April, 2016, Part 8, Poltiical Class Insanity: The Death of The U.S. Economy, More NSF Stupidity, Obama's Racist Comments, and More

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.

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) Despite running an astronomical national debt of over $19 TRILLION, the bureaucrats in the Federal government continue to waste epic amounts of money in absolutely absurd ways. Today’s stupid waste of taxpayer money comes to us courtesy of the National Science Foundation, NSF. Which should not be a surprise since we have often referred to the insanely stupid ways the NSF has wasted taxpayer wealth over the years. Consider just one of our previous posts that chronicled their obscene wasteful spending:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/12/day-3-seven-days-of-logic-and-sanity.html

Today’s waste of wealth comes to us from a recent Washington Free Beacon article by Elizabeth Harrington. According to Ms. Harrington, the NSF gave out a grant of over $400,000 to study how glaciers can shape “religious beliefs and cultural values.” I will let that sink in for a minute…. Yes, as a taxpayer, your government took some of your tax money, gave it to a university professor who proceeded to analyze how a very large chunk of ice somewhere where it is very cold and tried to correlate it to religious and cultural values.

Details from the article include the following absurdities:

• The final research paper was entitled, “Glaciers, gender, and science” and concluded that “ice is not just ice.”
• According to professor Mark Carey of the University of Oregon, the leader of the research: “Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers–particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied.”
• The final research paper concluded that, “Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.” 
• The research asserts that glaciers can shape “religious beliefs and cultural values,” and that climate change can lead to the “breakdown of stereotypical gender roles and even ‘gender renegotiation.’”
• More hogwash from the study: “A critical but overlooked aspect of the human dimensions of glaciers and global change research is the relationship between gender and glaciers,” the paper said. “While there has been relatively little research on gender and global environmental change in general there is even less from a feminist perspective that focuses on gender (understood here not as a male/female binary, but as a range of personal and social possibilities) and also on power, justice, inequality, and knowledge production in the context of ice, glacier change, and glaciology.”
• The exact cost of this study for taxpayers was $412,930.
• A student working with Carey on the study pushed to expand the scope of the study to include gender impacts of glaciers, justifying this nonsense as follows: “I wanted to know more about the relationship between women and ice, so we pursued the topic from climate-change vulnerability to knowledge,” said the student, Jaclyn Rushing, an environmental studies and romance languages major.

I’m sorry and maybe I am insensitive to the topic of glaciers and gender impacts but really - over $400,000 for this garbage? Millions of Americans go hungry every day, millions are homeless at any time during a year, thousands of veterans cannot get the medical treatment they were promised, almost 50,000 Americans die from drug overdoses every year because they did not get addiction treatment in time and the Federal bureaucracy just spent $400,000 on this study. Pathetically and tragically insane.

3) Liberals and Democrats are always trying to be politically correct, often taking it to the absurd. They are always so critical of others that do not match their passion for saying things that are not insensitive to others, no matter to what ridiculous heights they take it.

But they often do not carry that standard of correctness over to their own vocabulary. Consider the recent remarks Obama made in a question and answer session in Chicago when discussing his latest nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland: “And so, when I look at Merrick Garland, that was the person that… you know, the difference between the Supreme Court is that it’s just a handful of seats come up at any given time. Now, I appointed a Latino woman, and another woman right before that, so…You know, yeah, he’s a white guy. But he’s a really outstanding jurist. Sorry! You know, he is. I think that’s important.” 

So here we have the first African-American President joking and apologizing for nominating a “white guy” to the Supreme Court. Imagine the uproar if Bush had said the same thing but he had nominated a “black guy” to the Supreme Court, “You know, yeah, he’s a black guy. But he’s a really outstanding jurist. Sorry!”? Liberals and Democrats would have been besides themselves in outrage. 

Which is just another example of the hypocrisy of the American political class. When someone in the other party says something like this we get outraged. Someone in our party says something like this, and they joke about it. Very, very small minded people in so many ways.

4) The Washington Free Beacon had a recent example that shows how cozy Washington politicians have become with the power brokers in this country, being accountable to their constituents be damned. According to writer Joe Schoffstall, former Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia is now a registered lobbyist, representing companies who were among his top campaign fundraisers when he was in Congress.

He is now employed by DC located law firm McDermott Will & Emery and has filed to lobby for General Dynamics and Boeing. While in office, Moran took in $4,600 in campaign donations from General Dynamics employees and another $71,000 from General Dynamics related PACs. Boeing employees gave him $99,000 and Boeing PACs chipped in another $57,000.

See how it works. Washington politicians take money while in office from organizations looking to gain advantages from legislative action and those same politicians get more money as reward, after leaving Congress, for the favors they did for those same organizations while in office. Nowhere in this cycle are the interests of ordinary Americans taken into account. This is what our country has become, money buys influence, and then it buys a job for those in office.

Oh, by the way, according to the article, six other former Congressional members made the same decision as Moran this year relative to their post-Congress career.

5) Let’s finish today’s insanity with some really depressing economic news. It is no surprise that the U.S. economy, under Obama, has been performing very pathetically and substantialy below the long term trend. Wages and household incomes are stagnant, over 14 million Americans are either unemployed or working at part time jobs because they cannot find full time work, the labor participation rate is at all time lows, annual overall economic growth has been limping along at anemic levels, never attaining the long average long term growth rate of over 3%, and the ever growing level of taxation and regulations under Obama has resulted in terrible economic performance.

And this poor showing under Obama was attained even though:

• Obama spent over $800 billion on a failed economic stimulus program.
• Record low energy costs in the past few years should have fueled over economic growth.
• The Federal Reserve pumped TRILLIONs of dollars into the economy.

And yet, Obama still could not put together a credible economic growth program. So what could be so depressing, given this context of depressing economic news? According to a recent study by Gallup, 1) for the first time EVER in this country, more businesses are dying in this country than new businesses being created and 2) the U.S. is no longer the most entrepreneurial country and economy in the world.

Jim Clifton, Gallup Chairman and CEO, speaking of the latest Gallup findings: “The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the total number of new business startups and business closures per year — the birth and death rates of American companies — have crossed for the first time since the measurement began. I am referring to employer businesses, those with one or more employees, the real engines of economic growth. Four hundred thousand new businesses are being born annually nationwide, while 470,000 per year are dying.” 

This negative economic trend of business creation and death has been deteriorating every year during the Obama presidency: “Until 2008, startups outpaced business failures by about 100,000 per year. But in the past six years, that number suddenly turned upside-down. There has been an underground earthquake. As you read this, we are at minus 70,000 in terms of business survival,” writes Clifton.

How bad is this fiasco relative to the rest of the world? According to Clifton: “The U.S. now ranks not first, not second, not third, but 12th among developed nations in terms of business startup activity.” Denmark, Finland, Hungary, and even financially strapped Italy is starting up more businesses than the U.S.

Clifton concludes with some dire warnings: “Let’s get one thing clear: This economy is never truly coming back unless we reverse the birth and death trends of American businesses. It is catastrophic to be dead wrong on the biggest issue of the last 50 years — the issue of where jobs come from…when small and medium-sized businesses are dying faster than they’re being born, so is free enterprise. And when free enterprise dies, America dies with it.” 

In the meantime, President Obama is going to baseball games in Cuba, taking tango lessons in Argentina, playing golf in D.C., filming video tribute clips on the demise of “American Idol,” working on his choices for the 2016 NCAA March Madness tournament, and jetting off to Chicago to pal around with some law students. All the while while the economic conditions he created are destroying the job creation machine in this country, a machine that was once the envy of the whole world and which is now lagging behind elven other countries. Pathetic economy management.

Another depressing day as the American class continues to destroy the country and the economy while looking out for themselves. This was our eight post this month on political class insanity and we are not close to being done yet. Which is the real insanity. More idiocy 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.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

April, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 5: A Congressman Claims Poverty, Hillary Loses $6 Billion, DC Gets Richer While We All Get Poorer

This is our fifth and far from last post this month in our monthly political class insanity series. In this series, every month, we look at the insanity, idiocy, wasteful spending, and condescending attitude of the American political class. 

It seems that the members of this political class have been especially pathetic over the past month since it is likely we will surpass the most posts needed in one month to get all of the insanity reviewed. This is a very poor commentary on our politicians, the fact that they are getting worse over time, wasting taxpayer wealth and destroying our liberties and freedoms as they go.

1) We have often maintained that our politicians are the most ignorant politicians of all time when it comes to the economy, economic theory, and economic policies. The Independent Journal Review recently took some important economic indices’ values from 2008 and compared them to their 2013 levels.

Keep in mind a few facts before we review the indices:

1. Since 2008 we suffered through a severe recession but that recession ended four years ago.
2. The Obama administration spent well over $800 billion in an economic stimulus package to spur the economy back in 2009.
3. The Federal Reserve Board has held interest rates at historically low levels for a historical length of time to spur the economy.
4. We are living in the midst of an energy revolution which should be keeping business costs down and spurring economic expansion.

Despite all of these positive economic environmental factors, the political class has been only able to post the following economic results over the just past five years:

• The number of full time American workers has dropped from 120 million to 116 million.
• The work force participation has dropped from 66% vs. 63.2%.
• The home ownership rate has dropped from 70% to 62%.
• The median household income has dropped from $55,484 to $52,098, with most of that drop occurring AFTER the recession ended.
• The poverty rate has climbed from 13% to 15%.
• The number of Americans on food stamps has risen from 31.6 million vs. 47.8 million.
• The nation’s Debt-to-GDP has jumped dramatically from 64.8% vs. 101.6%

It is hard and sad to believe that despite all that the political class had going for it from a positive economic environment, this is how pathetic their policies have turned out to be in reality: lower American incomes, lower home ownership, higher national debt, more hungry Americans, etc. Pathetic ignorance of economic theory and policies.

That is why Step 36 from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government” was proposed. Under this step, every member of any Washington political office would be required to take a class on basic economic theory and pass a test from that class before being allowed to take office. 

2) Given these awful economic results generated by the current political class, it really smacks of being out of touch and a Hunger Games mentality when a long term Congressman tries to make the case that members of Congress are underpaid. Jim Moran, a 12-term Congressman from Virginia recently opined that members of Congress deserve a per diem payment, as they cannot afford to stay in Washington, D.C., according to reporting by The Hill. 

Keep in mind that members of Congress currently receive $174,000 a year in salary, more than three times what the average American household earns. Members get substantial help to pay for their health care coverage thanks to an illegal and un-Constitutional move by the Obama administration. They are only in the office for small parts of each month. They get a lot of other perks that save them money that ordinary Americans have to pay for. And their economic performance is putrid and the approval rating hovers around a historical low of 10%. 

And he somehow thinks they are underpaid. Step 37 from “Love My Country, Loathe my Government” suggested that a customer/taxpayer approval review process be instituted every year and that members of Congress and the President have a large part of their pay based on how well they scored in this citizen review. If this process was actually in place today, anything paid to a current Washington politician would likely be considered too much, given how little they have accomplished.

3) According to a recent report from the State Department Inspector General, the State Department has lost track of approximately $6 billion used to pay its contractors over the past five years or so. Just this one instance of $6 billion wasted and lost money comes out to about $52 for every U.S. household.

The report found a basic inability to file paperwork properly and a “lack of internal control at the department has led to billions of unaccounted dollars over the last six years,” State Department Inspector General Steve Linick said in a “management alert” recently made public.

How could this waste have happened and the $6 billion lost in a Federal department that has been around for hundreds of years, a department that should now better on how to handle basic accounting processes? Well, it is simple. Linick was appointed to his current position in 2013 after the State Department went without an Inspector General for nearly five years, the longest that any Federal entity has gone without a chief auditor, the Washington Post reported.

Thus, when the inspector general cat was away, the mice at the State Department played fast and loose with accounting rules, processes and taxpayer wealth: “The failure to maintain contract files adequately creates significant financial risk and demonstrates a lack of internal control over the Department’s contract actions,” the report states.

The department’s mismanagement of contract funds and contract-related files started a little before Hillary Clinton was appointed Secretary of State and continued throughout her entire tenure at the State Department. Which raises a simple and legitimate question: if Hillary Clinton showed no ability to manage the State Department budget while in charge of the State Department, why in heaven’s name would we ever trust her manage the Federal government’s entire budget as President of the United States? 

4) We have reviewed the following analysis in previous years but it is worthwhile to look at the latest results of a Forbes magazine analysis. Every year Forbes personnel look at U.S. Census data and compute the wealthiest counties in the United States. This year, six of the wealthiest counties are in the greater Washington DC metro area:

1. Falls Church City, Va. 
2. Loudoun County, Va. 
3. Los Alamos County, N.M. 
4. Howard County, Md. 
5. Fairfax County, Va. 
6. Hunterdon County, N.J. 
7. Arlington County, Va. 
8. Douglas County, Colo. 
9. Stafford County, Va. 

Only three counties outside of Washington were able to crack the top nine in the Forbes analysis. The average household income in the richest Washington metro counties, Falls Church and Loudoun was almost two and a half times larger than the overall U.S. median household income.

Now we know where all of our tax money is going, it is feeding the out of control and far reaching government bureaucracy in true Hunger Games fashion. 

5) The U.S. is hopefully going to get all of its troops out of Afghanistan pretty soon and leave the hell hole behind in our history. However, before we go, it is important to realize how much taxpayer wealth has been wasted in this ill fated military mission. The following instances and levels of waste do not include the wasted military costs and the cost of Americans killed and wounded in the fighting. 

According to the Special Inspector General For Afghan Reconstruction audit of non-military spending in the country, the American taxpayer has already spent over $14 billion. However, it appears we have gotten very little value for our money, given what the inspector general uncovered:

• The US has been trying to complete a dam project since the 1950, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars but the project is still not completed.
• A $34-million military facility in Helmand Province was built and THEN the Army decided that it did not need it, resulting in a need to decide whether to tear down or turn over to the Afghans. The Army decided to hand it over but for some reason the unused building will need a “major overhaul” before Afghanistan's government can use it/ So the Pentagon decided to throw good money after bad so the military gave additional $1.2 million to the Afghans to finish the work even though we will be long gone and unable to see what happens to it.
• An $11.3-million prison in Baghlan, built with a Department of State contract, has “serious structural damage” that endangers staff and prisoners because it is located in one of the country’s most earthquake-prone areas and may never fulfill its mission.
• Much if not most of the American wealth flowing into the country for civilian program ended up in the pockets of corrupt politicians, corrupt police, and not surprisingly, members of the Taliban, the very people we have been militarily fighting over the past ten plus years.

What a mismanaged, disgraceful project management example of political class incompetence. That has wasted trillions of our tax dollars and thousands of our brave service people’s lives.

So let’s review: the Washington politicians have wasted over $14 billion for civilian programs in Afghanistan, Hillary Clinton’s state Department lost $6 billion, people In DC are getting richer and richer while the rest of the country is getting poorer and poorer, and a U.S. Congressman is struggling to live on only $174,000 a year plus benefits and perks. Yes, sounds about ride for one day of political c lass insanity.

Unfortunately, much more insanity is coming down the the line in the days to come.

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