February, 2016, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: More Debt, More Taxes, More Disgust With Government

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc.

To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity posts we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history.

So let’s get started with the latest insanity:

1) According to the history books, one of the main drivers that American colonists had for rebelling against the British was the high level of taxation that the British throne had placed on the colonies. The colonists understood way back then that you could not have political freedom without financial freedom. “Taxation without representation” became their rallying cry and their efforts to throw off the yoke of high taxation led to our freedoms and liberties in subsequent centuries.

Well, according to a recent piece on the Against Crony Capitalism website, taxation with representation is not so great either. Their research found that the average American today spends more on taxes than food, clothing and housing COMBINED (click on the chart for a larger view):



These calculations from the Tax Foundation estimate that all Americans will paid $4.8 trillion in taxes to all government entities in 2015 and spent just over $4 trillion on food, clothing, and housing in 2015. The $4.8 trillion is about 31% of the total national income of all Americans. Thus, in reality, we are paying over 30% of our earnings to the “government” each year, a government that is inept, wasteful, crony infested, and generally incompetent.

Another way to view this taxation repression is to multiply 31% by 365 days of the year, in which case we find that we working until late April each year just to pay the government. Pathetic and insane, a complete contradiction of the principles on which this country was founded.

2) Given the high level of taxation and the wasteful spending that their wealth is used for by the political class, it should not be a surprise that Americans despise government agencies. In fact, according to a new survey by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), Americans' level of satisfaction level in Federal agencies, including everything from Treasury to Homeland Security, has 1) fallen for a third consecutive year and 2) reached an eight-year low.

Not surprisingly, the Treasury Department, home of the notorious IRS, got the lowest marks of satisfaction compared to all other government agencies. Not only are they the ones that come and take our money, they are also the agency that continues to show up as being one of the more inept ones in this blog, one that fails to collect almost $400 billion a year from tax evaders, one that erroneously sends out billions of dollars a each year to criminal activities and enterprises, and the agency that denied the First Amendment rights of millions of citizens by delaying and sandbagging people’s requests to form non-profit entities to support political stances that were contrary to the Obama administration.

"Satisfaction is linked to broader goals in the political system that it wants to maximize, like confidence and trust," said Forrest Morgeson, director of research at the ACSI. "It's much more difficult to govern if the entire population dislikes you." This may partially explain why the Obama administration has been such a failure. It failed to deliver basic government services to Americans, resulting in a record low satisfaction level with government, and in this case the Obama administration. Funny how the eight year low satisfaction was reached seven years into the Obama Presidency.

3) Terrence Jeffrey, writing for the CNS News website on January, 26, 2016, may have identified another reason why satisfaction with government is at an eight year low. According to the article and the U.S. Treasury, the U.S.national debt has grown over $8.3 TRILLION in the first seven years of the Obama administration. This comes out to an additional debt load of $70,612.91 for EVERY U.S. family.

For comparison purposes, before the liberal readers of this blog go nuts, during the entire eight year Bush Presidency, the national debt burden went up just under $4.9 trillion or $44,104.65 for every American household. But given that the Obama administration has another year of debt accumulation to account for, there is a very good chance that Obama will add twice as much debt to America than Bush did. In fact, there is a very good chance that Obama will increase the national debt by the same amount that ALL previous Presidents COMBINED:



From the beginning of Bush’s first term to the end of Obama’s seventh year in office, the national debt increased $13,213,630,160,947.51 which comes out to $112,219.57 for each of the 117,748,000 households that were in the country as of September, 2015. As we said before, taxation with representation is not so great either.Maybe if we had gotten something for our individual $112,219.57 debt burden, we could justify this type of government spending. But our roads and bridges are still falling down, our public schools still fail to educate our kids, our border is still not secure, we are no safer from terror attacks than we were seven years ago, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are still hurtling towards financial insolvency, government operations are wasteful, inefficient, and ineffective, etc. $112,219.57 for basically nothing in return. If government was a new car, we would have had it recalled as a lemon decades ago.That will do it for today’s insanity. An ever growing and crushing debt burden, a never growing and crushing tax burden, and an ever growing disgust with government and the politicians that operate it. And we are just getting warmed for this month’s political class 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