"Try To Pare Things Down. Very Few Moves Do A Lot.... No American Politician Ever Said

“Try to pare things down. Very few moves do a lot.”

It is no surprise that the Washington political class runs a very inefficient and ineffective Federal government:

• Medicare and Medicaid lose upwards of $100 billion a year to waste and outright criminal fraud.
• Social Security loses about $100 billion a year to waste and outright criminal fraud.
• Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are well on their way to financial collapse.
• The IRS readily admits that it fails to collect almost $400 billion a year from tax evaders.
• The IRS has devolved into a political tool to suppress the voting and First Amendment rights of American citizens.
• The National Science Foundation has wasted billions of dollars over time on such idiotic research such as finding out when dogs became best friends, determining if online dating sites are racists, etc.
• Federal housing and food assistance welfare programs waste billions of dollars every year.
• Obama Care is turning out to be the worst piece of legislation ever enacted.
• The nation’s infrastructure is crumbling under our feet despite that fact being known and a reality for years.
• The Federal railroad system known as Amtrak has lost tens of billions of dollars since its inception.
• Our borders still leak.
• Our public schools still under educate our kids.

We could go on and on about other failures but you get the idea, politicians make life very complicated with contorted programs and laws that almost never work. 

The American political class has turned our political processes and the Federal government into Jabba the Hutt from Star Wars. Jabba is a large, formless, tyrannical life form that sucks up resources but provides no societal benefit in return. If that does not summarize the Federal government today then I have no idea what does.

As we proposed in “Love My Country, Loathe My Government,” we need to get to a point in Washington where things get simplified in order to get resolved. Rather than focusing on far fewer problems and making getting some of them resolved, our politicians bounce around from perceived crisis to perceived crisis, resolving nothing.

Let’s consider a fictitious,yet realistic, example of how American politicians make our lives more complicated, more expensive, and more confounding how they never resolve an issue:

The Coyote Principle

California

• The Governor of California is jogging with his dog along a nature trail. A coyote jumps out and attacks the Governor's dog, then bites the Governor.
• The Governor starts to intervene, but reflects upon the movie "Bambi" and then realizes he should stop because the coyote is only doing what is natural.
• He calls animal control. Animal Control captures the coyote and bills the state $200 testing it for diseases and $500 for relocating it.
• He calls a veterinarian. The vet collects the dead dog and bills the State $200 testing it for diseases.
• The Governor goes to hospital and spends $3,500 getting checked for diseases from the coyote and on getting his bite wound bandaged.
• The running trail gets shut down for 6 months while Fish & Game conducts a $100,000 survey to make sure the area is now free of dangerous animals.
• The Governor spends $50,000 in state funds implementing a "coyote awareness program" for residents of the area.
• The State Legislature spends $2 million to study how to better treat rabies and how to permanently eradicate the disease throughout the world.
• The Governor's security agent is fired for not stopping the attack. The state spends $150,000 to hire and train a new agent with additional special training re the nature of coyotes.
• PETA protests the coyote's relocation and files a $5 million suit against the state.

TEXAS

• The Governor of Texas is jogging with his dog along a nature trail. A coyote jumps out and attacks his dog.
• The Governor shoots the coyote with his state-issued pistol and keeps jogging. The Governor has spent $.50 on a .45 ACP hollow point cartridge.
• The buzzards eat the dead coyote.

Sound familiar, you could apply this principle to anything Washington touches. But it was not always that way. Two of the most important pieces of legislation passed by Washington in the past fifty years, were less than 34 pages long. The Voters’ Right Act was about two pages long and the Civil Rights Act was about 34 pages long.

But that is not the efficiency and positive results we get today. If we had politicians from the 1960s, Obama Care might have been only a page or two long, comprising the following three simple principles:

1. Simply raise Medicaid income levels to qualify more lower earning Americans for this Federal insurance program.
2. Allow kids to stay on family policies until age 26. 
3. Recoup the $100 billion lost annually in Medicare and Medicaid criminal fraud and use it to sure those with pre existing conditions.

This is how simple Obama Care could have been. Basically the same results we have seen since Obama Care was rolled out without all of the agony and complications. Instead, today’s politicians gave us the following contorted and complicated (and failed) health care legislation insanity:

1. 2,000 pages of legislation.
2. 10,000 pages of regulations.
3. A massive and expensive Federal government online health insurance exchange process, to the tune of billions of dollars, that failed miserably out of the gate and continues to be a major operations problem.
4. Numerous and expensive state based online health insurance exchanges processes. to the tune of at least hundreds of millions of dollars, the majority of which never performed anywhere close to the promise and many of which have already been shut down or may get shut down because they simply do not work.
5. A large and expensive and mostly useless operations system to handle customer calls and registration for insurance policies that has malfunctioned from day one.
6. Two massive subsidy programs to pay and subsidize large insurance companies for their loses.
7. The forcing of upwards of 7 million people to unnecessarily lose their current insurance coverage.
8. Millions of people unnecessarily lost access to their preferred doctors, hospitals, and current treatment programs.
9. Millions of Americans unnecessarily got exposed to identity theft because of faulty data systems processes within the Obama Care process.

“Try to pare things down. Very few moves do a lot.”  Over 10,000 pages of regulations is not paring things down and will accomplish very little. As we have discussed every month over dozens of posts in this blog, by NOT paring things down, the Washington political class has enacted a Jabba The Hutt monstrosity called Obama Care that is not working and will never work.

To show you how screwed up Washington is from a functionality perspective, the Heritage Foundation recently compared six major projects that were COMPLETED in less time than it has taken the Keystone Pipeline to be STUDIED:

• It took four years and 600,000 rivets to build the Golden state bridge. Since its construction, over 2 billion cars have crossed the span.
• It took five years to build the Hoover Dam that at its base the dam is as thick as two footballs fields measured end-to-end.
• It took one year to build Boeing’s Everett factory which the Guinness Book of World records claims is largest building in the world by volume. 
• It took two years to build the Pentagon which housed 30,000 people during World War II and which has 17 miles of corridors.
• It took two years to build Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta airport which covers 4,700 acres and is the largest air passenger terminal complex in the world.
• It took two years to build Beaver stadium in Oregon which is now the second largest stadium in college football.

Thank goodness today's Washington politicians were not involved in the Voting Rights Act. Fifty years later that might still be studying it and adding thousands of pages of regulations to it. If today’s politicians were working on putting a man on the moon it may take a century whereas Kennedy proposed that it take less than a decade, which it did.

“Try to pare things down. Very few moves do a lot.” And one move that could do a lot, one simple move, would be to impose term limits on all current and future Washington politicians. Many of the current members of Congress have been in Congress for decades. They are the ones responsible for making life much more complicated, expensive, and less palatable to Americans. They are the Jabba The Hutts of our generation. Time to move them out and find people that can focus on far fewer distractions and finally resolve the big issues of our day. To help pare things down, please go to our term limits website at:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

Because really, when Jabba is your role model, any replacement has to be better.

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