August, 2015, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: Death Of The Export-Import Bank,CIA Spies On Congress and More

At the beginning of each month we take a week or so to review the latest insanity from the American political class. Insanity from them includes a wide range of very depressing actions which can include wasteful spending, idiotic quotes, an inefficient and ineffective government bureaucracy, failed economic policies, etc. Every month we continue to prove that we are being served by the worst set of politicians ever.

And as you will see, this month’s review and discussions do nothing to prove that this thesis is wrong in any way:

1) In past posts we have always supported the termination of the Export-Import Bank. This is a Federal government entity that takes American taxpayer money and gives it out as loans to foreigners to purchase American made products. There are a number of things wrong with this type of government operation:

• Why are we giving and risking taxpayer wealth with foreign companies, let them buy American goods with their own money or their governments’ own money.
• Contrary to what Export-Import fans say, most of the money and loans go to supporting very large American companies such a GE, Boeing, etc. We should let those companies’ stockholders finance purchases of their companies' products, not taxpayers since it is the stockholders that will see any advantage of doing so, not the taxpayer.
• Giving U.S. taxpayer-backed loans to foreign companies to purchase American products disadvantages American companies that compete with those foreign companies since domestic companies cannot get Export-Import loans.

Fortunately, the bank's charter recently expired and hopefully it will stay dead in future Congressional sessions. As an example of why it should stay dead, consider the highlights from the following Washington Examiner story by Timothy Carney from June 18, 2015:

• Apparently, the bank has given a $650 million, U.S. taxpayer backed loan to the richest woman in Australia.
• Gina Rinehart owns Roy HIll mining in Australia and is also the richest woman in that country. Despite that wealth status, the Export-Import bank loaned her company $650 million to purchase equipment made by GE and Caterpillar.
• But a U.S.mining company, Cliff’s Natural Resources, an American company that competes with Roy HIll, does not get any financial support and taxpayer backed plans from the Export-Import bank, putting it at a competitive disadvantage.
• The loan also disadvantages the U.S. domestic steel industry since Roy HIll sends a lot of its mined ore to China which turns it into steel which impacts worod wide steel prices. 

How perverted has Washington become where we send U.S. taxpayer money half way around the world to support foreign companies owned by very rich people but do not extend that opportunity to domestic companies? If selling equipment to Roy Hill is so important, than let the stockholders at Caterpillar and GE finance the purchases.

Hopefully, with the recent death of the program, this type of financial insanity will stop and that the Export-Import Bank will not rise from the dead. But zombie people do rise fom the dead as do zombie govenrment programs so who knows.

2) Recently released CIA reports from the CIA inspector general now show that the White House is possibly involved with the CIA’s spying on personnel in the U.S. Senate. The reports show that CIA Director John Brennan met with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and discussed the intention to search the computers being used by Senate staffers working for Senator Dianne Feinstein to investigate the use of torture by the CIA on suspected terrorists.

The report said that Brennan had ordered CIA investigators to use “whatever means necessary” to ascertain how Senate investigators had obtained “certain sensitive internal documents.” At that time, Feinstein’s Senate committee was conducting its own investigation into the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.

While the CIA spying on Congress is bad enough, the inspector general analysis shows that White House personnel knew that the spying was going on and did nothing to stop it. Obviously, if this is true, than Feinstein’s argument that the CIA had “likely violated the constitutional separation of powers,” is a very valid and very serious Constitutional violation, a violation that the White House might also be guilty of.

The inspector general concluded that the five CIA employees who conducted the search had “engaged in wrongdoing,” according to the Huffington Post, but, as always with government lawbreakers, that their actions were not punishable. At about the same time the inspector general report was made public, a CIA Accountability Review Board report asserted that Brennan, who denied telling CIA employees to use “whatever means necessary,” failed to “appreciate what forensic techniques were necessary to answer his questions.”

Violate the Constitution, very bad, but no punishment. Smoke a cigarette in your own home in NYC, and you could soon be a criminal. Down the rabbit hole of political class insanity we fall.

3) The Government Accountability Office is kind of like the Federal government’s auditor function, going around and identifying and fixing what is wrong with government functions. Someone in that entity was recently caught doing their job well when they identified thousands of Medicaid beneficiaries and hundreds of medical providers that were involved in ripping off the American taxpayer during 2012, the last year complete data is available:

• The ripoffs included receiving improper and fraudulent payments.
• The fraud amounted to $18.3 million in just four states, New Jersey, Michigan, Florida, and Arizona.
• About 8,600 Medicaid beneficiaries had improperly collected benefits from more than one state.
• 200 dead Medicaid beneficiaries had received upwards of $9.6 million AFTER they had died.

Makes you wonder who is watching the taxpayer money since in just a few paragraphs we saw that the Federal government is sending hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer wealth to the richest woman in Australia, millions of taxpayer dollars to dead people, and millions of dollars to live people who are double dipping. Pathetic fiscal management.

4) But it is not just the Federal government that gives taxpayer money to rich people. Wisconsin Governor and Republican candidate for President, Scott Walker, wants to give some Wisconsin state taxpayer money to rich, billionaire basketball team owners. Apparently, according to a recent Washington Examiner article, Walker and other state politicians want to give a quarter-billion dollars in taxpayer money to the billionaire owners of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, who are threatening to leave Wisconsin unless they get a new, subsidized basketball arena.

According to the article, the owners do not even live in the state but state politicians have negotiated a financial deal where state and local taxpayers would pay for half the cost of a new $500 million arena for the NBA team. The state would borrow $55 million to fund the arena, costing the state taxpayers $80 million over 20 years when interest is included. City and county governments would cover the rest.

Walker is claiming that this is a good $250 million investment and good use of taxpayer money for the local and state economies. But the article points out that it is nearly unanimous among economists that stadium subsidies do not pay for themselves, and the research suggests that losing a sports team doesn't hurt a city's economy:

• Economists Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys: "Our conclusion, and that of nearly all academic economists studying this issue, is that professional sports generally have little, if any, positive effect on a city's economy."
• Economist Ray Keating: "The lone beneficiaries of sports subsidies are team owners and players."
• Examiner article: “One reason is the substitution effect: Milwaukeeans who have a basketball team will spend less money on other types of leisure. The money spent in and around the fancy new arena wouldn't have just sat under mattresses.”

If it is one thing American politicians like to do is give away our money, in this case to billionaire out of state basketball team owners. That will do it for today’s insanity, but more insanity sure to follow in the next few days, can hardly wait to see who our politicians give our taxpayer money to 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.loathemygovernmobama,washington post,politifactent.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

September, 2014 Polticial Class Insanity, Part 3: Laws and Jets That Do Not Work, CIA Lying, A TSA Education Failure and More

This is our third post in our monthly series where we look at all of the recent political insanity that our politicians have dumped on us and the country over the past month or so. From wasteful spending to stupid quotes to inefficient and ineffective government operations, the amount of ineptness and insanity keep on coming at an ever quickening pace. There is little doubt that we are being served by the worst set of politicians in the history of the country.

1) One of the Obama administration’s biggest successes is supposed to be the Dodd-Frank legislation that was supposed to clean up the financial services section of the economy. We have previously reported in other insanity posts that we have no idea if that legislation is a success since years after it was passed, more than half of the necessary government rules and regulations have yet to be written and put into effect. 

It is tough to say anything is a success with its impact yet to be felt. Plus, you wonder how successful it will be if it is that hard to write the rules and regulations. Not very efficient.

As a prime example of such nonsense, consider an older article that appeared in the December 27, 2013 issue of The Week magazine. At that time, still years after the legislation was passed, just one of the rules in the bill, the so-called Volcker Rule was expected be almost 1,000 pages long. It was estimated in the article that just complying with this single aspect of Dodd-Frank will take businesses 2.3 million hours of legal and administrative work.

Such a waste of economic resources, resources that companies would be much better off using to grow the economy and create more jobs. Plus, who in the world in the government is going to review the 2.3 million hours of work to see if the work is legal, legit, complete, accurate, etc. In short: no one, making the Volcker rule and the larger legislation it sits within just plain nonsensical insanity.

2) According to an article in the July 25, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, a TSA agent refused to let a Washington D.C. resident go through TSA security checkpoints at Orlando’s airport because…wait for it… they did not know that Washington D.C. was a part of the United States. Really? This government employee, employed by the Federal government in Washington D.C. did not know that Washington D.C. was a part of the United States. Insane.

Two points of concern here:

1. These are the types of people that are supposed to keep the air traveling public safe. Scary.
2. In a bigger sense, what value are we getting for our tax dollars that go to public education if this employee did not even know the capital of the country?

A TSA spokesperson said that additional training would be done so that TSA employees recognize D.C. driver licenses when used as id. Really? That training should have been done and completed by the fourth grade at the latest: what is the capital of the country?

3) Let’s get back to Dodd-Frank. One of the utmost, primary purposes of the legislation was to make sure that large banks and other financial institutions had so-called “living wills,” plans that would be deployed so that a large institution would implode quietly without risking the rest of the economy in the process.

This is was a major driver of the Great Recession, banks and other institutions were poorly managed and started collapsing in financial ruin, almost collapsing the world economy with it. Thus, the attempt to manage and minimize such crashes in the future was a good intention.

But, alas, as with most good attempts by the political class, this too has failed, Years after the legislation was signed, the Washington Post reported that the Federal government has rejected the living wills of eleven of the largest financial institutions in the country. Thus, for the most part, we are no better off than we were prior to the Great Recession, despite years having passed since the legislation was passed.

4) According to a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal opinion poll, Americans are NOT happy:

• 71% said the U.S. is on the wrong track.
• 60% feel the country is in a state of decline.
• Only a meager 2% are very satisfied with the state of the political system while 79% are dissatisfied with it to some degree or more.
• Only 3% are satisfied with the economy while 64% are dissatisfied with the economy.

So much for Obama’s hope and change. The only change has been to a tremendous slide towards negativity while the only hope is that we can survive him and the rest of the incompetents in Washington.

5) In one of the most inept, embarrassing and expensive boondoggles in the history of the Federal government, consider the sad state of affairs relative to the development of the F-35 fighter plan, as described in the Briefing section of the August 8, 2014 issue of The Week magazine:

• The F-35 is supposed to be the country’s next generation of fighter plan that would make the U.S. the undisputed owner of war time skies.
• However, 18 years and $400 BILLION later, the plane is nowhere close to be ready to take to the skies.
• That’s $400 BILLION, with a “b”, or almost $4,000 for every American household.
• It is estimated that the cost of single plan will be about $185 million each, on top of the $400 BILLION that has already been spent.
• The earliest deployment date for any of them is now 2015, making it over 19 years since the work first started on the plane.
• Once we have the planes, it will cost up to 40% more to maintain each plane than what it costs to maintain the jet fighters we currently have.
• It is believed that the Chinese government hackers stole copies of the F-35 blueprints and is working on its own version of the F-35, called, the J-31, which will be lighter and faster than the current plans for the F-35. 
• In fact, computer based warfare scenarios done by the Rand Corporation have shown that in a hypothetical war with China, our F-35 fleet would be destroyed by the Chinese air force. The developers of the scenario rated the F-35 as ‘double inferior,” which does not sound good.
• While the Pentagon has committed to buy 2,400 F-35s if and when they are viable, the article quotes air force analysis and defense analyst Mr. Pierce Sprey as predicting that: “…the F-35 will be such an embarrassment that it will be cancelled before 500 are built."

What a waste of taxpayer dollars, what a national embarrassment, what a deadly farce for our pilots in the future. But I bet no one anywhere in the Federal government got fired for such incompetence. Hundreds of billions of dollars wasted for no reason and not benefit. But that sounds about par with anything our current set of politicians touch. 

6) Speaking of not being fired, recently the CIA Director, John Brennan, openly admitted in a Senate meeting that an internal CIA investigation proved that the spy organization had actually hacked into computers used by Senate staff people. This is contrary to what he told Congress back in March when he strongly denied the CIA had committed such acts.

Which means one of two things: he either lied back in March or he has lost control of the situation within the CIA. Lying or incompetent, either one should be grounds for dismissal. You do not want your top spy to have either of these qualities. In most jobs outside of Washington, either trait is usually grounds for dismissal and/or prosecution.

In democracy such as ours, I have to think that spying on Congress and Congressional personnel is against the law. You know that if you or I spied on Congress we would be in a Federal lock up somewhere.

But apparently those rules and logic do not apply to Washington insiders like Brennan. More than a month he revealed he was a liar or incompetent, he is still on the job and those that hacked Congress are also still at their taxpayer funded jobs. Insane.

That will do it for this episode of political class insanity. Today we learned that we have major legislation and major jet fighter plans that apparently do not work but cost a lot of taxpayer resources, we have a top spy who is either lying or incompetent, we have TSA agents that are so uneducated that they do not even know what the capital of the country is, and the rest of America is not happy with the direction of the country. 

Worst part of the whole post: we still have more insanity to review 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