October, 2017, Part 3, Political Class Insanity: More Celebrity Political Drivel , More Scandals at the VA, and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us.

1) If there is a group of people less in touch with the issues and realities facing Americans than our politicians it is probably Hollywood performers. Seems everything that they tweet or say is nonsense which only reinforces the reality that they are so out of touch with the real world.

So it was no surprise when C-List performer and comedian Amy Schumer recently put her foot in her mouth when she claimed during a BBC interview that Americans who do not like Hillary Clinton are just “uninformed.” Ms. Schumer, maybe you misinterpret “uninformed” with “informed” about the following Hillary realities:

• Maybe non-Hillary supporters are aware that she condoned, abetted, and protected her sexual predator husband for decades, maybe they did not want a sexual predator back roaming the halls of the White House.
• Maybe non-Hillary supporters are aware that she cannot be trusted with vital information as the President since she obviously could not be trusted to guard and protect classified information when she was Secretary of State.
• Maybe non-Hillary supporters did not trust her because she deleted over 30,000 emails from an illegal and unsecured computer server and used a specific program to make sure those emails stayed deleted and were untrackable.
• Maybe non-Hillary supporters looked at her Senate record and found that in her entire tenure she was able to get only three pieces of legislation passed that she was a primary sponsor of, especially since one of the three named a post office and another of the three named a highway.
• Maybe they looked at her hypocrisy of being critical of Wall Street banks in public but supportive of them in private, especially when they gave you very rich speaking fees.
• Maybe they were just tired of her lies, from the true cause of the Benghazi attack (it was NOT some obscure video) to her landing under fire when visiting Bosnia (you did NOT land under fire) to saying all of her grandparents were immigrants (they were NOT), etc.

No, Ms. Schumer, there was plenty about Hillary to be informed about. Given the partial list of information above, maybe YOU are the uninformed one.

2) Seattle tends to be a very Democratic and liberal city politically. George Will. writing for the National Review website on September 27, 2017, pointed out a number of reasons why that is not the brightest thing to be:

• Mr. Will pointed out that the city political class recently passed a tax law that put a $1.18 city tax on each bottle of two liter soda sold within the city limits. This is supposed to reduce the amount of sugary drinks that city residents purchase and thus somehow reduce obesity.
• However, we have previously reported in this blog that when other cities (e.g. Philadelphia) tried this method of taxing its residents into health, it failed miserably since city residents just drove out of town to purchase the now much cheaper soda, they incurred more carbon emissions by doing so (something that liberal politicians hate), and this behavior helped wreck the financials of small and large grocers within the city limits who not only lost soda sales but other food sales when people did their soda and grocery shopping elsewhere which increased city unemployment.
• Seattle previously had ordered that the minimum wage in the city be raised over time to $15 an hour, a move that has resulted in businesses closing and people being laid off or their hours reduced because employers cannot afford this minimum wage dictate.
• The city politicians did this anyway despite the reality that a published study they requested from the University of Washington to justify their minimum wage move actually proved that it would an economic disaster: “[the study] concluded that the costs to low-wage Seattle workers have been three times larger than the benefits. Using a richer trove of data and more sophisticated statistical methods than have been available for other studies of minimum wages, the report concluded that Seattle’s still-advancing increase has cost more than 5,000 jobs, and that workers whose wages were increased to comply with the new minimum lost an average of $125 a month as employers reduced their hours.”
• Despite these clear cut findings, the local politicians went ahead with the minimum wage increase anyway with the predicted study results actually occurring.
• Undeterred by the negative fallout of their economic ignorance, the city politicians installed a city income tax, a move that is clearly both in violation of current Washington state law and constitution and common sense since we have shown in this blog a number of times that raising taxes quite often results in LESS tax revenue since people most affected by the higher or new tax rates just leave the district where the higher or new tax rate is being applied.

Must be great living in the city of Seattle where political common sense and economic realities are a very rare commodity, which, unfortunately, is detrimental to Seattle residents and businesses.

3) We have reported many times in this blog how the Veterans Administration (VA) has miserably failed in serving the health needs of our armed forces veterans. Our veterans have died and suffered because the VA has been so inept during the Obama administration in getting them the proper medical care they were promised and which they deserve.

And things have not gotten much better even though the Trump administration has promised and tried to improve VA performance:

• According to a recent Washington Examiner article, hundreds of thousands of veterans are still waiting over a month to get an appointment at a VA facility.
• VA documents found that there are currently over 184,520 veterans across the country who have waited over a month to get an appointment to see a VA doctor and 45,000 have waited over 90 days to get a medical appointment.
• In addition, there are a whopping 479,239 veterans waiting for physician requested follow up appointments who have waited over 30 days.
• In the Phoenix VA facility there are 3,328 local veterans who have waited over 30 days for care.
• Which is really scary since you would think and hope that if any VA facility would be operating efficiently it would be that one since it suffered through the scandal of at least 293 veterans dying before they could get VA care several years ago. Obviously, the embarrassing scandal did nothing to kick start improvements there.

Two very distressing points here. First, it continues to be sad and depressing that the Federal government via the VA continues to be such an inefficient, taxpayer wasting, veteran killing operation.

Second, politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren think that allowing the Federal government and Washington political class to take over the medical and health care of ALL Americans via a single payer health insurance system is somehow a good idea. How many Americans do we think such a system would kill via long waiting lists if the government’s operation of the VA is any indication of what a total, single payer Federal government health care system would bring to the masses? 

Imagine how much sicker you would be if you had to wait over 30 days just to see a doctor, the situation that our veterans face today. Imagine how much sicker you would be if you had to wait over 90 days to see a doctor, the plight of 45,000 veterans today. Insanity.

That will do it for today’s insanity: our veterans continue to suffer at the hands of the government and the politicians that operate it, Seattle liberals have no common sense, and who really cares what celebrities think. More insanity sure to follow.

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