April, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 1: Wasting Taxpayer Money In Every Conceivable Way

Every month since this blog began back in 2009, we have spent some time writing about the insanity, idiocy, ineptness, and wasteful spending of the American political class. Back then, we could usually cover all of the insanity in one post. 

However, over the years, it seems as if the politicians in this country have created more insanity and problems at a faster and faster rate. This has pushed the number of days each month required to cover such insanity to more and more over the years.

This month should be no exception. Even though we spent two weeks last month covering the idiocy and fiascos of Obama Care and political class corruption, there is still enough insanity this month to cover at least a week or so of posts. Today starts the process. Hopefully, at the end of this week of insanity you will feel compelled to join our effort to implement term limits at:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

Because really, as you will see from the political class incompetence we will document this week, how much worse could it get with a whole new set of people sitting in elected office?

1) Many Americans like to think that we live in a capitalistic society where companies compete fairly in a free market. That is really not true. We live in a crony capitalistic society where cronies and friends of politicians use and abuse those political connections to get favored treatment at the expense of their competitors of the American taxpayer.

This point was recently driven home by a study from an organization called Open the Books. They issued a new report that went to great effort and detail to document all Federal grants, loans, direct payments, and insurance subsidies that the Federal government and political class hands out at taxpayer expense. The amount of money given to each company is relatively small in the context of the multi-TRILLION Federal budget. But when added up together, we see that the American taxpayer is paying out tens of billions of dollars to some to the largest and least needy businesses on the planet.

For example, according to the website, www.openthebooks.com:

• $21.3 billion was doled out in the form of outright income-transfer subsidies to corporate America last year. 
• On average, each Fortune 100 company received about $200 million in such handouts.
• General Electric received $380 million in taxpayer financed handouts.
• General Motors received $370 million in taxpayer funded handouts.
• Boeing received $264 million in taxpayer funded handouts.
• Archer Daniels Midland received $174 million in taxpayer funded handouts.
• United Technologies received $160 million in taxpayer funded handouts.
• The $21.3 does not include the billions of dollars in housing, bank, and auto-company bailouts in 2008 and 2009 since those payments are kept mostly invisible within the Federal government accounting system.
• It also does not include the asset purchases of the Federal Reserve, indirect subsidies such as the ethanol mandate that enriches large agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland, or special tax breaks for wind and solar manufacturers.
• About $8.5 billion of these financial gifts were in the form of taxpayer-subsidized loans. The big winners here were Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor Company, and other multibillion-dollar corporations whose franchisees who somehow qualified for Small Business Administration loans despite the financial size and power of their parent companies.
• Archer Daniels Midland, the giant agricultural business, got just under $1 billion for USDA farm-program loans which does not include ethanol subsidies, a fancy name for another form of crony capitalism
• The No. 1 federal insurance program, the Export-Import Bank provides subsidizes insurance and marketing aid to such financial giants as Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase with both receiving more than $3 billion in such aid and Citigroup and Bank of America receiving more than $1.5 billion in taxpayer backstop insurance. (Remember, this doesn’t include TARP bailout money.) 
• John Deere, American Express, and even Walmart have historically reeled in taxpayer funded and backed Federal insurance support as well.
• The National Review Online article from March 27, 2014 that documented these findings pointed out that only one of the Fortune 100 companies did NOT receive taxpayer funded support and crony gifts from the American taxpayer over the time frame that Open The Books studied.

This documented $21.3 billion in crony capitalism/corporate handouts comes out to about $185 for each household in the country. Thus, as you are writing your check this month to pay your Federal income tax bill, remember that $185 of that payment is being used to give political and financial favors to the biggest banks, the biggest companies, and likely the biggest campaign donors to the politicians in Washington. 

It is just so unfair that we cannot claim Wells Fargo, American Express, Exxon and all the others as dependents on our tax forms since they truly are dependents, courtesy of the Washington political class.

2) But it is not just big corporations that the American political class wastes taxpayer wealth on. According to an April 1, 2014 article from the Independent Journal Review, the Federal government has recently spent taxpayer wealth on the following dubious projects:

• $3 million to create a safe street crossing for turtles.
• $137,500 for the creation of a video game called “Layoff.”
• $71,623 to study cocaine use in monkeys.
• $3 million for NASA to study Congress, giving hope that we may finally find out what color the sky is in Nancy Pelosi’s world.
• $15,551 to study drunk mice behavior.
• $544,338 to update the Justice Department’s Linkedin page.
• $17.4 million to install broadband capability to serve 30 people.
• $10,000 to develop a moose-themed musical called “Moosical.”

I dare anyone justify to me these kind of expenditures being worthy of taxpayer money. Useless, wasted spending on programs that do nothing to resolve the half dozen major issues facing the country today.

3) But the Independent Journal Review was not done with just documenting these eight wastes of taxpayer wealth. The day before exposing the above eight atrocities of waste, they identified massive wasteful spending by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in any number of areas that have absolutely minimal impact on the vast majority of Americans

Let’s start with the a Federal funded musical play. The NSF has spent nearly $700,000 of taxpayer money on a “climate change-themed theatrical production” entitled The Great Immensity. The theater company “The Civilians” applied for and won a grant in 2010 to produce the play. According to the musical’s website, The Great Immensity is “a thrilling and timely production,” presented by an “investigative theater company.”

Useless spending. The Federal government, especially one of its primary science agencies, should not be in the mode of financing the production of musical plays on an issue that is far from settled in the minds of many, many Americans, including myself.

This NSF musical funding effort was just one of several questionable expenditures that were recently scrutinized by U.S. Senator Lamar Smith of Texas. He recently interrogated the White House “science czar” John Holdren in a committee hearing about how the NSF is choosing to spend its money. Along with the musical, Smith specifically queried asked Holdren about the following questionable and idiotic NSF projects:

• A $15,000 study on the fishing practices in and around Lake Victoria in Africa. In Africa, not America, Africa. 
• $340,000 study on the examination of the “ecological consequences” of early human fires in New Zealand. In New Zealand, Not America, New Zealand. 
• $200,000 towards a three-year study of the Bronze Age. 
• Another $50,000 towards the survey of archived lawsuits from 17th century Peru. Not this century, not America. Three centuries ago in Peru. 
• $20,000 for a study on the causes of stress in Bolivia. In Bolivia, Not America, Bolivia.

Ridiculous wastes of money. If the Federal government is going to have a national science agency, and I question the need for one given the abject failure of the NSF to recently develop and deliver any kind of useful scientific breakthrough or technology despite spending tens of billions of dollars over the years, shouldn’t the projects it is funding be geared to resolving the major issues of our times?

I can think of seven areas where I would want scientific breakthroughs to happen to address the major issues facing most Americans today:

1. Find a cure for the leading cancers of today such as breast and lung cancer.
2. Find a cure and treatment approach for aging diseases such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons, diseases that will ravage our aging population.
3. Find a way to make coal a clean fuel since most of the world will be using it for decades into the future on a worldwide scale.
4. Find a way to treat addiction to break the deadly hold drug addiction has on millions of Americans.
5. Find a way to make clean energy cheaper, more efficient, and more accessible.
6. Find a way to reduce the ever escalating health care costs in this country since it is now obvious that Obama Care will not be able to resolve that issue.
7. Find a way to make existing and new energy sources cheap, plentiful and clean.

If the NSA could fund research that would solve just these seven issues, most of America would be able to pay their tab. However, the political class has allowed the NSF to waste money in New Zealand, Bolivia, Peru, and Africa on projects that are of absolutely no concern to the American public. That is insanity and that is why the NSF should either get refocused on what is important to Americans or be disbanded and their budget redistributed back to Americans.

That will do it for today, the myriad of ways our politicians have found to waste our money on their business cronies and other stupid porgrams and projects. The insanity is just getting started, much more to follow in the next few days.

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

Obama Care Will Apply To All Americans...Except for Those Covered By The 1,040 Waivers That Have Been Issued

There are many reasons to despise and doubt the many components of Obama Care. The latest set of numbers from the Department Of Health and Human Services (HHS) adds another layer of doubt that the political class really had any sense of reality when they passed the legislation. Less than a year after the legislation was passed, HHS has already granted 1,040 waivers to the law to various organizations across the country.

This raises some pretty obvious and simplistic questions:

1. If this law is so good, why have so many waivers been granted so quickly for temporary exemptions from the law?
2. How could the architects of this law not have even a clue that it would adversely affect so many Americans so quickly (the healthcare blog from "The Hill" estimates that these 1,040 waivers/exemptions cover about 2.6 million Americans).
3. Since over 800 waivers have been granted just over the past three months, how many more waivers affecting how many more Americans are yet to be granted?
4. Accusations have been made that many of these waivers have been granted to union organizations, the very types of organizations that supported Obama Care in the first place: is this granting of waivers a payment for union support for the passage of Obama Care?

Just another aspect of this very bad law. Let's review all of the negative aspects of the law that have erupted or oozed to the surface so far:

• While the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) originally estimated that Obama Care would reduce the Federal deficit by about $135 billion over ten years, their estimate did not include all of the components of Obama Care that were finally included in the legislation. Associated Press analyses found over $100 billion of excluded costs that at the very, very best case makes Obama Care deficit neutral, not positive.
• Even so, the ten year CBO analysis included ten years worth of revenue and taxes and only six years worth of expenses, an apples to oranges, invalid analysis.
• Some of the starting programs of Obama Care are woefully under enrolled, missing their estimated enrollment totals by over 95% in most cases, indicating that maybe these programs are not as good as the political class would have us believe.
• Twenty six states, more than half of the state governments in the country, are in court trying to stop various aspects, if not the whole, of Obama Care. While there are obviously some degree of partisan politics in play here, if Obama Care was that great, there would be no basis for the state court actions. Given that two judges have already found serious flaws with the legislation indicates that the 26 states may be on the right track.
• The current legislation gives very little credence or support to medical tort reform, a strategy that has significantly reduced health care costs in states that have already implemented tort reform in this area.
• This legislation gives very little credence or support to allowing insurance companies to easily operate across state lines, which would increase health insurance competition and reduce costs.
• This legislation gives very little credence or support to reducing the main culprits of bad health and increased health care costs in this country: smoking, bad eating habits, and lack of exercise of most Americans. Thus, even if Obama Care works perfectly, which is highly unlikely, the root causes of our high national health care costs will still be in place: Americans smoke too much, Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, and Americans do not exercise enough. These life style root causes will not be solved by Obama Care which is only a doomed taxing and government bureaucracy approach, not a life style and personal responsibility approach.
• Although Obama Care is supposed to reduce health care costs and allow more Americans to get health care insurance, the legislation is structured so poorly and so stupidly that many major U.S. corporations (AT&T, Verizon, John Deere, MacDonald's, others) have already publicly stated that they may drop health care insurance for their employees and retirees since it would be less expensive, under Obama Care, to pay the Obama Care fine than continuing to offer health care insurance for their people. Thus, a political class action to reduce the number of Americans without health care insurance is likely to attain just the opposite result: increase the number of Americans without health care insurance. Brilliant!
• This legislation, via its mandate that orders all citizens to buy a product/service that they may or may not want, health care coverage insurance, is a basic violation of our freedom to choose and to live our lives as we see fit.

So let's review. This legislation is so bad that every month, hundreds of American companies and unions get exemptions from the law. This legislation is so bad that it will likely increase the number of Americans without health care insurance, the exact opposite of what is supposed to do. This legislation is so bad that it does not address the underlying life style root causes, meaning it will never solve the symptoms of high health care costs and high uninsured rates. This legislation is so bad that the very people it is supposed to be helping already have basically ignored the programs it introduced. This legislation is so bad that over half of the state governments in the country are in court to stop the law, an unprecedented move on any other Federal legislation in our history. This legislation is so bad that the Democrats in the political class did not even have the class and courage to pass the law in traditional ways, needing to sneak in the side door of reconciliation to get it passed. The legislation is so bad that there are serious flaws in the methodology and analysis used to prove its financial worthiness. This legislation is so bad that it undercuts our basic freedom of choice in this country with its government mandates.

What is needed is not an individual waiver from Obama Care. What is needed is a waiver of the entire program and a fresh start as outlined in Step 28 of "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." Step 28 lays out a logical, problem solving approach to health care in this country without the intrusion of the political class and the accompanying lobbyists. We see what the political class and lobbyists have gotten us, it is time to put a waiver out on them and do the job right the next time.



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