September, 2015, Political Class Insanity, Part 8: Terrorism At An All Time High, Manufacturing At An All Time Low

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) We have always tried to make the case, and often that case has been extremely easy to make, that we are living through the worst set of Washington politicians ever to hold office and they are presiding over the most expensive yet most ineffective Federal bureaucracies ever. This theory was recently upheld when you look at a damning report recently released by the Department of Homeland Security, as recently reported on the Investors’ Business Daily website.

Before you read the highlights of this report, keep in mind that since the attacks on 9-11, the Federal government has easily spent trillions and trillions of dollars trying to protect the United States and its citizens from terrorist attacks. And while the Feds have definitely thwarted some attacks, according to the report the homeland security situation is very dangerous despite the spending of trillions of dollars:

• "The terror threat level in the U.S. homeland is high, and the situation is getting steadily worse," the seven-page report warns.
• Over just the past five years, the number of U.S. terrorist cases involving homegrown violent jihadists has tripled to 122 from 38 in 2010.
• The Islamic State has inspired or directed 55 terrorist plots or attacks against Western targets — including 14 in the U.S. alone — and there are already more cases this year than in all of 2014.
• U.S. authorities have arrested or charged at least 48 individuals in the U.S. in 2015 — and 63 since 2014 — in Islamic State-related cases.
• Most of the IS terrorist plots and attacks have involved targets in the New York and Boston areas.
• The majority of recent Islamic terrorist plots have targeted law enforcement or troops based inside the U.S., such as July's Chattanooga, Tennessee attack, killing five soldiers.
• The FBI has "hundreds of open investigations" of potential ISIS-inspired terrorists that cover all 56 of the bureau's field offices in 50 states.
• Potentially "thousands of Americans" are taking in ISIS recruitment propaganda over social media sites, and may act on jihadist commands to "kill, kill, kill."
• ISIS has produced more than 1,700 "jihadeos" and other propaganda material in just the first five months of this year.
• ISIS and its agents are posting an estimated 200,000 jihadist messages on Twitter every day, and despite the FBI's crackdown, American recruitment is exploding.
• ISIS is drawing fighters from more than 100 countries, including "dozens" from America, and can now muster between 20,000 and 30,000 foot soldiers.
• The Islamic State's Western-based jihadists continue to recruit online in English-language social media posts, inspiring new generations of terrorists to join its ranks or conduct attacks in their home countries.
• "America and its overseas partners have largely failed to roll back the ISIS terror safe haven," the congressional panel said.
• The report notes that ISIS now has a direct presence, affiliates or groups pledging support in at least 18 countries or territories, including: Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Lebanon, Nigeria, the Palestinian territories, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen.

Recall that Obama once called ISIS the “JV” of terrorist organizations. This will likely go down as one of the worst foreign policy statements and assessments issued by any President, ever. Nevertheless, despite spending trillions of dollars, the possibility of an attack is possibly at the highest point ever, as documented by the very people who are expected to keep us safe.

2) According to a recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report, there are more government workers throughout the United States than those employed the manufacturing sector of the country. As of August, 2015, there were 21,995,000 government employees at all levels of government and only 12,329,000 in manufacturing, a ratio of 1.8 government employees for every manufacturing employee.
As the Washington political class has constantly showed they have no idea how to operate a growing, vibrant economy, we are now saddled with over 20 million Americans who do not create incremental wealth for the economy, being paid based on the wealth created by others and financed via dozens of taxes. And this trend of incompetence has been going on for decades:



According to the government data, manufacturing employment in the United States peaked in June 1979, when it hit 19,553,000. Which means we as a nation have lost about 7 million middle class manufacturing jobs since mid-1979. In fact, the number of manufacturing jobs today is about the same number of manufacturing jobs that existed in December,1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor:



In 1941, there was one manufacturing job for every 10.6 citizens. In 2015, there is one manufacturing job for every 26.1 people in the total population. While we can argue what went wrong to turn the U.S. from a manufacturing powerhouse into a shrinking manufacturing footprint, the stats show that the Washington political class has done nothing to reverse this trend. Maybe that explains why the true unemployment rate in this country is stubbornly still over 10%.That will do it for this month’s political class insanity. Today we found out that we are in more danger from a terrorist attack than probably any time in our history even though our politicians have spent trillions of dollars to prevent this very situation. Those same politicians and their predecessors presided over a deterioration of our country’s manufacturing base that took over two hundred years to create. Devastation is the only consistent output of our political class. Given the insanity of the past week that we discussed, consider joining our effort to get term limits for Washington politicians because really, how much worse could it be if we got rid of every current Washington politician after one term:www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com