December, 2014 Part 4, Political Class Insanity: A $9 Million Obesity Video Game, More Obamaphone Fraud, Goats For Afghanistan, and More

It’s the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from America’s politicians. Whether it is wasteful spending, inane quotes, faulty government operations, or insulting the American public, there is always new material spewing forth from these people, usually enough to fill up half a dozen or so posts every month. Given what we know today, this month should be no different as the insanity seems to be expanding exponentially from those in office today.

This is our fourth installment this month and we are nowhere near the end of the latest insanity from our politicians:

1) The Washington Free Beacon recently reported that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had paid taxpayer dollars for the development of two video games that promote healthier eating. The first one is called “Escape from Diab,” a “nightmare” fictional city where people are only allowed to eat junk food.

“The story centers around five children who must get healthy enough to escape the evil King Etes,” explains Archimage, Inc., a computer game company that received over $9 million to create the games. King Etes is a fat ruler who forces his people to eat out of vending machines.

According to the Diab website: “Deejay, an athletic inner city youth, accidentally tumbles into an abandoned building and through its rotting floor. When he awakes, he finds himself in Diab, a nightmare city where people eat nothing but junk food.”

Here’s an idea for another nightmare: spend $9 million on a video game that will likely never be seen by more than a handful of kids or adults across the country and have virtually no impact on the food habits of America. How many homeless people could have been fed or sheltered for $9 million, how veterans could get the medical care they have been denied for $9 million, how many drug addicts could have gotten the detox treatment they need before they kill themselves on an overdose? 

$9 million? Are you kidding me? Such insanity.

2) There has been a lot of news coverage of the so-called Obamaphone disaster that has been going on for years. In this wasting of taxpayer money, American taxpayers subsidize cellular and home phone service for people that have more than enough wealth to pay for their own phone service. 

Additionally, the companies providing the service under this wasteful program have been big political campaign donors to Democrats for which they are rewarded with an out of control spending government program, crony capitalism at its worse. Rather than have been try to explain the latest disgraces out of this program, I refer to the following link that gives the details of this wasting of taxpayer wealth:

http://joeforamerica.com/2014/11/obamaphones-no-more-like-obamafrauds/

3) In the Federal government, inspector general organizations within each major branch of the government serve as the auditors and policemen of Federal agency spending, making sure that as best as possible that government procedures and processes are as honest and efficient as possible. A major problem arises when these guardians of the taxpayer wealth are actually the culprits that are wasting the taxpayer wealth.

According to a Washington Examiner article from November 12, 2014, written by Paul Bedard, over half of the credit card charges made by people working in the EPA’s inspector general organization were “improper.” A review of “high risk” credit card charges by that agency’s auditors found that more than half were for such non-job related items such as police equipment and “novelty items.”

In a two year audit of expenses from that inspector general organization, in a sample of expenses charged by workers totaling $62,012, $36,488. Well over half, were improper, according to the analysis titled, "Spending Taxpayer Dollars: Ineffective Oversight of Purchase Cards Resulted in Improper Purchases at EPA OIG." The report found shoddy recordkeeping and sloppy use of government credit cards as the main culprits for the improper use o taxpayer funds.

Thus, at least in this case of wasteful spending, the foxes were put in charge of guarding the henhouse, i.e. the EPA inspector general organization was guilty of the type of behavior it is supposed to catch and correct.

4) We have previously reported how the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan has turned that country into the biggest heroin producer in the world. According to numerous news reports, and a recent article in Businessweek, the U.S. has spent $7.6 billion since 2002 trying to get rid of the Afghan poppy fields with absolutely no success. 

Never one to give up, the political class and the Federal government are now taking a different approach to the heroin problem that originates out of the country‘s poppy fields. Their new approach: goats. The U.S. government recently sent nine specially selected male goats to Afghanistan with the hope of creating a bigger Afghan cashmere industry. 

The theory is that if the stock of Afghan goats can be improved, their hair can be cultivated for cashmere applications and people will stop producing poppy plants and start producing better cashmere. The nine goats are supposed to be the start of this revolution and the end of the Afghan poppy and heroin trade.

Two thoughts here, neither of them very complimentary of the Federal government:

1. Why didn’t we try this latest and greatest idea BEFORE we wasted $7.6 billion on the other failed ideas? Nine goats has to be cheaper than $7.6 billion.
2. Does any sane person really think that nine goats is going to make a hill of difference against a multi-billion dollar poppy industry? According to the Businessweek article, there are no refining and development facilities for the cashmere in the country. The raw hair would still have to be sent out of country for production.

This plan does nothing to reduce the demand for poppies and heroin and thus, it has no chance of being successful. We are just throwing good goats after bad money already spent on failures. Nine goats, give me a break.

5) It is not just the humongous Federal government that wastes taxpayer wealth. Consider a short report from the January, 2015 issue of reason magazine on a local Minneapolis taxpayer funded organization. Community Action of Minneapolis is chartered to provide energy assistance, skills training, and others services to less affluent people in its community.

However, a state government audit found that the organization spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on cruises. Spa treatments, a loaner care, and bonuses for staff and board members. Not quite the expenses you would expect to see from an entity that is supposed to be helping the poor. 

That will do it for today but more insanity to follow in the days to come. Today we learned that government bureaucrats can waste money wherever they exist, from a small non-profit entity in Minnesota to the Federal government’s EPA in Washington. We learned that the federal government is using nine goats to try and solve a problem that $7.6 billion could not solve. We learned that Obamaphone fraud is still alive and striving. And that for over $9 million, you can build a silly video game on junk food that will serve no societal benefit. Insane.

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.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