May, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 7: the President Lies Again, Rolls Royces All Around, Counting Space Junk, and More

Its day seven of our latest monthly political class insanity review with possibly an end in sight. Sometimes I think that is better when Washington politicians take long vacations because when on vacation they are far less likely to screw anything else up. A sad, sad commentary on the lack of leadership and ability of the current set of American politicians.

1) Let’s start today with some outer space political class insanity. Circling around the earth are thousands and thousands of pieces of space junk. Often, space junk collides with other space junk which creates thousands and thousands of new pieces of space junk.

Most of this space junk is traveling really fast so that even a little piece of space junk can cause big trouble when it hits another piece at speeds up to 17,000 miles an hour. This action even has a name, the Kessler effect. It is named after NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler, who wrote about it in 1978. It is a scenario in which the density of objects in low earth orbit gets larger over time, so that that a collision between objects causes a cascade. Each collision produces more space debris, which in turn increases the likelihood of further collisions. 

As the number of pieces of space junk gets larger, the probability of a piece hitting and disabling a working satellite gets larger and larger. Such an event, if it knocked out a satellite, could have severe commercial, telecommunications, and national defense issues. So this is serious stuff. To quote George Clooney from his character in the movie, “Gravity”: "Half of North America just lost their Facebook." 

There really is no way to solve the problem with today’s technology, there are just too many pieces of junk floating around and racing around in space. However, that will not stop the Federal government from wasting at least $6 billion to try and fix it. The Feds want to build something called the "Space Fence." It really isn't a fence. It's a $6 billion radar system that will monitor just a tiny fraction of the space junk. 

Let’s be clear. Spending $6 billion will monitor and track only a small portion of the junk load. It will not be able to prevent any collisions. It will not be able to predict when these collisions will occur. It will only be able to say: “There was a collision.” 

There is no known solution to this problem. There is no program to solve it. The "Space Fence" merely lets some Air Force person, who is staring at a screen, watch the chain reaction blow holes in the world's space-based telecommunications system, impact by impact. 

But you know that some aerospace company gave some money to some politicians somewhere along the line to get $6 billion for a project that basically looks out into space. Pathetic waste of money.

2) The Washington Examiner reported on May 7, 2014 how a former Congressman was able to turn his life around inside of ten weeks despite resigning from Congress under suspicious circumstances. Former New Jersey Congressman Rob Andrews was facing an ethics probe for allegedly using his political campaign funds for personal travel and other personal expenses. When Andrews announced a sudden resignation from Congress in February, some observers concluded that it was because of the ethics investigations, a conclusion the former Congressman denied, citing quality of life issues.

Within ten weeks after his last day in Congress, Andrews registered himself as a Federal lobbyist. And guess what? As a former member of the House Armed Services Committee, he will lobby for a New Jersey defense company, to help them "gain business opportunities with the Department of Defense and other federal agencies," as he puts it on his disclosure form.

Again, nice work if you can get it. Yesterday, we discussed the fact that an EPA employee was paid despite spending many hours everyday downloading and viewing porn on the job. And now this former, possibly ethics-challenged Congressman escapes out of Congress to land a sweet deal in the lobbying industry. Sweet for the former Congressman, disgraceful for those of us that paid his salary for a very long time and ended up allegedly being abused by his actions.

3) I love pointing out hypocrisy and the following data from the Federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics points out a big hypocrisy of the Obama administration. Recall that over the past six years or so, the Democrats via Obama have controlled the White House and have controlled the Senate so they are not idle sideline observers in the following labor situation.

The Obama administration is always crying out about the “war on women,” blaming Republicans for being insensitive to the needs of American women. This President tries to position himself as the champion of women and their well being. 

But is that true? Not if you consider the latest statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS):

• The number of women 16 and older not in the labor force climbed to a record high of 55,116,000 in April, according to a recent from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 
• In other words, officially there were 55,116,000 women 16 and older who were in the civilian population who not only did not have a job, they did not actively seek one in the last four weeks. 
• That is up 428,000 from the 54,688,000 women who were not in the labor force in March.
• According to BLS, the labor force participation rate for women was 56.9%, down from 57.2% in March. The labor force participation rate is the percentage of this population that either has a job or actively sought one in the last four weeks.
• In April, according to BLS, the female civilian labor force was 72,835,000 which was down 340,000 from the 73,175,000 in March.

In other words, the economic policies of this administration and this Congress have not been good to the women of America. It is not the Republicans that are waging a war on women, as Obama likes to claim, it is the whole political class, including Obama and the Democrats and the Republicans, and their idiotic economic policies that are hurting the labor chances and opportunities of women. For him to claim that it is only the Republicans, more than five years into his administration, is ludicrous.

4) Speaking of hypocrisy and lying, the President was recently giving a speech where again he whined about the Republicans and how they had filibustered 500 pending pieces of legislation to thwart his plans for the country. Nice try, but the usually Obama-friendly Washington Post called him on yet another lie, giving this claim its top liar rating of four Pinocchio’s. 

Apparently, this claim is nowhere close to being reality with true filibusters occurring just a fraction of the time that the President claimed. But I guess we should not be too surprised that he lied or deceived again since he lied about how Obama Care would not cancel your existing policy or cut you off from your preferred doctors and hospitals, how he would close the prison at Guantanamo right after being elected but still has not, how he would cut the annual Federal deficit in half but has recorded record deficits since coming into office, how he would have the most transparent administration but really has the most secretive and opaque administration, etc. Remember that he was awarded three of the top ten political lies by the Post in 2013 and it appears that he is driving hard for a similar dubious record in 2014.

The really underlying problem is not just this lie. Independent polling organizations are now finding that a strong majority of Americans do not believe what the President says or they believe that he lies on a regular basis. When the country does not believe what the President says, his ability to lead is seriously impaired since no one will believe what he says, support what he says, or have any faith in his ideas, being scared of getting burned with yet another lie. That is no way to lead a country but that is what a multitude of Pinocchio’s will do for you, destroy your reputation for integrity and dignity.

5) One last piece of insanity for today. The nation’s Federal government debt load is now around a mind numbing $17.5 TRILLION as the Obama administration and the Washington political class continues to spend and waste not only the wealth of this generation but the wealth and well being of future American generations. Both the Congressional Budget Office and the new chairwoman of the Federal Reserve have warned that current government spending levels are not sustainable and will have dire consequences for the country in the future.

But how much is $17.5 TRILLION? It is so large it is almost incomprehensible, much like most of the political class. Given that this past week we celebrated Mother’s Day, the wonderful website Bankrupting America tried to quantify how much $17.5 TRILLION actually is:

• With $17.5 TRILLION, you Could Buy Your Mom 71 Billion Flower Arrangements From An Expensive NYC Florist. Matles Florist currently offers an orchid arrangement with a premium price of $245.
• With $17.5 TRILLION, you Could Buy Your Mom An Extravagant Private Island …Or 190,375 Of Them. Rangyai Island is a developed private island for sale off the coast of Thailand. It is currently listed for $160 million dollars.
• With $17.5 TRILLION, you could Buy Your Mom 11.7 Billion Jars Of Diamond Face Cream. If your mother has expensive taste for beauty products, Forever Flawless offers a face cream that is infused with diamonds for $1,500.

To this list we would two more ways to measure our national debt:

• With $17.5 TRILLION, you could give every adult resident of New York state a check for over $1.2 million, every adult, no exceptions.
• With $17.5 TRILLION, you could buy every resident of Massachusetts a Rolls Royce Ghost, starting price of $253,200. Thus, a family of four living in Massachusetts would have four Rolls Royces sitting in their driveway.

We are allowing the Washington politicians to spend and waste our country into a financial death spiral without any flowers, islands, face cream, or Rolls Royces to show for it. Pathetic.

That will do it for this month’s insanity, enough is enough. Today we learned that the President got caught in another obvious lie, the country is going broke for nothing in return, we are wasting time and money looking at space junk explode, and life is bad for the working women in this country but great for allegedly ethics challenged politicians. Sounds about right.

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

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics Or Liar, Liar Pants On Fire

A few weeks ago this Presidential administration tried to make us believe that the Obama Presidency was a fiscally prudent operation. The administration failed to mention that the Federal deficit has gone up dramatically since the Democrats took over Congress in 2007 and the White House in 2009, topping one TRILLION dollars a year for the past four years.

The administration failed to mention that Federal government spending as a percentage of GDP has not been this high since probably the second world war since the Democrats took over Congress in 2007 and the White House in 2009.

The administration failed to mention that while spending and deficits started rising dramatically in the last two years of the Bush administration, those outlandishly wasteful budgets were developed and passed by a Democratically controlled Congress, that then Senator Barack Obama did not raise any objections to those budget busting deficit spending levels, or that the President had not worked to bring those high deficits and spending levels down once he was in the White House.

The administration failed to mention how they contorted, manipulated, and otherwise deceived when they tried to foist this ridiculous notion on the public, the notion that this administration is in any way frugal with taxpayer wealth.

The administration failed to mention that they continue to allow hundreds of billinos of taxpayer dollars a year to be wasted and lost to incompetence and criminal fraud.

I could go on and on about the deception they tried to pull off, but pictures are much better than words in this situation. Many of the following graphs have already appeared int his blog but as long as the likes of Pelosi, Reid, and the President continually insist on a different reality than what actually happened, I will continue to bring up the graphs.

The first four graphs cover the following spending trends and use only official government data sources as their basis. No Republican, Tea Party, or other partisan source of data was used, just official U.S. government data:

• Federal government spending deficits - Billions Of Dollars
• Federal government spending deficits - Budget Deficits as a Percentage of GDP
• Federal government spending deficits - Government Spending As a Percentage Of GDP
• Federal government spending deficits - Billions of Dollars (with a horizontal line showing the October, 2011 MONTHLY Obama administration deficit)

A number of consistent observations can be drawn across all of the graphs:

1. Spending was generally under control and getting better until the Democrats took of control of Congress in January, 2007.
2. This good spending trend starts to deteriorate in 2008, the first year that Democrats Pelosi and Reid got their hands and their control on the nation's budget making process in a Congress that seats Senator Obama and a Democratic majority.
3. Things really start to get worse in 2009, Obama's first year in office and three and a half years later, he has done nothing to get  wasteful spending under control, as the graphs indicate.
4. Spending is so far out of control, the fourth graph shows that the Obama administration had a single MONTH of budget deficits, around two hundred billion dollars, that was larger than several of the ANNUAL budget deficits the Bush administration ran.

Thus, the pure simplicity and message from these government data sources show that even if Obama was not President when the uptick in government spending began, his Democratic colleagues in Congress, where the country's budgets are developed, are certainly to blame for the explosion in spending, he did not oppose this explosion in spending when he served in that Congress and he obviously did nothing to get that explosion of spending under control in his first three and a half years in the White House.

Note: you can double click on each graph to get a bigger view:

But wait, I can hear the Obama supporters and enablers crying out that the war in Iraq is to blame for the massive budget deficits and the President is not to blame for Bush's war folly. I thought about that and concluded, based on the following graphs that this argument does not hold water. There is no doubt the war in Iraq was one of the biggest Presidential mistakes in our history, wasting blood, time, national unity, and taxpayer wealth.

However, as the following graphs show, Iraq does not come close to  being the sole or even major blame for our skyrocketing deficits and government spending. The following graphs come from the outstanding work being done by the Cato Institute and their effort, "Downsizing Government."

Cato has been working on this effort for a little while, where they have gone through EVERY single Federal department looking for ways to cut unnecessary government spending, reductions that will save the American taxpayer a lot of wealth without substantially affecting the average American's life. Their outstanding analyses, rationales, and identification of the TRILLIONS of dollars that can be taken out of our government's budget can be found at www.downsizinggovernment.org.

The following graphs from Cato show the total annual budget numbers for the major Federal government Cabinet positions over time. Remembering that the Democrats took over Congress in 2007 and Obama moved into the White House in 2009, answer the following questions that the graphs suggest:

• If the Iraq war is to blame for our high deficits, why did the budget of the Department of Agriculture go up by more than 50% since Bush's last year in office and is still trending up?
• If the Iraq war is to blame for our high deficits, why did the budget for the Commerce Department go up by more than 50% since Bush's last year in office?
• If the Iraq war is to blame for our high deficits, why did the budget for the Labor Department more than double since Bush's last year in office?
• If the Iraq war is to blame for our high deficits, why did the budget for the Transportation Department go up about 20% since Bush's last year in office and is still trending up?
• If the Iraq war is to blame for our high deficits, why did the budget for the Energy Department go up almost 100% since Bush's last year in office and is still trending up?
• If the Iraq war is to blame for our high deficits, why is the budget for the rest of the major government entities graphed below at or higher than Bush's last year in office?

Look, I am not defending Bush. But his administration looks almost miserly compared to what Pelosi, Reid, and Obama have done to government spending over the past five and a half years, in both the aggregate spending level and the department by department spending levels. The graphs above show that the notion that Obama, and his fellow Democrats, have any degree of budget sanity and ability is insane.

I take it as a personal insult that Obama would even try to convince us that he has the budget under control and the deficits are not his fault. This attempt at justifying his bad handling of the budget process and the resulting massive deficits and debt is a disgrace and a fallacy of epic proportions.

Since Obama and the Democrats took over Washington, they have increased the national debt by about one third in just a few years, adding an amazing $5 TRILLION to the national debt. More debt has been added to the national debt than all of the Presidential administrations from Washington through Clinton. The $5 TRILLION additional debt works out to a debt burden of about $43,000 per each American household.

Without going into the convoluted way he tried to pull off this charade, consider the following simple business illustrative example:

• Let's assume that you run a small business and your regular monthly expenses are $100 a month.
• Forces beyond your control result in your monthly expenses going to $200 a month. In this case, your monthly expenses have increased 100%.
• But if your business had regular monthly expenses of $1,000 and forces beyond your control resulted in your monthly expenses going to $1,500 a month, you would have only a 50% increase.
• But although your monthly increase in expenses in the second example is only half of what it was in the first example, 50% vs. 100%, the ACTUAL size of your monthly expenses is five times as much, $500 vs. $100.

This is what Obama tried to do with this notion that he has not increased spending by very much. By deceptively manipulating numbers and dealing with percentages and not actual spending, he got to the false answer he wanted. But dealing with percentages, as the above example shows, can mask the reality of the situation, i.e. the percentages can be smaller but the actual dollars involved can be much larger and much more dangerous.

An insult and misuse and abuse of reality and statistics. As a trained statistician, I resent his manipulation. As an American, I resent his outrageous spending and waste that destroys our country's fiscal health and our democracy's liberties and freedoms.

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Note: just so we are clear who was in charge and who is to blame for our dangerously rising national debt, the following chart shows that the Democrats have controlled about 80% of the Federal government since they took over Congress in 2007 (double click on the graph for a larger view):

The Start Of Regular Posts

A little later than I expected but this post will start the regular blog and communication phase of our efforts to change America for the better. First, I would like to thank everyone for their purchase of the book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom and Destroying The American Political Class." Sales have been much better than I expected and your follow up supporting comments after reading the book are really appreciated. I especially want to thank those of you that have forwarded the news of our message of change to their friends and family members. That kind of support will go far in getting the fifty steps implemented.

In driving back recently from New Jersey to Florida, I started a list of political class members, from both parties, that have had some recent "problems." Unfortunately, the drive was long but the list seemed even longer:


Ex-President Bill Clinton - liar, adulterer and disbarred lawyer

Senator John Edwards (NC) - liar, adulterer, father out of wedlock and owner of $400 haircuts

Ex-Governor Eliot Spitzer (NY) - liar and adulterer

Senator Larry Craig (ID)- alleged airport rest room sex trawler

Ex-Governor Jim McGreevey (NJ) - liar and adulterer

Ex-Congressman Mark Foley (FL) - alleged sexual advances towards Congressional pages

Senator John Ensign (NV) - liar and adulterer

Governor Mark Sanford (SC) - liar and adulterer

Ex-Mayor (DC) Marion Barry - not enough room to list all the problems

Ex-Mayor (Detroit) Kwame Kilpatrick - pled guilty to several felony counts

Ex-Governor Otto Kerner (IL) - convicted felon sentenced to three years in prison

Ex-Governor Daniel Walker (IL) - convicted felon sentenced to seven years in prison

Ex-Governor George Ryan (IL) - convicted felon sentenced to six and a half years in prison

Ex-Governor Rod Blagojevich (IL) - allegedly tried to sell political favors to the highest bidders

Ex-Senator Tom Daschle (SD) - failed to pay over $120,000 in owed Federal taxes

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner - failed to pay over $30,000 in owed Federal taxes

Ex-Congressman William Jennings - alleged took bribes and froze some of the proceeds in his freezer

Entire State Of New Jersey - recent arrests of forty people on corruption charges continues the long history of corruption at the state and local government levels in New Jersey
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I will stop now since I think you get the message. Why do we continue to elect these types of people to represent our interests? Why do we continue to believe the fallacy that they act and behave to some higher standard of behavior and integrity? Why do continue to think that they are smarter than us? And most importantly, why do we continue to think that they put our best interests ahead of their personal enrichment? Any number of steps in the book would address this issue of bad politicians including term limits (Step 39) and shared values oath (Step 38) among others. If you are tired of the types of behavior listed above, than we need to take action so that honesty and integrity is restored to holders of public office.

This is a great lead-in to a monthly feature of this blog. Every month I will put out out a hypothesis and would appreciate your comments and views. Each month's issue will be related to one or more of the fifty steps outlined in the book. The issue for this months is:

Which state has historically had the most corrupt political class members?

I would bet that residents of New Jersey or Illinois could both present strong cases for their home grown politicians but let us know if you think your state can compete with these two. Let the comments and debate begin.