September, 2015, Political Class Insanity, Part 6: Economic Policy Failure In Washington and Immigrants Sucking Up More Welfare Than Natives

It is the start of another month which means it is time for our monthly review of the latest political class insanity that continually spews forth from America’s politicians. Their actions, words, quotes, incompetency, and general ineptness continue to reinforce our theory that we are currently being served by the worst set of politicians in the history of the nation.

As you read about the latest shenanigans and ineptness of the political class, keep in mind what should be their priorities in these difficult times and compare this list to what they are actually working on:

• NBC recently reported that ISIS forces are getting larger and stronger despite the Obama administration spending billions of dollars on a failed air campaign and military strategy.
• The stock market is in free fall.
• Job creation is barely keeping up with population growth.
• Wage growth is anemic, growing just .2% in the second quarter, the lowest quarterly growth since 1982.
• The labor participation rate is at the lowest level in decades because the Obama economy cannot generate enough jobs.
• Thousands of veterans are still not getting the medical care they were promised by the Federal government.
• 46 million Americans are still receiving monthly Federal food assistance.
• Our borders still leak and thousands of illegal immigrant criminals continue to walk our streets
• A record number of police officers have been assassinated in the past week.
• Major programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are hurtling towards insolvency and lose hundreds of billions of dollars every year to fraud and mismanagement.
• Our kids are still getting lousy public educations at most public schools.
• The IRS and other government functions seem to be getting their computer systems hacked on a regular basis, exposing tens of millions of Americans to identity theft potential.
• Obama Care is a failure along so many dimensions as health care costs continue to soar despite the Obama promise that they would decrease.
• Annual Federal deficits, while down, are still about half a TRILLION a year meaning that even though the Federal government is collecting more in taxes than ever before, it still cannot run a balanced budget.

Again, keep these real crises in mind as you read what our politicians are actually doing.

1) The President likes to tout how well a job he has done managing the economy which as almost always with him, is either political spin, ignorance, or outright lying. Consider the following government statistics on the economy that come from a NewsMax article on September 7, 2015 by Stephen Moore:

• Twenty million recent college graduates are living at home, unable or unwilling to find a good job.
• A 2014 CNN study found that half of the kids who are at least two years past their graduation day still rely on their parents to pay some or all of their bills.
• Which also means that many recent graduates are not paying back their student loans which will eventually have to be paid by the American taxpayer.
• Although the official U-3 unemployment rate is down to 5.1%, that has more to do with the mathematical calculation than actually major improvements in the economy and its ability to create jobs.
• The more realistic unemployment rate that includes workers too discouraged to look for a job or forced to settle for a part time job is 10.5% according to the Federal government.
• A whopping 90 million adult Americans are no longer in the workforce.
• Over 46 million Americans get Federal food assistance every month.
• If Obama and his economic policies had created a normal economic recovery, there would be an additional 5 to 6 million more jobs for these unemployed Americans.
• If Obama had mimicked the Reagan recovery, that number would be closer to 8 million incremental jobs.
• According to Census Bureau stats and analysis, through this past June, the median income family has lost $1,700 in real income since Obama became President.
• The true irony of this fiscal and economic failure is that the steepest declines in income and the higher unemployment rates occur among blacks, Hispanics, single women, and young adults, the very people who voted Obama into office twice. Talk about racism and a “war on women.”
• A standard measure of income inequality, the Gini coefficient, shows that there is now a wider gap between rich Americans and poor Americans than during the entire George W. Bush Presidency.

And somehow the Obama administration, and the rest of Washington’s political class, have managed such anemic economic results despite spending over $800 billion on a failed economic stimulus package, living through a domestic energy and technology revolution that created thousands of good paying jobs, reduced energy costs, and reduced our reliance on imported oil, and benefited from an out of control Federal Reserve that printed up trillions of dollars. 

And still, even having the benefit of these three monster tail winds, they, Obama and the rest of Washington, still screwed it up. You cannot make up such incompetence and insanity.

2) Let’s continue on this train of bad economic numbers and add in a few more:

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently published the job numbers for the month of August which showed that only 173,000 jobs were created in August, a 30% decrease from the previous two months.
• Although the U-3 unemployment rate dropped top 5.1% that was only because 261,000 people dropped out of the workforce, too discouraged to look for a full time job or forced to settle for a part time job.
• The Center For Immigration studies found that in the second quarter of 2015 that native born blacks and Hispanic workers had U-6 unemployment rates that were at least 50% higher than all native born workers.
• In an ironic twist, the study found that almost one in four native born workers between the ages of 18-29 cannot find a full time job where foreign born workers of the same age that are 20% more likely to have a full time job.
• The unemployment rate for low skilled workers, young adults, and African-Americans is over 8% vs. an overall unemployment rate of 5.1%.

Again, despite the tremendous positive tailwinds of a stimulus package, an energy revolution, and the Fed printing money, this is how badly the Washington political class and current administration has done in trying to manage a vibrant, growing economy.

3) One last set of bad numbers for today, from another study done by the Center For Immigration Studies. The found that:

• A whopping 51% of immigrant-headed households use at least one welfare program (welfare, housing, food assistance, etc.).
• This number is two thirds higher than native born households where only 30% of those households use at least one welfare program.
• This would indicate that immigrants, legal and illegal, are not the best and brightest of the rest of the world in general, they are the lower skilled and less educated in general, resulting in higher unemployment rates and higher welfare usage rates.
• The author of the report, Dr. Steve Camarota concluded that: "As we make clear in our report, the main reason that immigrants use more welfare than natives is simply that immigrants tend to be less educated and subsequently poorer than natives. Welfare use is not a moral failing on the part of low-skilled immigrants any more than it is for low-skilled natives. Our point is that as long as we continue to take in so many low-skilled immigrants (legal or illegal), immigrant welfare use will remain high."

Not only will welfare usage remain high, it will also unnecessarily tax the average taxpaying working American and deny additional support to needy native born Americans.

That will do it for today’s insanity. Despite spending almost a trillion dollars on a failed economic stimulus plan, despite having the benefit of an energy revolution, and despite having the benefit of the Fed printing and distributing trillions of dollars, the Washington political class and the Obama administration STILL could create a robust, vibrant economic environment. 

And as an additional economic kicker, legal and illegal immigrants fare far worse in the Obama economy and eat up more welfare dollars than native Americans, making a shambles of any defense of the current immigration policies being administered by this Presidency.

Six days into this month’s political class insanity and we are still not close to being done, more insanity tomorrow.

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