June, 2016, Part 3,Political Class Insanity: Taxpayers Pahying For Pecan Snacks, Economy Killing Regulations, and a Senseless Rant In Louisiana

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. In fact, last month we set a record, needing ten full posts to cover it all.

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.

It looks like our politicians have been especially insane over the past month or so let’s get started with the latest insanity from today’s American politicians:

1) Let’s start today’s insanity with some good old fashioned wasteful spending. According to Eric Scheiner, writing for the CNS News website on May 19, 2016, the United States Department of Agricultural recently gave out $247,000 of taxpayer wealth to “help develop a pecan snack.” Which, as always, raises the same question when the Washington political class wastes our money on nonsense like this: why isn’t the pecan industry spending $247,000 to develop a "pecan snack?”

But pecans are not the only food getting taxpayer research support. Mr. Scheiner points other wastes of taxpayer wealth that went out to industries, that should be paying for their own research, under the Federal government’s Value Added Producer Grant (VAPG) program in 2015:

• $247,677 to Front Porch Pecans LLC of Georgia “to help develop a pecan snack.”
• $250,000 to Calloway Farms LLC of Delaware “to expand the local market for watermelon.”
• $250,000 to Goat Milk Stuff LLC of Indiana “to expand caramel sales to the online customer base, and fund a marketing campaign.”
• $214,000 to Hillandale Farms Inc. of Pennsylvania “to further development a Mid-Tier Value Chain to add value to egg layer manure produced on the farm and other small farms within Central Pennsylvania.”

These programs account for almost a million dollars of unneeded and stupid subsidies to private businesses and industries that should be paying for these research efforts themselves rather forcing the taxpayer to pay for their needs. Even if you do not want this million dollars to go back to the taxpayer, imagine how many drug addicts, homeless Americans, hungry Americans and other needy souls could be helped for a million dollars a year vs. “expanding the caramel sales to the online customer base.” A pathetic waste of money.

2) It has always been our theory that one reason the Federal government spends so much money on such stupid projects as pecan snack development is that it has gotten so large and unwieldy that government bureaucrats make up projects of little value just to justify their continued existence and the continued funding of their jobs. As a result, government spending gets out of control to justify itself and its components.

The following example of political class insanity reinforces this theory. The following are details from a Heritage Foundation article written by James Gattuso and Diane Katz regarding the overwhelming amount of new business regulations that the Obama administration has burdened the economy and Americans with:

• During the Obama Presidency, the Federal government has added 20,642 new regulations to the American economy.
• This comes out to about 232 new regulations, on average, every month since Obama took office.
• This further breaks down, on average, to over 7 regulations being imposed on our economy and lives every DAY since the onset of the Obama administration, seven days a week for the seven and half years the Obama administration has been in place.
• These regulations require businesses, business owners and others to spend more and more time responding to likely unnecessary and burdensome government regulations than working on expanding their businesses and thus, expanding the economy.
• We say “likely unnecessary” regulations because it is difficult to believe that all of the Presidential administrations before Obama somehow missed 20,642 vitally important regulations that needed to be imposed.
• But as our theory goes, if a government bureaucracy is not constantly justifying its existence via producing more and more regulations, it will cease to exist. And this is how you end up getting 7 new regulations every day for seven and a half years.
• A Heritage Foundation analysis estimates that just the new regulations passed in 2015 added $22 billion a year in new regulatory costs to the American consumer and American businesses while at the same time muting economic growth.
• This brings the total annual cost of government regulation to about $100 billion a year or over $3,000, on average, for every U.S. household.
• This is $3,000 that every U.S. household cannot spend in the economy to help it grow and build up new employment opportunities.
• And Obama is not done yet since there are more than 2,000 proposed or final rules in the Obama regulatory pipeline including 144 that will likely cost $100 million a year or more. 
• The Heritage report is apolitical, correcting pointing out that the Bush’s administration also added a lot of regulations, adding about $76 billion a year to the economy in addition to Obama's additional $100 billion.

And according to the Heritage Foundation report and likely reality, we are certainly not getting good societal value back for the massive amount of new regulations that the Obama administration has imposed:

• We got reduced access to credit under the hundreds of rules created under the Dodd–Frank financial regulation statute
• We got fewer health care choices and higher medical and healthcare insurance costs from Obama Care.
• We got less Internet investment and innovation under the network neutrality rules dictated by the Federal Communications Commission.
• We got higher and higher electricity costs due to EPA regulations, e.g. Obama’s Clean Power Plan,” that even the EPA admits will have very minimal, if any, impacts on the environment.

And keep in mind that the vast majority of these rules that severely affect our lives are not done in a representative government way, in which we have a say in which regulations should happen via our elected representatives, but are done by government bureaucrats that are accountable to their bureaucratic bosses and not American citizens. This is how democracy dies, not by an external force but by the overwhelming mucking up of the economy by career bureaucrats protecting their home turf.

3) Politicians saying the darndest things help make this blog work since their  vocalizing of idiocy is so rich and full. Consider just a small example of their past hilarity:

• Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House, once said that the Obama Care legislation had to be passed so that we could see what is in it. Forget about reading a proposed law BEFORE you vote on it, let’s just vote on it like it is a wrapped gift so that we can see what is inside of it. Probably the most inane comment any Washington political figure has ever made.
• A Georgia Congressman once stated in a public Congressional hearing that he was afraid that the island of Guam might tip over. Yeah, Congressman, that is why all islands have anchors so that they do not drift away or tip over.
• A Texas Congresswoman once wondered out loud if a Mars probe would be driving past the location on the moon where Neil Armstrong walked. Think about that one for a minute.

To this list of insanity, let’s add the recent inane quote from a Louisiana state politician. The state politician, Barbara Norton, insisted that the Declaration of Independence, is a “racist relic from our past” and should not be taught to school kids in the state’s schools. Yes, one of the greatest human documents EVER written, a document that formed the basis for our freedoms that we enjoy today, is somehow racist.

Her words are pretty nonsensical, especially how she tries and fails to somehow get Dr. Martin Luther King into her logic stream: “I’m not really sure what your intent is but one thing I do know is: all men were not created equal. When I think back to 1776, July the 4th, African-Americans were slaves and for you to bring a bill to request that our children will recite the Declaration, I think it’s a little bit unfair to us to ask those children to recite something that’s not the truth. In 1776, Dr. King was not even born. African-Americans were in slavery so since they were in slavery and the Declaration of Independence says we were all created equal, we were not created equal because in 1776, I, nor you, nor any of us were born, now was Dr. King born, so we were in slavery and to have our children to repeat again and again documents that were not even validated, I don’t think that’s fair because we are teaching them a lie.”

A number of observations:

• Only three sentences, but over 150 words, no way this rant was going to make any sense.
• How does Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. figure into this rant? Of course, he was not born in 1776, what is your point?
• The country eventually lived up to the promise of the Declaration from her perspective, slavery was eventually defeated via the Civil War.

Trying to figure out her rant is not worth the time from anyone's life. The Declaration was always an aspiration and a fine one at that, an aspiration that eventually got rid of slavery. Verbal and logic insanity.

That will do it for today’s insanity. A senseless rant out of Louisiana, over kill from a regulation perspective, and still wasting taxpayer money on stupid projects like pecan snack development. More insanity tomorrow.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

March, 2016, Part 2, I Am A Global Warming Doubter and A Believer In Science

Every month we have enough material to return to a continuing theme in this blog, namely that “I am a global warming doubter AND a believer in science.” This became of interest because of people like Al Gore who fanatically and verbosely claimed that you had to be an idiot to not believe in manmade global warming. It has been my life belief that anyone that is that loud and that obnoxious is hiding something, that rather than argue facts and reality it is better to beat down and insult anyone who disagreesAs we have dove into the whole issue of manmade global warming, or its new rebranded title of climate change, we found that Al Gore and people like him were guilty of a number of things:

• Ignoring science and realities that did not support their opinions and positions.
• Rather than have an adult conversation about climate, these types of advocates like Gore sank to the level of insulting those who dared look at ALL science by calling them a variety of names including racists, homophobes, terrorists, flat earth believers, and other slanderous names.
• Continuing to insist that politicians step up their intrusions into our lives with higher taxes, more regulations, and more control on our freedoms and standards of living based on a shaky theory at best.

To see the past posts and the multitude of evidence that we have compiled that showed it is perfectly okay to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, enter the phrase "global warming doubter” in the search box above or go through the monthly historical post listed on the right side of this page.Thus, let’s see the latest facts and science that prove you can be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, regardless of what Al Gore proclaims, in our last post for this month under the theme that “I am a global warming doubter and a believer in science”:1) The Cato Institute and author Patrick J. Michaels recently did a nice job of reviewing some of the myths and realities of climate over the past hundred years or so, showing that global warming is a natural occurring cyclical process, that alternates with global cooling:

• Between 1920 and World War II,global temperatures rose three quarters of a degree Fahrenheit even though there was far less carbon spewing economic activity going on.
• Temps then cooled down, despite more carbon burning going on, and then temps warmed up again from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s by about the same amount as what happened in the early 1900s.
• Most scientists, if not politicians, have concluded that temps reached their current level in the late 1990s and have stayed constant since then.
• Some global warming advocates claim that temps started climbing again, based on one year’s worth of 2015 data, when temps jumped up.
• But this jump in temps could have happened because the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stopped using satellite-senses sea surface temperatures, a measurement process that had been going on since the mid-1970s, and replaced this generally accepted measurement process with taking temperatures from the “cooling-water-intake tubes of ocean going vessels.”
• Really? Cooling water intake tubes of ocean going vessels? Mr. Michaels claims that scientific literature is in agreement that this new process results in large measurement errors since a ship’s structure conducts heat, is affected by the sun’s rays, and the intake tubes of different ships measure temps at different ocean levels.
• Thus, one year’s worth of data from a new measurement process is hardly conclusive when it comes to global warming proof.
• But there is another factor in the higher 2015 temps since in 2015 a massive El Nino weather set up in the Pacific Ocean.
• Historically, El Nino periods always raise temps worldwide because of how it affects Pacific Ocean currents. 
• For example, as a result of the 1998 El Nino, global average surface temperature jumped up slightly less than a quarter of a degree while in 2015 the global average temps jumped up a bit more than a quarter of a degree, thus no big deal.
• In 1999, the year after that 1998 El Nino, global temps dropped almost three tenths of a degree, wiping out the jump in temps in 1998, a reaction that is likely to happen once the 2015 El Nino dissipates.

The article goes on to show how another temperature measurement process also debunks some global warming theories:“Instead of relying on debatable surface-temperature information, consider instead readings in the free atmosphere (technically, the lower troposphere) taken by two independent sensors: satellite sounders and weather balloons. As has been shown repeatedly by University of Alabama climate scientist John Christy, since late 1978 (when the satellite record begins), the rate of warming in the satellite-sensed data is barely a third of what it was supposed to have been, according to the large family of global climate models now in existence. Balloon data, averaged over the four extant data sets, shows the same.”One last global warming doubter set of data: Analyses from the biggest reinsurer insurance company, Munich Re, and University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke, Jr. proved that weather-related losses have not grown at all over the past 25 years. In fact, if anything, weather-related losses have trended downward in a non-statistically significant speed. 2015 recorded the second lowest weather related loss of Global World Productivity the entire time it was measured.A lot of real data from real scientists again showing how rational it is to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science.2) One last piece of science and reality in the global warming debate for today and this month. Yesterday, we discussed the reality that if Obama’s so-called Clean Power Plan goes into effect it will have a minimal impact on the environment, according to his own EPA analysis and forecast, but will have a devastating impact on the U.S. economy and jobs. This conclusion was recently reinforced by an article on the U.S. Chamber Of Commerce website in an article written by Sean Hackbarth, “Setting Things Straight: EPA’s Carbon Regulations Will Not Save People Money.” Details of his article include the following:

• EPA head Gina McCarthy claims the EPA’s Clean Power Plan will save the country and Americans billions of dollars a year.
• Which on the surface, from a basic economics perspective, is a ridiculous claim to make since the plan will likely shut down many coal powered power plants and immediately reduce the amount of electricity available throughout the country.
• Economic theory tells us that if you reduce the supply of anything but allow demand to grow, prices HAVE to go up, no possibility of anything else happening.
• Which is exactly what is going to happen according to research and analysis done by NERA Economic Consulting.
• NERA Economic Consulting found that 40 states could see an average retail electricty price increase of 10% or more.
• Their state by state analysis found that two states, North Dakota and Utah, could see an obscene increase in electricity rates of over 40%.
• The following chart highlights the economic devastation across the most heavily impacted states:

So, if electricity is going to go up by double digit figures for just about every American, Ms. McCarthy, where is America going to save billions of dollars? Simple economic theory and NERA analysis shows that either you are not being truthful with America or you simply do not understand reality. Double digit increases in electricity prices for a global warming theory that grows weaker and weaker every day.

That will do it for this month’s discussion on how to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science. Today we learned about how weather patterns have short term effects on temperatures and that short term effects on temperatures do not mean the end of the world is near or that global warming is real. And we learned that somehow Obama's Clean Air Plan was going to save us billions of dollars while simultaneously raising the cost of our electricity by over 40% in some states. Insanity.