Our Horribly Broken Election Process, Part 2 - The First Half Of A Solution

We have never been big fans of any American politician in this blog. We find them either cowardly, stupid, or greedy and often criminals. The list of their transgressions in each of these categories probably numbers in the hundreds when you go back through our previous posts.

Probably their worst trait of all is that they rig the system to make themselves rich, comfortable, and often above the law. They give themselves high pay and great benefits. They are in session in Congress for less than half the year. They are given multi-week vacations that they try to call “recesses.” They find ways to do insider trading on stocks and companies based on non-public information relative to potential and real legislation. And they spend so much time doing this stuff for themselves that they never get around to resolving the major issues facing the American public.

Several days ago we did a post on one particularly egregious abuse of the system by politicians:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2018/02/our-horribly-broken-election-process.html

Today, rather than do specific examples of abuse, we are proposing a set of basic changes that need to be made to our political processes that hopefully will get people in office that want to focus on resolving the big issues facing Americans today rather than have the existing types of politicians continue to remain in office where their only focus is self enrichment:

1) As we laid out in the post above, one of the first changes we need to make to our political processes involves leftover campaign funds. What should happen is that after a political campaign is over, regardless of whether or not that candidate won or lost, he or she should have no more than six months to liquidate their leftover campaign funds. 

Over that six month period they should be able to pay off any legitimate outstanding debts as a result of the campaign and at the end of the six months, any remaining funds should either be returned to those that donated or the candidate should donate those funds to legitimate charities.

Those paying off of debts should be reasonable and pass the reality check. Those leftover funds should not be paid out to relatives and friends of the candidate just to enrich those that are close to the candidate. Also, as mentioned above, the funds should be liquidated even if the candidate won the election. He or she should start from scratch for the next election from a raising campaign funds perspective. There should be no carry over from one campaign to the next. Such existing carry over helps ensure that useless incumbents always seem to get re-elected since they have such a war chest of funds gathered over the years.

2) Once elected, a winning politician should put their investment portfolios in a blind trust and have no contact with the manager of that blind trust until they are at least one year out of office. Politicians often have secret, insider access to potential legislation that gives them an insider track on lucrative investments. In the private sector, such insider information is often abused and a crime. Inside Congress, such access to insider information is just another easy way to get rich.

Now, some people would say that this was already taken care of under the Obama administration when the STOCK legislation was passed. However, shortly after this legislation was passed, and which much less fanfare, another bill was passed which essentially gutted the enforcement capability of the STOCK law and rendered it toothless. 

Politicians should not be able to get rich off of secret government information. Make them give up control of their investments to a portfolio manager they have no access to while in office and for a time period afterwards in case they know of pending legislation that they could still leverage once out of office.

To see how abusive politicians are of this insider information conduit, go to:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/07/washington-corruption-train-keeps-on.html

3) No politician should be able to receive campaign funding from anyone who does not have the ability to vote for that politician. For example, someone who is running for Senator from Kansas should not be able to accept campaign funding from someone living in New Hampshire. Someone running for Congress in a Congressional district in Utah should not be allowed to accept campaign funding from someone living in Oregon.

Very rich people and organizations have a lot of money to sway elections even though they don't reside where those politicians live. This distorts the election process and deprives local citizens the right to fairly select the candidates they want to serve them. If you cannot vote for a candidate, you should not be able to fund a candidate.

4) Speaking of funding, the only entities that should be able to fund a candidate’s campaign are private citizens. PACs, unions, corporations, trade organizations, etc. should not be able to fund and in many cases unfairly sway elections away from local citizens. The Constitution and Bill of Rights guarantee freedom of speech to individuals, they do not guarantee freedom of speech to organizations.

5) If an elected member of Congress or the Presidency has a net worth of over $3 million, he or she should not be able to receive a salary or benefits at the expense of the American taxpayer. Many, many people in Congress are multi-millionaires, they do not need to draw a salary of $174,000 or so a year or receive extensive benefits, they can afford them without being a drain on the Treasury.

We have a $20 TRILLION national debt, denying ultra rich Washington politicians a salary and benefits will not cure that $20 TRILLION national debt but symbolically at least it would show that they are serious about getting out of control government spending under control.

6) Many current Washington politicians have been in office for decades and have presided over the worst performing government in our history. Despite over spending their revenue streams by trillions and trillions of dollars, they have been unable to resolve any of the major issues of our times. They have allowed the Federal government bureaucracy to grow like a cancer and become totally ineffective in serving the American people.

Which leads to a dire need for term limits. “One and done” should be the Washington creed. No decades long residency in Congress where the only thing that incumbent members of Congress do is enrich themselves and take long vacations. 

Because really, seriously ask yourself: given the ineptness of today’s Washington politicians, how much worse could it get if they all got thrown out of office because of term limits and we started with a clean slate of people? At least then we might have a fighting chance to get something, anything resolved.

That will do it for today’s recommendations to fix what is broken in our political processes. The second half of our recommended changes will follow shortly.

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:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

The American Freedom Pyramid: Where It Should Be Vs. Where It Is Today

An important part of the book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," is the understanding of what I call the Freedom Pyramid. The Freedom Pyramid tries to imagine what our founders had in mind when the put the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights and a government based on individual freedom together. The ideal American Freedom Pyramid fits together as follows:

1. The base and foundation of the pyramid is the Constitution and the Bill Of Rights.
2. Sitting on top of this base level is the government structure that the founders defined to implement the liberty principles and concepts of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution in a limited government manner.
3. This government structure serves all of the country's citizens equally in guaranteeing each person's rights and freedoms as defined by the base level documents.
4. And finally, the pinnacle of the Freedom Pyramid is our own individual rights, freedom, and liberties.

These concepts are graphically illustrated below:

There are a few important characteristics of this pyramid. The power in the pyramid flows up from the Bill of Rights and U.S. Constitution to our individual freedoms which is the pinnacle of our country. Government exists to serve the citizens and the country and is just the mechanics for implementing the tenets in the Bill of Rights and Constitution. Finally, the political class appears nowhere in the Freedom Pyramid structure.

This structure has served the country and its citizens quite well over the past two centuries. Americans were usually the freest people in world, which allowed the country to grow into the most prosperous ever. The Freedom Pyramid concept placed individual freedom above all else, including the government and the political class, whose sole purpose should be implementing the concepts and principles of the Constitution and the Bill Of Rights.

However, over time, we have allowed the American political class to pervert this original Freedom Pyramid concept:

1. Today, individual citizens and their freedom and liberties are no longer at the pinnacle of the pyramid, having been replaced by a self serving political class.
2. This political class uses government functions and institutions to enlarge, entrench, and enrich itself. Examples at this level abound and include earmark abuse, favorable campaign finance laws, Congressional voting district gerrymandering, excessive  Congressional benefits and perks, confiscating large amounts of citizens wealth and income via taxes, and a general low priority for the needs and desires of the country's citizens.
3. The political class uses their increased power to divide the country into various and competing tribes and voting blocks of citizens, "energizing their bases" as needed and demonizing those not in their bases or tribes.
4. This increased power of the political class and their abuses of power results in diminished individual rights and freedoms.

These concepts are illustrated in the current day, perverted  Freedom Pyramid below, where the only Americans with the freedom and power tend to be our politicians:



As you can see in this pyramid, the Bill of Rights and Constitution are no longer vital to this pyramid's structure since the often act as an obstruction to the needs and desires of the political class rather than their original intent, the foundation of the country. Also, the power is driven down from the political class and is imposed on American citizens and their freedom.

We need to recognize how far we have deviated from the concept of the first Freedom Pyramid. The reality of America today is that we no longer live in a free country. We do not get true freedom in our election processes since the political class has rigged the voting process to favor existing officeholders and existing political parties. We do not get true freedom while under our excessive tax burden. When an individual is forced to pay more than 30% of their annual income to all levels of government, that individual's freedom to send his or her kids to a better school or to start a business or to save for retirement or to go on a vacation is severely limited: you cannot have political freedom without financial freedom. We do not get true freedom when politicians call individual citizens racists, Neanderthals, un-American, smelly, and other derogatory names just because they dare to disagree with a politician's programs.

If we ever want to get back to the right Freedom Pyramid, where individual citizens are in charge and the political class and the government the run are subservient, we need to implement most, if not all, of the steps laid out in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." Some of the most important steps include:

• Step 1 - reduce the size and budget of the Federal government by 10% a year for five years.
• Step 6 - allow only individual American citizens to contribute to election campaigns, forbidding unions, corporations, PACs and other organizations from flooding the election process with money. The Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech to individual Americans, not organizations.
• Step 7 - allow only citizens that are affected by an election to contribute to election campaigns within that election. For example, political parties would not be allowed to accept campaign contributions from someone in Kansas and send/funnel that money to be used in an election campaign in New Jersey.
• Step 14 - stop gerrymandering Congressional voting districts to almost guarantee the re-election of incumbents.
• Step 17 - eliminate the Democratic Party's "Super Delegate" process which has the potential of voiding the votes of all voters who voted in Democratic Party Presidential primaries.
• Step 34 - hold politicians sitting on Congressional committees accountable for their respective government areas of oversight and remove them from their committee positions if that committee falls short of serving the country, e.g. all members of Congressional Intelligence committees should have been removed from those committee posts on September 12, 2001 for their inability to foresee the 9-11 terror attacks.
• Step 39 - institute term limits for all Federal political seats.

Many of the other 50 steps are also important but implementing these listed above would go a long way to getting us back to the true and rightful Freedom Pyramid concept for this country.

Our recent 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:
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/

 

Post Election Musings And Harry Reid

Some thoughts and observations a day after the mid-term elections:

• I am very happy that Michele Bachman won her House Of Representives seat in Minnesota. She apparently faced some very nasty and unnecessary personal attacks during the campaign, including a benefit concert for her opponent that was headlined as: "F*%$ Michele Bachman." No human being, including a politician, should have to face that kind of degrading abuse in an American election.
• I am also happy for the success of the many conservative women politicians who ran during this election cycle, both those that won and those that lost. They also had to put up with much abuse, totally unrelated to issues and problems facing the country, with the most degrading and debasing being an online Playboy article that talked about what needed to be to them in a carnal way and how to do it. Again, no place for this kind of trash in an American political campaign.
• I continue to have the highest degree of respect for Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania and Kendrick Meek in Florida. Both men stood their ground and principles when pressured by high ranking members of the Democratic national party to step aside for the perceived benefit of the national Democratic Party. They refused to be bullied and continued to represent the people that put them in the election during their states' primaries. While both of them lost their races yesterday, it gives me a little bit of hope that there are some politicians out there who will stand on principle, defend their integrity, and fight to represent their constituents.
• I am very proud of what Florida voters did in the area of eliminating the gerrymandering of state legislative districts and Congressional districts. These constitutional amendments sought to  bring sanity and fairness into the voting redistricting processes, processes that had been badly corrupted by incumbent politicians to ensure their perpetual re-election and processes that many election experts felt had helped polarize the country. Both ballot initiatives passed by the 60% threshold required to make them part of the Florida constitution. Hopefully, more states will follow Florida's lead and begin the elimination of gerrymandering across the entire country, basically implementing Step 14 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government."
• I am also proud of Florida for their overwhelming  (72% in favor of the ballot initiative, 28% against) support of a non-binding ballot question that urges the United States Federal government to adopt a policy that would require the Washington political class to pass only balanced budgets every year and to accomplish this balanced budget requirement without raising taxes. If this was how we ran the Federal government, we could start to get the onerous Federal national debt burden under control and eventually allow Americans to retain more of their earnings and wealth, increasing their personal freedom. This favorable outcome mimics the recommendation laid in in Step 1 of "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." That step calls for the Federal government to reduce its budget and spending by 10% a year for the next five years, which should bring Federal government revenues in line with Federal expenses.
• I am also happy that Orlando Congressman Alan Grayson was defeated. Over the past two years, the Congressman had been quoted for the many derogatory comments he had made against any American who dared to disagree with Democratic Party positions on some very important issues, especially health care reform. These comments and descriptions of fellow Americans included calling them knuckle dragging Neanderthals, terrorists, and Klan members. He put out an intentionally deceptive campaign advertisement using his opponents words, edited in such a way to convey his opponent's exact opposite position on the issued being discussed. These kinds of tactics and name calling do nothing to help bring the country together and address the pressing issues of the day in a mature, adult manner. Name calling is for kindergarten, mature discussion is for problem solving.
• I am still upset with the billions of dollars that were spent on every facet of this election process, a process that will continue to get more and more out of control unless concrete steps are taken to eliminate the big money contributions we see today. This torrent of money perverts the election process and reduces the freedom of individual Americans to be heard and listened to.
• I am already dreading the next two years, given what politicians and pundits were all saying during this morning's newscasts, namely what does this election and the results mean for the next Presidential election cycle? Can we please take a breath, understand what happened yesterday, and with that understanding start to work on the real problems facing this country? Do we need to already be distracted by the 2012 elections? This kind of talk verifies what I have felt for many years. The American political class sees election victories as the ends, not the means to make changes. The overwhelming priority of our politicians is to get and stay elected, and maybe along the way improve the lives of Americans, as long as it does not interfere with their perpetual election campaigns. How else can you explain the political interest and activity for 2012 already? Given that the President and almost every other Washington politician has basically spent the past six weeks on the election trail while major issues like unemployment, deficit spending, tax cuts, the continually
• I am impressed by how far the Tea Party movement has come in such a short time. Regardless of where you stand politically relative to Tea Party principles, you have to admit that by tapping into the frustration of the voting public throughout the country, they have made a historic impact on the national level. Cracks are finally starting to appear in the previously elite and exclusive American political class. Given what the political class had not achieved in the past forty years, the cracks are a welcome sign that positive change may be on the way.
• One final thought on Harry Reid. I listened to an interview of him on NBC News this morning. His most memorable quote in the interview was something to the effect that we need to stop calling each other names. I find this interesting that when the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid never spoke up, like a leader should have, to call for a halt to the names Republicans and ordinary Americans were being called by various Democrats. Senator Reid himself contributed to the name calling when he publicly stated that Americans physically smell when they visit Washington D.C. as tourists in the summer so he himself is guilty of name calling. Given that the nation has spoken and the Democrats have taken a rather severe election beating, he now comes out to call a halt to name calling? This call for civility would have been a lot more impactful and believable if Senator Reid had spoken up against name calling when it was actually was going on by Democrats like Congressman Grayson prior to the yesterday's election.

Thankfully, the process is over. Let's take a breath, cool the name calling, and start fixing things before the political class gets distracted by 2012.


Our new 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:
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/

The Insanity That Is Our Expensive Election Campaigns

As the midterm election process finally and gratefully draws to a close, I thought it would be a good time to review the insanity that has entrenched itself in our electoral process when it comes to campaign spending. Consider a www.washingtonpost.com article by Ruth Marcus that appeared in the October 29, 2010 issue of The Week magazine:

• According to the article, Republicans will receive and spend more than $100 million from anonymous donors, an outrageous sum that has been loudly criticized by the Democrats.
• However, in 2004, Democrats set up campaign groups that fronted for labor unions and big dollar individual contributors, which contributed more than $150 million to the Democrats.
• Ms. Marcus reported that the "hapless" Federal Election Commission levied only a $1.3 million fine on this 2004 outrageous spending three years after the fact which, obviously, had no impact on election results. The $1.3 million fine is a pittance of a slap on the hand, less than 1% of the amount collected.
• According to the article's conclusion: "When it comes to campaign cash, Democrats and Republicans have essentially the same position: when we have more to spend because of some loophole in the law, that's just fine; when the other side has more money, democracy is being subverted."

According to a recent article in the St. Petersburg Times, House and Senate candidates running for office in these midterm elections have already shattered the previous campaign spending record and will likely spend over $2 billion in total on this election. According to the article, this is roughly equivalent to about $ 4 million spent per vacant Congressional seat. This number obviously does not include the money being spent at the local, county, and state government levels for their elections and does not include special interest group spending which the article estimates could be as high as $400 million.

And while the numbers are high, the consequences are not. A 2006 U.S. News and World Report article by Dan Gilgoff showed that once a politician gets into office, the access to campaign funds almost always guarantees that as an incumbent, that politician will almost always stay in office. The title for the article was "A Fake Democracy? Why No One Has Much Chance of Toppling Congress's Incumbents." According to the article, in the 2004 elections, 98% of the incumbents retained their seats. You cannot be living in a democracy with that kind of re-election rate.

And financial situation seems to be getting worse. If you believe Mr. Giloff's numbers, in 2004, it cost about $1.5 million to run a House Of Representives campaign. Just six years later, that cost is now about $4 million, two and a half times larger than in 2004. The article concluded in 2006 that the increasing costs were stifling competition for political seats, creating a state of  "partisan stasis."

How outrageous is all this insanity? Consider some simple math:

• The average Congressional office holder makes about $170,000 a year in salary. If you divide the campaign cost by the salary of the eventual winner you get a ratio of more than 23 to 1. In other words, for every salary dollar received, more than $23 will be spent to receive that $1. Makes no sense on the surface.
• If the average flu shot costs $10 per shot, then this $2 billion could have given two thirds of the country's population a free flu shot.
• If you had been alive since the birth of Christ and had spent $2,500 a day, every day from then until today, you still would have not spent $2 billion.
• According to a Parade Magazine article a few years ago, $2 billion could hire almost 5,000 teachers for a year, buy the health insurance for 50,000 American households and provide 83 million school lunches for needy children.

Obviously you can go crazy with the numbers. The bottom line, though, is that $2 billion total, $4 million per Congressional seat, is a lot of money to spend for a job that only pays $170,000. It is this 23 to 1 payback that illustrates how much power and freedom has migrated away from the ordinary citizens in this country to those sitting in Congress. No sane person would personally pay $23 to possibly win back $1, if successful. Only in an American election can this type of irrational behavior be considered rational.

And the holier than though attitude of the Democrats in this election does not hold water. We all know that if any politician can get their hands on money to ensure their re-election, then principles go out the door. The Democrats are not mad because the Republicans are spending so much money. They are mad because they do not have that amount of money to spend this time around like they did in 2004. Their hypocrisy is incredible. No one says that any politician HAS to take the money presented to them for their election campaign. However, has there ever been an politician that not take money shown to them?

It is obvious from this insanity that our political class at all levels of government cannot control their urges to take any money at any time to ensure their comfortable positions in Congress and elsewhere. That is why the following suggestions from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" are needed to take the money decisions out of their hands and structurally change the election process in this country:

• Step 6 - allow only individual Americans to contribute to election campaigns, not corporations, unions, PACs, etc. The U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of speech for individuals, not organizations.
• Step 7 - allow only those affected by an election to contribute to their respective election campaigns. For example, only those living in a specific Kansas Congressional district should be allowed to contribute to those running for Congress from that election district, i.e. no outside money allowed.
• Step 8 - strengthen the Federal Elections Commission by staffing it with seasoned prosecutors, not political appointees, so that cronyism is not a factor in prosecuting election law violations.
• Step 18 - hold all of the Democratic and Republican primaries on the same day in order to shorten the election cycle that should also result in less money being spent on the primary election cycle.
• Step 39 - impose single term limits on all politicians which would remove a huge amount of corruption and money exchanging going on since a lame duck politician, which a single term politician would be, would not be given campaign funding for their re-election since it does not exist anymore.

These steps, when implemented, would greatly reduce the amount of money that goes into our election process and would reduce the distortion that the huge amounts of money cause. Waiting for our political class to voluntarily behave is not going to happen, they are part of the insanity. Only the structured electoral changes listed above in these steps will restore sanity and fairness to our election process.

And, a side benefit of these steps might be that some of this wasteful $2 billion would find its way back into society and be used for some more useful purposes, such as growing the economy, adding teachers to our schools, increasing the health benefits of our citizens, etc.



 Our new 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:


http://www.cato.org/

http://www.robertringer.com/

http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/

http://www.flipcongress2010.com/

http://www.reason.com/

One Final Pass At Obama's Failed Economic Stimulus Program

I know we have beat this issue to death over the past year so this is hopefully the last time we have to review what a failure it has been. I do it one more time since I am tired of the midterm election political rhetoric from the Democrats that claim how successful it was. Much like the failed bank bailout program (TARP) that gave taxpayer money to banks that did not need it or that deserved to go out of business because of their own incompetence, Obama's economic stimulus program also severely over promised and  under delivered, mostly because they were 1) based on faulty assumptions about life and reality and 2) were developed and administered by the low performing political class.

 

So, one last time:

 

- In order to get the stimulus package passed, Obama administration representatives tried to scare us with economic horror stories that might come to pass if the stimulus bill was not passed. The most famous horror story was the one that said U.S. unemployment would soar to 8% if the legislation was not passed. Well, the legislation was passed and unemployment soared right past 8% and keep rising before setting into about 10% for the past untold number of months. This number probably underestimates the true unemployment rate since it does not include those Americans that have dropped out of the workforce due to the frustration of not finding a job. Hundreds of billions of dollars spent under the stimulus umbrella and unemployment soars, not a good plan.
- The November, 2010 issue of Reason magazine has a fine article called "How To Slash The State." The article does a detailed and meticulous job of going through Federal government functions and identifying places where the Federal budget could be slashed with minimal impact on most Americans' lives. One of the article's recommendations is to not spend the remaining portion of the economic stimulus legislation, $301 billion. Given that the stimulus legislation authorized $794 billion to be spent, that means that about $493 billion was spent in order to drive up the unemployment rate to 10%. The article points out that through June, 2010, a government operated website, http://www.recovery.gov/, had estimated that the stimulus money spent so far had created 749,143 jobs. What the article does not do is do the basic math which is to divide the amount of money spent to create jobs by the number of jobs created, which in this case equals $658,085. I doubt that we can fix the unemployment problem by spending over $650,000 per new job.
- And these numbers assume that the government estimate of jobs created is accurate. When the first set of numbers came out, it was widely reported that a lot of double counting had taken place, inflating the jobs created total. A Florida day care center reportedly saved 129 jobs with stimulus spending but when you got to the core of their estimates, it turns out that the day care center gave raises to 129 workers with the stimulus money, no jobs were created or saved. Thus, the numbers in the above paragraph are probably worst than calculated.
- The sad thing about these numbers is that even if they had worked as advertised, this program would still be a disaster. For example, the administration claimed that if we spent the $749 billion, we would create 3 million jobs. If the program had worked as promised,the cost per job created would have been about $250,000 per job created ($749 billion divided by 3 million new jobs). Again, you cannot solve the unemployment problem if it costs you a quarter million dollars to create one job. Did no one in the Obama administration think to do this simple math calculation ahead of time?
- Why did the economic stimulus bill not stimulate? Well, maybe it was because of how the money was spent in some cases, as detailed in the Wall Street Journal in January, 2009:

• $554,763 to replace windows in a closed Forest Service visitor center in Washington state.
• $762,372 to create an interactive dance software program.
• $72 million for a useless tunnel in Pittsburgh that even the Pennsylvania Governor did not want.
• $1.9 million for international ant research.
• $89,298 to replace a new sidewalk that leads to a ditch in Boynton, Oklahoma.
• $16 million to help Boeing clean up an environmental mess that Boeing itself created in 2007.
• $200,000 to help Siberian communities lobby Russian policy makers.
• $39.7 million to upgrade the statehouse and political offices in Kansas.
• $760,000 to Georgia Tech to study improvised music.
• $456,663 to study the circulation of Neptune's atmosphere.
• $529,648 to study the effects of local populations on the environment in the Himalayas.

Is there any doubt now why the economic stimulus bill did not economically stimulate? You cannot stimulate the economy if you pay to research ants or Neptune's atmosphere or spend U.S. taxpayer money in Siberia or the Himalayas. I would bet that if you peeled back the cover to each of these expenditures you would find a politician that personally benefited from the project that was funded. Kansas politicians can now go home and brag about how they got the rest of the country to pay for the Kansas statehouse renovation, a renovation that only Kansas citizens should have paid for. The Georgia politicians can go home and brag about the money they grabbed from the U.S. taxpayer for an in-state university for a project that has no economic bearing or potential. I would bet that some politician got an election campaign donation for giving Boeing $16 million to clean up a mess that Boeing made. As always, our politicians were looking out only for their own political careers and their perpetual re-election, the good of the country be damned.

Consider for a moment if a different approach had been taken to the economic crisis. Would if the $794 billion had been returned to the taxpayers? It is our wealth and our money so why not return it to us? We are going to have to pay off the debt of Obama's failed stimulus package so why shouldn't we get the rewards? It is not the government's money, it is not Obama's money, it is not the politicians' money, it is our money. Consider:

• If each American household got an equal portion  of the $794 billion, each household would have received a check for about $6,900.
• This comes out to about $133 a week.
• This money would have helped a struggling family put meals on the table for a year while they tried to get back on their feet.
• This money might have helped some families avoid foreclosures on their house or least help pay down their mortgage.
• This money might have been used to buy a new car, go on a vacation, go out to a restaurant once in a while, repair or refurbish their homes, buy a new television, or spend the money on something else and thus, stimulating the economy themselves for things they wanted, far more efficiently than spending it on ant research  and dance software.
• Families might have been able to use the money to seed a new business venture, also stimulating the economy.

It does not matter what they would have spent the money on, they would have spent it immediately and injected most of the money into the a moribund economy. Ask yourself:  how much worse could this approach have been vs. the doomed Obama economic stimulus approach? At least as citizens we could have seen where our financial futures were going, we would have been spending it ourselves.

That's it, hopefully forever. The economic stimulus program did not work, the numbers do not lie. Depressed GDP numbers, stubbornly high unemployment numbers, and political approval ratings for both the President and Congress heading south. Enough said.

 Our new 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:



http://www.cato.org


http://www.robertringer.com


http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/


http://www.flipcongress2010.com/


http://www.reason.com/