not appear to be the solution since according to the article, the country has more than doubled education spending over the past 40 years with no gain in education attainment to show for the investment.

Wow, a simple solution that improves results by about 80%, a solution that parents like and want to continue, and a program that avoids some of the typical bureaucracy we find in public schools today. Would go wrong?

Well, according to the article, President Obama and many Congressional Democrats have been trying to kills this program for years and years. Which is especially disturbing from the President’s perspective since he sends his kids to one of the most exclusive, if not the most exclusive, private schools in the DC area, the Sidwell Friends School, a school that costs tens of thousands of dollars a year to attend. Some serious hypocrisy if you ask me, he can afford to pay for the best education for his kids but wants to deny the opportunity to the poorer residents that live around the White House.

Why would one want to do that? That answer is simple: political election and reelection money. Go to the following link at the fabulous Open Secrets website and you will see that the National Education Association, and other teacher union related entities, donate tens of millions of dollars each year to politicians, the vast majority of which goes to Democrats like Obama:

https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=L1300

Teachers unions are scared of successful voucher and private school initiatives like this since it threatens their current monopoly hold on education in this country. Thus, they have found friendly political allies in the Democrats serving in Congress and you can make the correlation case that campaign donations come with the strings attached that private school programs like Opportunity Scholarship Program are discouraged or killed outright, the welfare and education of the inner city youth be damned.

Two steps from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government” would help alleviate this conflict of interest and maybe lead to more inner city kids getting opportunities in spite of political considerations:

Step 6 would allow only private citizens to contribute to political election campaigns. No PACs, no Super PACs, no dark money, no corporations, no unions, etc. would be allowed to contribute to election campaigns. Nowhere in the Constitution’s First Amendment did the Founding Fathers guarantee that a corporation or union or PAC had freedom of speech protection.
Step 35 would limit all Federal politicians to one term in office, one and done. Much of the election sleaze that happens in American politics is driven by incumbents desperately hanging onto their office and granting favors to those that will help finance that hanging on.

This program proves that we can resolve problems in this country, in this case when it comes educating our kids. But as we often see, it is the political class that prevents problem resolution in this country,not that our problems are insolvable. The above two steps would go a long way to fixing not only our education issues but who knows what other problems we can resolve once the political class is removed as a road block.

If you agree with us, please visit our companion website to find out how to help get term limits installed at the Federal government level:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

Because really, how much worse could it get if we replaced every current Washington politician with new ones?

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:

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

May, 2015, Part 2, Why No American Should Pay An Additional Penny In Federal Taxes

Hundreds of times we have shown in this blog how the Federal government and the Washington political class have wasted untold trillions of dollars of taxpayer wealth over the years. This has left the taxpayers nothing in return to show for their money except a whopping $18 TRILLION national debt. Many times the money was spent on one time, wasteful projects:

The Navy built two new ships almost to completion at a cost of $300 million only to spend another $10 million to junk them immediately.
Hillary Clinton’s State Department spent $40 million to build a U.S. consulate in the hinterlands of Afghanistan only to find out after spending the money that it had to be abandoned because it could not withstand a terrorist attack.
The TSA purchased hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment for airport security in order to get a bigger discount but ended up not using a high percentage of the equipment anyway, leaving it stacked in a warehouse never to be seen or used.
The National Science Foundation has spent millions and millions of dollars on such inane projects as building a video game to simulate prom week, studying when dog became man’s best friend, determining of dating sites were racist and other equally useless projects.

But many of these one time wastes of money pale in comparison to the money that is consistently wasted in the same manner year in and year out:

Medicare and Medicaid lose upwards of $100 billion every year due to inefficiencies and outright criminal fraud.
Social Security loses upwards of $100 billion every year due to inefficiencies and outright criminal fraud.
Other welfare programs such as Federal housing support and food assistance lose billions and billions of dollars every year due to inefficiencies and outright criminal fraud.
The IRS loses billions of dollars every year to identity theft in the income tax filing system every year.
The IRS is so inept that it admits that it fails to collect almost $400 billion a year from tax evaders.
The President’s debt reduction commission easily identified $100 billion a year that could be removed from the Pentagon’s annual budget without endangering national security.

Thus, it is pretty obvious that no American, no matter how rich or poor, should [pay a penny more in taxes given that the Federal government and the Washington politicians that operate it easily waste or fail to collect a whopping $800 billion or so EVERY YEAR.

But this reality is apparently lost on a Georgia Congressman.

Hank Johnson recently stated that when it comes to taxes, “we [Washington politicians] don’t have enough [taxes] to do what the government - and do what the country needs the government to do and that’s the problem.”

The Congressman went on: “If everyone is paying their fair share of taxes than we certainly should and can live within our means. But our problem now is that taxes are being paid by the middle class. The rich, the wealthy and the corporations are not paying their fair share and so therefore we don’t have enough to do what the government and do what the country needs the government to do and that’s the problem.”

Note: before you consider whether the Congressman’s position has any merit, remember that this is the same Congressman who claimed in public:

That the island of Guam might tip over in the middle of the ocean if too many U.S.military resources were placed on the island. That’s right, he actually stated in a Congressional committee meeting that an island could tip over.
He also lamented the possibility that there would not be enough helium gas to blow up birthday balloons if Congress stopped funding a Federal storage facility for helium.

Yesterday we focused on how much the Federal government and the Washington political class wastes of taxpayer money every day of every year and how inane and out of touch politicians like Hank Johnson are when they ignorantly claim that more Americans need to pay more taxes.

We reviewed any number of credible sources and analyses that constantly show that a very small percentage of people in this country pay a very high percentage of the Federal tax bill. And with more and more of these wealthier people renouncing their citizenship every year and moving away, taking their tax payments with them, that means that the rest of us will end up paying more and more in taxes unless our politicians finally get a handle on wasteful spending.

But the odds of that happening are probably pretty slim, given that they have no even tried despite being shown where the wasteful and useless spending is within the budget. Obama actually commissioned a blue ribbon commission to identify the waste, which they did and which he promptly ignored.

Today, let’s explode another Congressman Johnson fantasy by showing that no matter how much you tax the high earners and the wealthy in this country, it will make absolutely no difference in the quality of life for every citizen or the financial chaos of the Federal government.

Our proof of this last assertion rests on some simple logic and math:

The Federal government spends about $4 TRILLION a year.
Let’s round it off and assume that the Federal government spends about $11 billion a DAY.
According to the latest Forbes analysis, Bill Gates is the richest American with a net worth of about $81 billion.
Congressman Johnson and other politicians want to tax people like Bill Gates more.
But let's assume that Johnson et al get the ultimate politician wish and do not just raise taxes on a wealthy person’s income but that they confiscate EVERYTHING that the wealthy person owns.
In the Gates case, if the Washington political class took everything Bill Gates owns, it could use that wealth to operate the Federal government for a grand total of … about seven days, just over one week.
It could pay off only .45% of the national debt, less one half of one percent.
Not only that, whatever Federal income tax Gates would have paid in the following years would now be equal to zero since it is doubtful he would ever work again, knowing that the Federal government could come along and take everything he owns. This would force the rest of the taxpayers to make up the difference.

Taking everything the richest American owns could support the Federal government bureaucracy for only a week or so. So taking less than that, something that Congressman Johnson and others would like to do would be even far smaller.

How much smaller? Let’s assume that Bill Gates earns $8 billion a year, a totally made up number, 10% of his current net worth. And that Johnson raises his Federal income tax rate by 10% which yields an additional $800 million a year to the Federal government. In this case, taxing Bill Gates income at a 10% higher rate could result in tax revenue that could operate the Federal government for...about an hour and 45 minutes. This would pay off .004% of the national debt.

Don’t these politicians ever do any simple math before opening their simple mouths? You cannot fix what is wrong with this country by raising taxes, there are not enough rich people to get it done.You have to cut spending, starting with the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted every year by Washington.

Let’s take this imaginary confiscation example and extend to other rich Americans, first assuming that the Washington political class took EVERYTHING they earned and somehow turned it into cash:

Bill Gates $81 billion - could operate the Federal government for just over 7 days.

Warren Buffet $67 billion - just over 6 days.

Larry Ellison $50 billion - about 4 and a half days.

Charles Koch $42 billion - just under 4 days.

David Koch $42 billion - just under 4 days.

Christy Walton $38 billion - about 3 and a half days.

Jim Walton $36 billion - about 3 and a quarter days.

Mike Bloomberg $35 billion - not even 3 and a quarter days.

Alice Walton $35 billion- not even 3 and a quarter days.

Robson Walton $35 billion - not even 3 and a quarter days.

Mark Zuckerberg $34 billion - just over 3 days.

Sheldon Adelson $32 billion - just under 3 days.

Larry Page $31.5 billion - just under 3 days.

Sergey Brin $31 billion - just under 3 days.

Jeff Bezos $30.5 billion - about 2 and three quarters day.

Total - $620 billion which could operate the Federal government for only 56 days, less than two months, about eight weeks or pay off only 3.6% of the national debt.

As with the Bill Gates example above, you cannot make this work even if you take EVERYTHING the richest 15 Americans own in their lives. You could only operate the government for two months in only one year because in the following years these people would have nothing to contribute Federal tax wise. Which means that everyone else would have to make up the difference.

If we continue the Gates example with the 15 richest Americans, than that $620 billion becomes $62 billion which could not operate the Federal government for even a week. And, if you used that money to operate the government, you still have not paid off any part of the growing and dangerously high national debt.

No matter what people like Hank Johnson say, taxing the wealthy even more cannot overcome the out of control spending and government waste of people like Hank Johnson. All this kind of rhetoric does is divide America, waste more wealth, allow the debt to soar, and get nothing accomplished. And remember, this economic wisdom is coming from a man who was worried a Pacific island would tip over take anything he says with a huge grain of sand.

Note: we have already shown how to take trillions of dollars out of the Federal government’s budget without negatively impacting government operations and returning trillions of dollars to pay down our debt and pay back taxpayers. That analysis can be seen at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/12/day-7-eight-days-of-logic-and-sanity.html

The analysis was developed by someone who knows that Pacific islands cannot tip over.

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