March, 2017, Part 4, Polticial Class Insanity: More Food Stamp Scandals, More High Living By Washington Politicians, and the Disgust Levels With Washington Rises

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

Today and for all of the insanity posts this month, let’s start off with a welcome piece of honest political dialog. It comes from a State Department spokesperson. Mark Toner, who is about to start the daily State Department press briefing. In a joking matter, he makes the following quote: "Welcome to the State Department. I think we have some interns in the back. Welcome. Good to see you in this exercise in transparency and democracy." 

He then burst out laughing at his own quote, indicating he also knew what a joke the Obama administration has been, especially Mr. Toner’s State Department, when it comes to cover ups, lack of transparency, denial of Freedom of Information Act requests, the prosecution of whistleblowers, etc. But at least it was a little refreshing to finally hear some actual honesty out of Washington as we see from the actual clip of the news conference:

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2016/08/when-even-the-state-department-spokesperson-cant-keep-a-straight-face-about-things-anymore-video/

With that context of honesty, let’s see what other insanity has been going down:

1) Michelle Obama was a big advocate for kids eating well which is a noble principle. However, her school meal program turned out to be a disaster, schools lost lots of money trying to comply with the regulations of the Federal government effort, tons of food was wasted, and kids are not eating any healthier. Federal government failure.

Which makes it even worse is that another Federal program under operation at the same time was undermining and having the exact opposite effect of healthier eating. Consider a Chris Edwards article from the Downsizing Government website on February 22, 2017:

• The Federal government program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, is supposed to help low income recipients “make healthy food choices within a limited budget” and “permit low-income households to obtain a more nutritious diet.”
• Again, a noble intention but it turns out that about $15 billion a year of SNAP resources is being spent on junk food, not quite what Michelle Obama had in mind.
• Since the SNAP budget was $67 billion in 2016, feeding 44 million Americans, then over 22% of the budget is being used to buy junk food.
• This was the bottom line finding of a Department of Agriculture study that was released last November which tracked SNAP and non-SNAP purchases at a major grocer over a period of a year.
• The study found that SNAP buyers spent a higher percentage of their purchase on soda than non-SNAP buyers while SNAP buyers spent a lower percentage of their purchase on fruits and vegetables.
• For SNAP buyers, “sweetened beverages,” “prepared desserts,” “salty snacks,” “candy,” and “sugar” accounted for 22.6% of purchases. 

There really are three scandals in this failure of the Federal government:

1. Why is the Federal government subsidizing the purchase and consumption of junk food which contributes to obesity which contributes to the high cost of healthcare in this country?
2. How badly has the political class managed the economy that 44 million Americans, about 13.5% of the entire population cannot find good enough jobs to feed themselves and their family?
3. We have often discussed the criminal cases that have arisen as a result of abuse in the SNAP program so not only is 22.6% of the program wasting taxpayer wealth on junk food but billions of other dollars are being lost to criminal fraud, making this probably one of the least efficient government programs ever implemented.

Insane.

2) The Blacksphere website recently reported on more government waste, but this time it was politicians wasting huge amounts of taxpayer wealth on their lavish lifestyle, as reported by the Washington Free Beacon:

• The Beacon article found that the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), which includes the African American members of Congress, and its fundraising arm, the CBC-PAC, spends far more of its money towards administrative and fundraising purposes than spending it on black candidates, which is the whole purpose of the PAC to begin with.
• According to the CBC-PAC website, its purpose is to raise: “the number of African Americans in the U.S. Congress” and to “support non-Black candidates that champion our interests, and promote African American participation in the political process-with an emphasis on young voters.” 
• However, a lot of the PAC expenses were spent on lavish vacations and accommodations including $5,000 last January for the Buccaneer Resort Hotel in St. Croix,Virgin Islands, last March another payment was made to another St. Croix luxury resort hotel, $820 was spent on St. Croix taxis, over $2,000 was spent on St. Croix sightseeing tours, and over $4,500 was spent on catering at Un Amore, an Italian restaurant.
• But the CBC also spent and wasted a lot of money domestically: $40,000 was spent at the Conrad Hotel in New York City, which is an all-suite luxury hotel, over $18,000 was spent at the luxury St. Regis Hotel in Washington DC, $6,576 on the 5-star Beverly Hills Hotel, $3,268 at the Waldorf La Quinta Hotel Resort and Spa, $4,180 at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las vegas, a $3,372 bar tab at Drai’s Rooftop Bar and Lounge in Las Vegas, and $2,000 at the Fantasy Springs Resort Hotel.
• The article also reported that: “The group paid $28,342 for “fundraising event tickets” to IHeartMedia Inc., a mass media corporation in San Antonio, Texas. The PAC put $22,112 toward “tickets and catering for a fundraising event” at the Staples Center, a sports arena, in Los Angeles, Calif. More than $25,000 was spent on catering at The Palm restaurant in New York City while $27,070 was spent on catering at Bobby Van’s Steakhouse in Washington, D.C. Thousands more were spent at other restaurants. The group also spent $1,621 on Broadway tickets and another $5,960 at the Golden Theater in New York City.”
• Thus, rather than helping out African American political candidates, the CBC appears to be more interested in living the good life as analyzed by the Center for Responsive Politics which found that CBC members via their PAC spent $283,100 on administrative expenses (e.g., luxury hotels, sightseeing tours, fancy dining, etc.), $127,000 on fundraising (i.e. getting money for their luxury lifestyles) and only $91,000 on the stated purpose of their mission, funding black candidates.

Do as I say, not as I do, the trademark of the American political class. Not thinking that the CBC is getting in touch with their constituents if they are staying in luxury hotels, both domestically and internationally, and eating and partying at high end locations.

3) But maybe Americans are finally getting fed up with a Federal government that wastes its hard earned tax dollars on failing government programs like SNAP and are fed up with politicians living the good life like the CBC members are doing while the rest of the country suffers. Consider the results of a recent opinion poll conducted by the Convention of States effort:

• The poll asked the following question: “Overall, which level of government do you believe is doing a better job of serving its citizens and delivering results?” 
• A whopping 71% said that state governments do a better job than the Federal government.
• Republicans felt that way, 82% vs. 18%, Independents felt that way, 77% to 23%, and even Democrats, the lovers of big government felt that way, 54% vs. 46%.

So maybe there is hope as Americans realize that Washington and those that inhabit it really care only about themselves and now operate a bureaucracy that is bloated , inefficient, and ineffective. We can only hope that it is not too late.

For those of you that would like to make a difference and fix what is broken government wise in this country today, may I suggest you go to the following link to find out about a nationwide effort to fix what is indeed broken:

https://www.conventionofstates.com/

More insanity next month.

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

July, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 2: Farm Agents Get Submachine Guns, USDA Loses Money Via Fraud, Goats Invade Detroit, and More

Yesterday kicked off this month’s series on political class insanity, the ineptness, and the lack of problem solving skills of the current set of politicians in this country at all levels of government. Their inability to resolve any major problem facing Americans in any kind of efficient and effective way continues to waste our wealth and shred our freedom every day of the year with no societal benefit in return.

1) Congressman Chris Stewart of Utah and other House Republicans are proposing steps to take heavy weaponry out of the hands of Federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose Office of Inspector General has put out a bid to buy submachine guns. Yes, the Department of Agriculture seems to think it needs to have some of its employees armed to the teeth with .40 caliber submachine guns.

This is funny on one level and very scary from a freedom perspective on another level. First, the funny part, maybe they are worried about mad cow disease and they need to protect themselves from wacked out bovines in the course of their work. 

But seriously, this is a waste of taxpayer money as well as a threat to freedom. Why do we need agricultural agents prancing around our farmland with submachine guns? A waste of taxpayer money and a danger to citizens from ag agents who probably will not be highly trained like law enforcement personnel are regarding firearms safety and the law. Somebody is going to get hurt with this much firepower in the hands of untrained government workers.

And what about the freedom and oppressive government angle? Congressman Stewart’s Regulatory Agency De-militarization Act wants to scale back a 2002 law that gave most Federal government Offices of Inspector General the authority to carry weapons and arrest people. But Stewart said that is prompting agencies to develop “SWAT-like” teams to handle situations that should be reserved for law enforcement agencies: “I understand that federal agents must be capable of protecting themselves. But what we have observed goes far beyond providing necessary protection.”

Stewart noted that the Food and Drug Agency and the Department of Education also have law enforcement teams to conduct raids, and said this shows the government has gone too far. In 2010, armed FDA officers raided a grocery store suspected of using raw milk. Yes, selling raw milk was enough to have a police-like raid by armed FDA people into a privately owned building. In 2011, the Department of Education’s SWAT equivalent forcibly entered the home of a man suspected of student aid fraud.

The militarization of the Federal government bureaucracy cannot end well from both a wasteful spending perspective or the eventual death of an American over unpasteurized milk or a late student loan payment. Insanity.

2) Yesterday we discussed the reality that Medicaid lost about $14 billion last year due to criminal fraud, incompetency and inefficiency due to just one of their programs. But Medicaid is not the only Federal government bureaucracy that cannot manage taxpayer wealth according to their own standards.

A new Federal report from the Government Accountability Office shows that that the Federal government program that funds school lunches for low-income families nationwide misspent about $996 million, or 8% of its budget, in the last fiscal year. And this level is still attained even though the U.S. Department of Agriculture has tried in recent years to prevent ineligible families from receiving free and reduced prices in the lunch line. But according to the new report, much more can be done, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.

The GAO report found the USDA made an estimated $996 million in errors in 2013 while certifying families for the program, which offers free and reduced lunch prices to students whose families live near or below federal poverty levels. In nearly half the cases inspected in the report, households were not actually eligible for the free or reduced-price meals they were receiving. Families had excluded the income of a parent, lied about their household size and understated their income. 

I am betting nobody got fired or reprimanded or demoted for wasting 8% of their government budget despite the fact they have known for years the fraud was present and rampant. But in just two days we have identified at least $15 billion a year that the Federal government wastes away in a variety of different ways including criminal fraud. 

That is the equivalent of giving every U.S. household, just from these two wasteful programs, a tax rebate of about $130 a year. How many hungry Americans could be fed, how many homeless Americans could be given shelter, how many ailing veterans could finally get the medical care they need if we had that $15 billion to spend on them vs. losing it via government incompetence? That is truly the most insane part of our wasteful government spending.

3) It is no secret that Detroit is one big mess. Population loss, housing loss, crime out of control, the city government in bankruptcy, high unemployment, useless schools, urban blight, you name it and from a bad perspective Detroit probably has it. It also has a very bad case of political class insanity, at least as it applies to goats.

Yes, goats. Consider what one good hearted and concerned citizen tried to do for the city of Detroit and how the political class in Detroit, showing no creativity or sense of pride, did right back at him:

• Mark Spitznagel recently brought 18 baby goats to inner city Detroit to try and clean up the nation's largest bankrupt city by eating the overgrown foliage on some of Detroit’s abandoned home lots
• This is not a far fetched idea since the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization estimates there are about a billion goats around the world that serve as some of nature's friendliest weed wackers, lawn mowers, and garbage disposals.
• Mr. Spitznagel wanted his goats to be part of the solution to the urban blight in Detroit that is overrun with large tracts of overgrown and unsightly shrubbery. Within the city itself there is an estimated 114,000 city land patches loaded with trash and with weeds.
• According to local news reports, the first use of the goats were an instant hit with the neighbors, who welcomed the animals and their large appetites.
• But leave it to the local politicians, the same type of people that drove Detroit into the ground and into bankruptcy, to ruin the worthwhile attempt to fix what they broke, shutting down the goat operation since it violated a local ordinance that makes it "unlawful to own, harbor, keep, maintain, sell or transfer farm or wild animals."

Spitznagel was not allowing thousands of goat run wild in the city. They apparently were not a safety concern relative to injuring local residents. He was not displacing city or union workers who were obviously not working at keeping the parcels clear of overgrown brush. This was a good hearted, well intentioned and likely successful attempt by a private citizen to do good things for his fellow human beings. But none of that apparently was taken into consideration by a broken and useless local government and political class.

Einstein once said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Obviously, the Detroit politicians never heard this saying or do not believe it since they are using the same logic and flawed government approach with regards to 18 goats that they used to drive the city of Detroit into the ground. You know it is bad when goats have a better chance of doing good in the local neighborhood than the elected politicians do.

4) We have reviewed the lost “war on drugs” being waged by the Federal government many times in this blog. For over four decades, the Federal government has spent trillions of dollars in a vain attempt to get illegal drug usage under control in this country and has failed miserably at doing so. All the ‘war” has done is waste vast amounts of taxpayer wealth, imprisoned millions of Americans for non-violent drug offenses, and created super violent drug cartels in other countries.

A previous chart we have used showed how much our prison population has grown due to the lost war on drugs:






And a now a recent article from the Independent Journal Review (IJR) further reinforced how our political class has failed miserably in the areas of imprisoning Americans, most likely due to our failed war on drugs. About 2.2 million American adults, one out of every hundred Americans, are currently living behind bars. That’s far and away higher than the next highest country, Cuba, in both absolute numbers and per capita.

According to the IJR, the Prison Policy Initiative completed an interesting analysis on how individual states would line up if they were treated like actual countries. They found that not only is the U.S. as a whole the most imprisoned population in the world but that 36 states have a higher incarceration rate than every other country in the world. 

For a country that has long considered itself the “freest” country in the world, it is difficult to believe we are still the freest in the world when our imprisonment rate is the highest in the world. As more and more parts of the government arm themselves with high powered weaponry for jobs that require nothing of the sort, as more and more taxes are collected to cover up the wasteful and criminal activities of the political class, as government grows to such absurd levels that good hearted efforts of an individual citizen to help out fellow citizens is threatened with arrest, the political class gets stronger, our prisons get larger, and our freedoms get weaker. And that is the purest insanity of it all.

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

Part 2, September, 2013 Political Class Insanity: Lies, Extortion, Wasteful Spending And Einstein's View Of Today's Government

This is the second in what promises to be a long series of posts on the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Yesterday we reviewed 15 of the latest abuses and wasteful spending of taxpayer money as identified by the Heritage Foundation. We learned that a major human smuggling ring operating out of the Phoenix was being run by a Mexican national that had already been deported eight times. We learned that in just one of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing efforts it had spent and wagered $600 billion for less than $20 billion in return. Pathetic and disgraceful.

But the insanity and lunacy continues today:

1) The first set of insane political antics comes form the Washington Could Learn A Lot website and their compilation of the latest statistics on what is going on in the country from a posting on their website on August 6, 2013, “Everything Sucks:”

• Home ownership is at an 18-year low at 65%. People are renting instead of buying. 
• College graduates are moving in with their parents to save money or bide their time.
• The only reason unemployment numbers are at 7.5% is that they don’t count those who just stop looking for work. People who are not in the labor force increased by 240,000 in July relative to the 165,000 jobs gained.
• And when people can find a job, it’s usually part-time and/or unsatisfying. Of the 953,000 jobs created in 2013, 731,000 were part-time. And only about one-third of people feel engaged at work.
• The weekly Gallup Economic Confidence Index shows that on a scale from -100 to 100, confidence has remained above -30 since January of 2012, and this is up from a low of  -65 in 2008. 
• In the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal Polls we see that a record-breaking 83% percent disapprove of the job that Congress is doing. 
• While more than 45% of Americans were confident that the POTUS had the “right set of goals and policies to improve the economy” in 2009, that confidence has dropped all the way to 33% while economic confidence has risen.
• Washington has made a lot of promises to fix all this junk, and we know what you are thinking: “WHAT IS TAKING SO LONG?? %$#@!!”

Great question. Why  is it taking longer than expected or do these politicians in Washington have no idea, inclination, or will to make things right and resolve the major issues of our time. I vote for the latter explanation.

2) According to a recent General Accountability Office analysis and report, between 2008 and 2012, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued more than $36 million in checks to about 6,300 farmers who had bought the farm, I.e. they were dead. 

If there is any good news in this disgrace it is the fact that the Department of Agriculture is less inept today than it used to be. The Department’s  Farm Service Agency (FSA), which oversees farm income subsidies and disaster payments, had paid out a whopping $1.1 billion to 172,801 deceased farmers between 1999 and 2005.

The USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA), which administers the Federal crop insurance program is not much different when it comes to handing out taxpayer wealth for no reason. This agency provided $22 million for some 3,434 farmers who had been dead for two or more years. Yesterday, we found out that taxpayers were sending checks to people in jail. Today we are sending checks to dead farmers. Can hardly wait to see where our taxpayer wealth is fraudulently being spent tomorrow.

3) And politicians continue to wonder why most of us never believe what they say. Bloomberg caught the Justice Department and Eric Holder in a bad math lie in the middle of August. The Obama administration claimed that it was cracking down and rounding up mortgage providers that illegally operated and helped cause the Great Recession. 

Obama’s Mortgage Fraud Working Group in the Department of Justice wrongly claimed it had criminally charged 530 people who had victimized 73,000 Americans. When Bloomberg journalists reporters got underneath the claim, the Department first stalled and then admitted it had inflated the claims themselves, a fib they admitted late on an August Friday, a time when news reporters are getting more focused on the weekend than reporting.

We are not talking minor math rounding errors here. Originally the Justice Department said 530 people were charged criminally as part of a year-long initiative by the multi-agency Mortgage Fraud Working Group. Turns out the actual figure was 107 or 80% less. Holder originally said the defendants had victimized more than 73,000 American homeowners. That number was revised to downward to 17,185, a reduction of about 75%. Estimates of homeowner losses associated with these mortgage frauds dropped to $95 billion from $1 billion.

Makes you wonder what else they are lying about. Or probably more accurately, are they telling the truth about anything that they speak of. Again, these are not rounding errors, they are outright lies and deceptions. Thankfully, at least two reporters were doing their jobs correctly and uncovered just the latest lies from this administration.

Given that they would lie about a relative trivial matter like this, the administration should not be given any credibility and benefit of the doubt when we are talking about major issues such as illegal IRS targeting, Benghazi, spying on news organizations, NSA spying, etc.

4) Comedian Jeff Dunham once made the somewhat accurate observation that the only difference between the government and the Mafia is that the Mafia is profitable. Listen to the audio dialog at the following site and then tell me if this is not akin to a Mafia shakedown of a legitimate business:

http://www.mrconservative.com/2013/08/22461-voicemail-leaked-of-democrat-congresswoman-using-bribery/

This is an actual voice mail that a lobbyist firm kept that contains a voice mail message left for them from sitting Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. Basically, she is telling the lobbyist that he had not sent any money to  her perpetual reelection campaign and that was not good since she sat on several Congressional committees that were involved in the areas this lobbying firm focused on.

This was basically an extortion phone call from a member of Congress. It has the undertones of an Al Capone standard operating procedure. It is this type of gangster-like behavior that requires that 1) we establish term limits for all Federal politicians since there is no longer any perpetual reelection efforts and 2) we need to fix our politics processes so that only individual American contribute to election campaigns. PACs, businesses, lobbyists, unions, etc. would be forbidden to do so, only individual Americans.

Both of these steps were proposed in our book, “Love My Country, Loathe My Government.” The term limits idea has been operational zed at:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

We should not have to pay protection money to a sitting Washington politician in any, any circumstance.

5) According to an article in the August 2, 2013 issue of The Week, the Federal government is getting into the magic industry. Believe it or not, American taxpayers are paying for this Department of Agricultural insanity.

The Department recently and officially demanded that magicians that use rabbits in their act submit plans to the Federal government on how they would save their rabbits in the face of a natural disaster. I swear, you cannot make this stuff up. Somewhere in the obese government bureaucracy actual human beings are worried about stuff like this. And being paid for it with my tax money.

In the face of this idiocy, magician Gary Maurer said he would carry around a reminder note so that in the case of a natural disaster he would read the note which says: “Take rabbit with you when you leave.” That was his plan. For this common sense we need a government bureaucracy. Insane.

6) According to another article from The Week magazine that appeared in its August 9, 2013 issue, the U.S. government has spent over $24 million over the past six years to fly a plane over Cuba that broadcasts American-sponsored television programming to the island below. However, the Cuban government blocks the signal with signal jamming equipment so no Cuban citizen has ever seen what is being broadcast.

Despite this fact, according to the article, Congressmen representing the Cuban exile community insist that the useless flights continue. Einstein must have this insanity in mind when he said: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.” 

How stupid and wasteful is this program. Its funding could have kept the White House tours going for more than 24 years instead of broadcasting stuff over Cuba that is never seen.

Lies, wasteful spending, extortion, and more. Never a dull moment, or rational moment,  when dealing with American politicians. And we are  just getting warmed up, more 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