October, 2013 Political Class Insanity, Part 5: Hookah Research, Social Security Fraud, Energy Department Waste and More

Please note: Nancy Pelosi recently made the outrageous comment that there was no waste to be cut in the Federal govnerment, i.e. EVERY dollar the Washington political class spends is essential to our country. Keep this insanity in mind as we go through this month's polticial class insanity, you will quickly see that she is very much out of touch with the reality of today's wasteful federal government.

This is the fifth but not last installment, at least for this month, of political class insanity. Every month we track and discuss the latest insanity, lunacy, and wasteful spending habits of politicians in Washington, around the country, and around the world. Wealth gets wasted, issues never get resolved, and we are stuck listening to the worst set of politicians ever to  hold office in the history of our nation.

This is not the last installment for this month because you can never tell, by the hour, how much insanity will pop up from Washington. Also, the most recent insanity has had to do with the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care, insanity which we now have to cover every month in a separate set of posts. Today, we will focus on just the regular run-of-the-mill insanity.

1) Just since this past January, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has mailed out disability insurance (SSDI) checks worth $1.29 billion to an estimated 36,000 people who were still on the job and thus ineligible for benefits. This was the conclusion of a recent  Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation: “Some work activity indicates beneficiaries are not disabled and therefore not entitled to [SS]DI benefits,” the report stated.

A doctor, who had been earning $22,000 a month, was also collecting $2,500 in monthly SSDI benefits during a three-year period, for a total overpayment of about $90,000, the GAO reported. Another man with “personality disorders” began working just one day after his disability benefits were approved in 2006. 

After reviewing this case in 2011, SSA suspended his monthly cash benefits “and subsequently assessed an overpayment of more than $57,000 due to his work activity” during the five years he was receiving disability checks. Five years he was cheating the American taxpayer before the government actually did their enforcement job. Disgraceful.

Rather than throw this guy into jail for fraud, he is now required to pay back the fraud amount in increments of $75 a month. At this rate, it will take him 63 years to pay off the fraud, at which point he will be way past 100 years old. In other words, Americans can kiss a lot of that $57,000 good bye because the government did not do its job again.

This is the just fraud that the GAO found, you can be pretty sure there is a lot more than $1.29 billion going out the door that should not. Like the lady the other day who got only three years in jail for defrauding the American taxpayer of over $6 million, this type of behavior will go on until the government does its job and some people start getting some longer, real jail sentences as disincentives to others.

2) We have always lamented that one of the biggest issues that has not been resolved by the Washington political class for the past 40 years is their inability or unwillingness to develop and implement a coherent and effective national energy strategy and policy. We proposed a process to do such a thing in “Love My Country, Loathe My Government” but that approach appears to be beyond the ability to execute such an approach in Washington.

This lack of success in the energy field was driven home by a recent report from AAA. Last week saw the 1000th consecutive day of average gas prices in the U.S. over $3 a gallon. The national average for regular gas is now $3.52 a gallon, up from about $1.89 when Obama took office. According to an analyst from Cameron Hanover, for every penny the price of gasoline increases, it costs American consumers an additional $4 million per day. That equals $1.4 billion over an entire year. 

That is $1.4 billion that cannot be spent in restaurants, expanding businesses, taking vacations, etc., expenditures that would help expand the economy and create jobs, something this economy sorely needs. Even worse, a lot of that $1.4 billion heads overseas since the political class, after 40 years, has not been able to make us energy independent so that our energy costs stay domestic. Just another gross failure of the people in Washington that we end up paying for every day of our lives.

3) Two weeks ago the White House was supposed to have been the scene of a Hispanic movie concert event but it was postponed because of the shootings at the Navy Yard in D.C. This was not going to be a low key event since major music stars, Gloria Estefan, Ricky Martin, Raul Malo, Prince Royce, Natalie Cole, Lila Downs, Arturo Sandoval, Romeo Santos, Alejandro Sanz and Marco Antonio Solis, were scheduled to perform.

Which raises an interesting question: the budget sequester in March required that the White House be closed to tours for ordinary Americans. But the White House and Federal government somehow found enough taxpayer money to hold a private concert for the President and his friends, family and associates?

This was to have been the third concert in a series of high profile concerts, the first two having been a Memphis soul music concert in April and a tribute to Carole King in May.

But there is not enough money because of the sequester for White House tours by ordinary Americans.

Also, the White House is currently going through a whopping $376 million renovation but there is not enough money because of the sequester for White House tours by ordinary Americans.

A judge recently ruled that the Obama administration did not have to tell the American people what visitors, lobbyists, corporate executives, friends, etc. are visiting the White House but ordinary Americans are not allowed into the White House for a simple tour.

Somebody has very, very screwed up priorities since it is the ordinary Americans in this country that finance concerts, finance renovations, and get stuck with the bill from corporate cronyism and lobbyists, the likes of which we no longer get to know, thanks to this ill conceived ruling by a judge. Insanity.

4) The Heritage Foundation reported on September 8, 2013 that the Department of Energy had award $45 million in research grants and contracts to different companies, universities, and other entities to do research in advanced transportation fields. On the surface this sounds like a good thing, findings ways to use energy more efficiently.

However, there are two things wrong with this kind of thinking. Since the Department of Energy was created four decades ago, I assume that this type of dispersion of taxpayer money has been going on since its inception with no discernible, societal benefits in return. Try to name just one major innovation or breakthrough in energy that the Department of Energy is responsible for, I bet you can’t. So what makes anyone think that throwing another $45 million up in the wind will be any different?

Second, some of the major recipients of this free taxpayer money included $1.5 million to Caterpillar, $1.75 million to General Electric, $3 million to 3M Company, and $350,000 to Ford Motor Company. So almost 14% of the total went to just four huge companies, companies that make billions and billions of dollars every year in sales and profits. 

If these companies saw a fruitful research project that involved advanced transportation opportunities, don’t you think they would spend some of their own wealth to explore and develop that opportunity? Why does the American taxpayer have to fund what the American shareholders in Ford, 3M, etc. should be funding? Makes no sense, especially given the Department of Energy’s nonexistent track record of success.

5) One last piece of insanity for today, we will need to continue with more insanity tomorrow, but this last piece of lunacy definitely comes form the “you cannot make this stuff up” category. According to the wonderful website Spendopia, in the summer 2009, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) granted over $60,000 of taxpayer wealth  to the Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Psychology to study the effects of hookah smoking in Jordanian university students. 

The study was titled "Waterpipe Tobacco Smoking: Trends, Toxicants, and Capacity Building in Jordan." The study was conducted in order to see the effects smoking waterpipes (hookah or shisha) had on the body and to see how and if that was associated with the 4.9 million smoking related deaths that are recorded each year.

A few major problems and observations here:

• Who Cares?
• Why are we studying health issues in Jordan, wouldn’t this money be better spent studying health issues in this country, given our ever escalating health care costs?
• You do not need a $60,000 study to  figure out that smoking, in any form, causes death.
• Who cares?

Ridiculous waste of money on a very, very small segment of people that are not even in this country. How insane is that.

More insanity tomorrow.

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

Gas Prices, China, India, and The Failure To Plan Strategically

Are you ticked off about high gasoline prices? It is quite possible that you have not seen anything yet:

- The St. Petersburg Times recently published some gasoline information from the Energy Information Administration (from 2009, the last year data is available):

• China consumed about 8.32 million barrels of oil a day in 2009.
• To feed this demand, it produced 3.99 million barrels a day and imported 4.23 million barrels a day.
• In 2011, 40% of the year over year demand growth for oil will be caused by China.
• This translates into an additional 600,000 barrels a day in Chinese oil consumption vs. the U.S., whose consumption will rise only 130,000 barrels. In other words, the growth in oil usage in China will be almost five times the growth in U.S. usage.
• At his rate, a rough estimate would say that within 20 years or so, Chinese demand for oil will be comparable to the United States demand.

In all likelihood this last point would never happen since the suppliers of oil would have trouble keeping up with the growing demand. When supply is constrained and demand keeps going up, the only lever left to change is price which could soar.

- China is not the only potential driver of sky high oil prices. The Indian car company, Tata, has big plans for its extremely low end, basic car, the Nano. Costing only $2,500, it is no where close to a luxury car. However, given the growing affluence of many Indians and the fact that auto ownership is only about 10 cars per 1,000 people (compared to the United States where auto ownership is about 750 cars per 1,000 people), the low penetration of ownership combined with wealth growth and the right price point all point to explosive growth in demand for oil in one of the world's most populated nations.

This should have the same effect as with China. Much higher demand, limited supplies means price pressure.

- Oil is not the only energy challenge. According to a Newsweek article from 2007, as reported by Fareed Zakara, and cited in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government":

• China and India will build 800 new coal burning plants by 2012.
• These new plants will burn nine hundred million tons of coal every year.
• This burning will dump an additional 2.5 billion of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere on an annual basis.
• According to the article, if all of the countries that signed the original Kyoto Global warming treaty lived up their commitments, which few if any did, the reduction from the treaty would reduce carbon dioxide production by only 483 tons, roughly on fifth of what China and India will dump into the atmosphere just from their incremental coal plants.

Since America gets a lot of its electricity from coal plants, if you dramatically increase demand elsewhere in the world, the likelihood of price increases in this country are very high.

Not good news. No matter how much we curtail demand here in the U.S., it is unlikely that the overall demand for energy or the environmental impact will be much reduced, given the powerful economic growth around the world. Unless something is done, $4.00 a gallon will seem like the good old days.

But nothing is being done:

• The President wants to get one million all electric cars on the nation's roads by 2015. But that would represent less than one percent of all cars being used.
• The President wants to end run Congress since he did not get his way on cap and trade, by using the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. However, it makes no sense to damage the U.S. economy with onerous and expensive regulation when the real future energy and pollution hogs/culprits are India and China. Thus, not only would the EPA regulation increase energy costs for everyone but it would have no significant environment impact, given the growth in greenhouse gases elsewhere.
• Congress keeps increasing the average auto fuel economy targets but ensures that the targets do not take effect for years and years to come in order to not endanger their re-election chances.
• The President and others have this pipe dream of building out a high speed rail system for the country but that is all it is, a pipe dream. First, the vast majority of drivers in this country do not need high speed rail to get to work or play. Second, we have over 100 years invested in our auto infrastructure, it would take decades to replace it with any kind of rail system. Third, given the financial fiasco that is Amtrak, there is no reason to believe that a high speed rail system run by the Federal government would be anything but a financial loser.

We should be much further ahead, strategically, in this area. Lord knows we have had enough warning since the oil embargo shocks happened almost forty years ago. In that time, the political class has done nothing to prepare the country for this crises. Oil and coal are the major components of our energy mix and that energy mix has increasingly been dependent on foreign oil sources, sources that are now in higher demand from China and India. What makes us think that our politicians can do any better in the next forty years, we have had no indication that they know how to think strategically and as a result, we are that much more closer of coveting $4.00 a gallon of gas.

What is needed is a whole new paradigm of thinking in this area. We need breakthrough thinking, not the tiny incremental thinking our political class has delivered in this area, if at all. Rather than centralized energy sources, maybe we need to look at decentralized energy generation and storage. The Internet is a thing of beauty because it is so decentralized, maybe that is the model we should be looking at as opposed to massive, centralized coal power plants. Maybe we should be looking at local solar and wind, not massive solar or wind fields.

Maybe what we need is a massive emphasis, a Manhattan style focus, to find a way to make cars several times more efficient which would strategically utilize existing infrastructure. This would pre-empt the need for totally new infrastructure, e.g. high speed rail, that is unlikely to be cost efficient, utilized, and profitable.

Maybe what we need is a break through approach to burning coal since coal is not going away, given the demand for cheap electricity in China and India.

However, what we really need is to get the politicians and embedded industry lobbyists out of the equation. Their lack of success in this area precludes giving them many more chances.

Three steps in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," Steps 23, 24, and 25 would be the processes needed to get started and would address the issues discussed above. We need to think entirely differently than we have ever as it relates to energy. Why? Because with the rise of China and India, the world is entirely different than it has ever been before. By not changing our approach and way of thinking, we are actually moving backwards vs. the rest of the world. However, our political class is entirely the same as it was in during the 1970s oil crises, ineffective, self serving, and unable to think strategically.




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 http://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/
http://www.repealamendment.com

Budget Cutting For Dummies...And Washington Politcians: Part 3 - Cato Institute

This post continues our themed week, "Budget Cutting For Dummies... And Washington Politicians" where, as a public service, we help our struggling political class in Washington learn how to cut out unnecessary government spending and save the country from financial destruction. On Monday, I offered my humble opinions and research and saved the American taxpayer between $100 billion and $140 billion a year with little, if any pain, for ordinary Americans.

Yesterday we summarized the outstanding work of Nicole Tichon and Andrew Moylan and their analysis, "Toward Common Ground: Bridging the Political Divide To Reduce Spending." Their work uncovered almost $600 billion in spending cuts that could be done by 2015, again with little or no impact on the ordinary American citizen. Their focus was on government efficiency and waste so that many of their recommendations save money through better processes and management.

Thus, as a rough average, their $600 billion savings within four years comes out to a,bout $150 billion a year on average. Combine their findings with Monday's findings and so far we have cut a quarter of  TRILLION dollars out of the Federal government's annual budget without hurting any animals, curtailing any safety nets, or making any American poorer, sicker, or less wealthy.

Today we will summarize the work coming out of the Cato Institute. Their "Downsizing Government" effort is identifying many, many ways to effectively and efficiently reign in government spending. They are going through the Federal budget and government, line by line and organization by organization, to ferret out waste, redundancy, and incompetence. They are still in the process of completing their analysis but what they have done so far is first rate. Consider what they have found so far:

* Department Of Education

The Department of Education is about thirty years old. During that time frame, the United States has probably spent more on education than any other country in the world. In fact, the Baltimore Sun reported in August, 2009 that the United States spends twice as much of its GDP on education than the next closest country.

What has that gotten us? According to an article in the December 26, 2010 issue of the St. Petersburg Times, the United States ranks 30th in the percentage of students that perform at advanced proficiency level in mathematics. We trail such countries as Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Slovenia. An international testing study found that in math, science and language skills, dozens of countries' students do better than U.S. kids.

Obviously, something is wrong with education in this country and after more than thirty years, the Federal government, through its Department of Education, has done nothing to help the United States be a leader in education standards and performance relative to the rest of the world. And for this pathetic performance the American taxpayer pays about $107 billion a year.

Cato's solution: terminate the whole department and leave the process of education to the states. Think about the math for a minute. At $107 billion a year, you could purchase 267 million IPads at Best Buy and give two IPads to probably school kid in the country. Obviously, you would not do this but what if you gave the states $107 billion. Imagine how much good they could do technology wise, facilities wise, reward wise, training wise, etc. for education in their respective states. 

And this is with only one year's worth of Department of Education funding. Given the horrendous performance of public education in this country and the wasting of over $100 billion a year at the Federal government level, we need to do something else. I would terminate the Department immediately but phase out the funding expense over three years. In the first year, the states and local school boards would share in $107 billion dollars. In the second year, they would get one third less, in the third year they would get two thirds less and in the fourth year they would receive nothing. At that point, the American taxpayer and the Federal government has $107 billion less to worry about.

The only condition I would put on the funding is that it cannot be used to increase salaries or benefits for teachers or administrators. It has to be used to improve the curriculum, the facilities, the technology or the training. This gives the states and local governments a three year funding plan to finally fix what ails our schools. It is obvious that the Department of Education will not be able to or they would have done it already.

Annual savings: $107 billion.

* Department Of Energy

In 1973, President Richard Nixon ordered the Federal government to make the United States energy independent by 1980. To help in that goal, the Federal government shortly after that declaration created the Department of Energy.

Thirty eight years later we are no closer to that goal than when Nixon was in the White House. the Department of Energy has grown and grown so that today it eats up almost $40 billion a year in budget. And we have nothing to show for their efforts. We still import and use much to much of carbon based fuels. We are at the mercy of foreign governments and forces that do not always have our best interests in mind. There has been no strategic or earth shattering energy breakthroughs by the Federal government via the Energy Department despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars to do so.

The Department spends almost $6 billion a year on "general research," research that has turned up nothing of consequence in its history. Thus, Cato recommend that this department also be terminated and that some of its responsibilities for environmental cleanup be given to the EPA and Department of Defense.

Annual Savings : $18.4 billion

* Defense Department

Cato makes a compelling case that the role of our armed forces has to be narrowed to only one objective: defending the United States. It should not be used as a diplomatic option, it should not be used to interfere in the internal workings of another country unless that country poses an imminent danger to our safety, it is not meant to garrison troops all over the world in places that are not an imminent threat to our safety, it is not meant to have high technology weaponry only for the sake of having high technology weaponry. If you narrow the focus to militarily address only our safety, you can cut the Defense Department budget significantly.

Obviously, the first and easiest place to cut is to get our forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama promised to get us out of Iraq during his election campaign but we still have thousands of troops there at a cost of tens of billions of dollars a year. In Afghanistan, I have no idea what the final answer is but it does not appear that the current strategy is working. If it is working, the Obama administration is keeping this success a well guarded. Cato estimates that if we get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, we would save $159 billion annually.

They have also come up with additional savings of $1.224 TRILLION over ten years or an annual average savings of $124 billion. They agree with the analysis done yesterday to kill some of the Defense Department's expensive and unneeded programs such as the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. This represents a about a 17% reduction in overall defense spending without undermining our national security.

Annual Savings (After getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan): $283 billion.

* Commerce Department - cut subsidies to private businesses and save the taxpayer $2.1 billion a year.

* Agricultural Department - cut subsidies to the farming industry and save the taxpayers $30 billion a year annually.

The above cuts to just these five Federal departments would save the budget and the country about $440 billion a year. If you consider the cuts and savings that Cato recommends in Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and other Agricultural Department areas, you come up with another $244 billion in reductions. However, these cuts are likely to be harder sells to the established Federal political class since they would involve privatizing government services or in most cases, transferring the funding and the responsibility to the state and local government levels. The Federal political class is much more likely to fight to keep some of these functions within their realms of power.

Keeping these cuts separate does not detract from the need to make the changes Cato recommends. However, I do not have the time or space to go through the details and logical reasoning that they go through at their web site, http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/. I recommend that readers do this for themselves and decide whether or not the extensive work done by Cato should be implemented in these areas, worth $244 billion in spending.

For today, let's keep it conservative and give Cato credit for identifying $440 billion in additional spending savings and cuts. Remember, there are some departments that we have not included above and other departments that Cato is still busy analyzing and have not yet published their findings.

If you take this $440 billion and combine it with the $250 billion we came up with the past two days, we are approaching $700 billion in annual cuts. If you assume there is some double counting in the three analyses, we can safely assume that we already have about $650 billion or so in savings.

Thus, these judicial and intelligent budget cuts are similar to Monday's and Tuesday's cuts since:

• No animals were killed or harmed in the development of the budget cut list.
• No Americans went hungrier, sicker, or poorer as a result of any of the identified cuts.
• Corporate welfare was cut back, personal welfare or aid to the poor was unaffected.
• Americans' freedom was unaffected but the freedom of politicians to use taxpayer money to fund their re-election campaigns via earmarks, defense contractor and lobbyist donations, and corporate welfare donations was negatively affected.

The sad part of the three analyses is that the $650 billion still would not close the annual, and now recurring, $1 TRILLION plus budget gap that the Obama administration has incurred over the past few years. To close that gap, there is no way to avoid curtailing the budget lines known as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. We will take a shot at these lines on Friday.

Tomorrow, we will examine the poor performance of President Obama and the rest of the Washington political class. Their lack of leadership, courage, guts, and creativity are just as dangerous to the future of this country as is the devastating deficit they encourage and/or ignore. Any dummy can see that.




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 http://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/
http://www.repealamendment

Do We Really Need The Education Department and The Department Of Energy?

The origin of today's post comes from a short blurb in the December 17, 2010 issue of The Week magazine. The latest survey of student school achievement, which is done every three years by the Organization For Economic Cooperation and Development, found that students in Shanghai ranked first in the world in reading, science, and math. Quite a feat, to be number one in all three. The survey measured the education proficiency of fifteen year olds in 60 countries around the world.

The very bad and sad news is that the United States ranked 17th in reading, 23rd in science, and 31th in math. While the article did not give education expenditure information, I would bet that the United States ranked much higher in amount of education dollars spent per student than it did in any of the three categories measured. If this assertion is correct, then we are spending a lot of taxpayer money and getting mediocre performance in return.

Which brings us to the Federal Education Department, a bureaucracy that has been around since 1980 and according to its government website, has a discretionary budget of about $49.7 billion (this does not include the $33 billion or so of Pell grants that it administers). I guess one could make the argument that without the Education Department, the United States would have finished worse than 17th, 23rd, and 31th.

However, I do not buy that argument, I am pretty sure we could have finished this poorly without spending the $49.7 billion a year. In fact, if you look at the Education Department website, it acknowledges that "it is important to point out that education in America is a state and local responsibility."  They admit that they are not the main driver of education in this country but still eat up almost $50 billion a year just to fill a supplemental role.

Let's do some fantasy math. What if we terminated the Education Department, what could we do with that money:

• Since there are 50 states, you could provide an annual supplemental payment to the states, that the Department fully acknowledges has the main responsibility for educating our kids, of $1 billion per state to help improve their facilities and education processes.
• According to the government's National Center For Education Statistics, there are 93,295 public elementary and secondary schools in this country. If we divide this number of schools into the Education Department's budget, each school could theoretically receive an additional $532,000 per school each year to help educate America's youth.
• If we purchased the basic iPad product at Best Buys' current price of $499.95, we could outfit over 99 million students in one year with an iPad for themselves. Given today's high tech world, wouldn't iPads (or other worthy technology) be better use of taxpayer funds than a 31st finish in math?
• Of course, just having a piece of technology is not going to improve an education process but imagine what could happen in education with an iPad. For example, the need for books and the high expense that goes with the school purchase of books could be diverted to hire more teachers, improve curriculum's, enhance teacher training, etc. since bound paper books are more expensive than electronic digital books, a format that that could also be much easily updated. And this is for only one year. With the technology already purchased in year one, next year, millions of more dollars could be spent on other education needs, if we eliminated the Education Department budget.
• If you are not into helping improve our schools, you could divide the $49.7 billion by the number of U.S. households and give each household an annual check of just over $400. Certainly a better idea than 31st  in math.

The point to be made by these math calculations is that the Education Department has done such a poor job of positioning our kids for success in the world that continuing to budget and pay for this nonperformance is a farce. How much worse could it be to take the $50 billion or so and try something new with it? Given that the Department is supplemental, what is the worst that could happen? We fall to 32nd in math? The schools and education approach in Shangai is getting results, why can't we get the Federal government out of the way and let the states find a way to mimic what Shanghai is obviously doing right and our Education Department is obviously not doing at all?

While reading about our poor performance as a nation academically, it occurred to me that another Federal agency, the Department of Energy, is also a total failure when it comes to its charter. Although it has been over 30 years since the traumatic energy crises of the 1970s, we as a nation are not closer to having a strategic, workable, and rationale national energy plan today than we were when the Department of Energy was formed decades ago.

Think about it: name one success story from the Department of Energy that you can come up with without doing some serious research? We still have no national energy policy. I can think of no significant project, program, or technology that the Department funded with our taxpayer money that has born fruit, either with cheaper energy, better energy, or less reliance on foreign energy sources.

If you look at their Federal website,you see that the Department Of Energy's annual budget is around $28 billion, of which just over $11 billion of that is for Defense Department research. If you took that $11 billion and moved it and its staff into the Defense Department, you could dump the remaining parts of the Department Of Energy and save the taxpayers just over $17 billion a year. This would provide an annual tax reduction of about $150 for every U.S. household. What would you rather have: $150 in your pocket or just another government bureaucracy that did  nothing it was supposed to do?

These are the types of questions that need to be asked as the country faces this extraordinary and looming budget crisis of skyrocketing national debt. Just because we always had a government program, does not mean we need to continue to have these programs. An Education  Department that fails at education and a Department of Energy that fails at energy are not good reasons to continue to have them. Better to try somethng different and less expensive. Again, how much worse could it get when it comes to these two monstrosities? 

Five steps from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" would be good starting points:

1. Step 1 would reduce the size of the Federal government by 10% a year for five years. The major component of this downsizing effort would be just what we did above. Starting at the ground level, identify whether every department, program and project is absolutely necessary and terminate the rest. I am sure that Education and Energy would be the first ones to go, based on their long, failure-riddled history.
2. Steps 23, 24, 25 provide a framework and approach to put together that elusive national energy strategy and policy that balances the needs of the consumer, the environment, and the nation's economy.
3. Step 27 provides a framework and approach to fixing what ails our public education system, sans lobbyists and politicians, so that the embarrassment of the Organization For Economic Cooperation and Development survey eventually turns into a point of pride.

Just because something exists today does not mean it has to exist tomorrow. Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns, Montgomery Ward, Service Merchandise, American Motors, Studebaker, GTE, ITT, the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union, etc. all existed and are now all gone. Given this historical perspective, getting rid of a mere Cabinet Department or two should be no big deal, especially the ones that are expensive and ineffective, the cause for the demise of these past giants in their respective fields.



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/