On a periodic basis we do some posts that fall under the theme of “by the numbers.” Rather than trust what American politicians tell us about reality, we like to examine the real numbers and the real reality in the world to understand what is actually going on.
Relying on politicians, and their cohorts in the media, to tell us what is reality is always a sucker bet. They have their own agendas and goals, usually centering around their needs and self-enrichment. So we need to look at the reality of the numbers to determine what is really going on. Previous analyses of “by the numbers” can be accessed by entering the phrase in the search box above.
1) All too often we have discussed the total inability of the Federal government to track, manage, and protect taxpayer assets from criminal fraud and general government incompetence. To combat the negative income impacts from covid, the Federal government and the politicians that oversee its management passed over $5.5 trillion in aid for Americans to get them through the covid crisis.
Not unexpectedly, a large portion of that $5.5 trillion was lost through fraud and incompetence:
The FBI recently reported on a “massive fraud scheme” in which nonprofit groups in Minnesota illegally diverted covid relief money intended to feed needy kids and purchased real estate, cars and other items with the illegally obtained taxpayer funds.
The fraud is estimated to be about $65 million.
The Secret Service has opened up over 900 investigations into covid fraud possibly involving $100 billion.
A truly despicable number from the Labor Department estimates that as little as 23% of the $800 billion doled out in the Paycheck Protection Program actually made into American workers’ paychecks.
Another study found that more than $87 billion in emergency unemployment benefits were improperly paid out.
The Small Business Administration, one of the historically more inept Federal agencies, paid out over $6.2 billion to loan applicants suspected of using identity theft to procure the funds.
The IRS managed to send out 2.2 million stimulus checks, worth about $3.5 billion, to dead people.
Everyday millions of Americans are homeless, hungry, and fighting drug addiction. Imagine how many of those homeless folks could have gotten shelter for the $3.5 billion the IRS wasted. Imagine how many meals could have been provided to hungry Americans with the $6.2 billion the Small Business Administration screwed up with. Imagine how many drug addicted Americans could have been treated with the $65 million wasted in Minnesota. Imagine we had a political class and a government bureaucracy that was not so inept, corrupt, and inefficient.
2) But it is not just money that the Federal government is so bad about handling. Consider how the Feds really don't know how to count as witnessed by some recent covid studies:
Apparently those daunting and frightening covid death totals in this country were not quite as bad as initially reported by the government.
We had seen early examples of how inept the government was in counting covid deaths when we discussed the reality that two people in Colorado had died from gunshot wounds but their deaths were classified as being caused by covid.
And now the truth is starting to emerge as witnessed by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health which recently announced that it will “update its criteria” for classifying covid deaths.
The Department is going to go back and retroactively change its state covid death numbers as far back as March, 2020.
This effort has already decided that over 4,000 Massachusetts covid designated deaths were actually not caused by the virus and these 4,000+ cases have been removed from the state’s death toll.
Since Massachusetts accounts for about 2% of the country’s population, a very rough estimate of the total country’s falsely designated covid deaths would be over 200,000 falsely reported covid deaths.
Since the CDC currently estimates that about 970,000 Americans died from covid, dividing that 200,000 estimated false covid deaths by the official government 970,000 number indicates that possibly over 20% of covid related deaths are bogus.
And keep in mind this is Massachusetts’ first pass at estimating the wrongly categorized covid related deaths, which means that the 200,000 national estimate is probably on the very low side of reality as is the 20% of all covid deaths in this country are bogus.
This is not to say covid was not horrific, it was, especially for the vulnerable members of society. But you cannot make good public health care decisions if you do not have good numbers and it appears that we have not been dealing with good, realistic numbers for the covid duration.
Whether this was intentional on the part of politicians and government bureaucrats to control the population and restrict our freedoms is another discussion. But the numbers were wrong and that is a public health failure.
3) The following numbers fiasco falls under the general category, “You had only one job and yet…”:
The Census department has been counting American citizens for well over 200 years, as required by the Constitution.
You would think that by this time they would know how to do the job, their only job.
Although the Census Bureau has released the official findings from its 2020 census, follow up analyses show they did some serious miscounting.
The Bureau originally said there were 323.2 million people in the U.S. population.
But now it appears that they under-counted the population by about 782,000 people.
They also said they found 18.8 “omissions in the population,” whatever that means.
This additional analysis found that whites and Asians were overcounted and blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans were undercounted.
But screwing up the Census numbers in 2020 should not be a surprise since even the director of the Bureau admits they have screwed up the numbers for years: “The 2020 Census undercounted many of the same population groups we have historically undercounted, and it overcounted others,” Director Robert L. Santos said.
So the Bureau readily admits they have been wrong in the past and rather than fix their number counting process they screwed up again in 2020. Between covid and the Census it makes you wonder if any number coming out of the Federal government has any shred of credibility at all.
4) And one last numbers observation regarding American politicians. Given the numerically related public comment Nancy Pelosi recently made, we possibly get an insight why the government is so bad at managing numbers. At a recent press conference she actually said the following: “What may come as news to someone is that when you subtract money, money is subtracted.”
Seriously, that is the depth of her understanding of numbers? And she is actually not afraid to show this ignorance? No wonder the government cannot count, a leading politician issues this type of nonsense. Her actually statement can be seen at the following link:
So, the Federal government cannot track our tax dollars, the Federal government cannot accurately count covid deaths, the Federal government cannot accurately count the population, and a leading Washington politician talks nonsense when it comes to math. Numbers don’t lie but government agencies and politicians do.
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