April, 2019, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: More Carnage In Chicago, Lobbying Dollars Beat Out Citizens'Needs and More

It is another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us.

Let’s get started:

1) We often check in with Chicago, a city sitting in a state that both have some of the most stringent gun control laws in the whole country. Politicians, mostly Democrats in Chicago and Illinois, seem to think that disarming citizens of their guns rights and Second Amendment rights will make the runaway gun violence go away in the city of Chicago.

What these fools continually refuse to understand is that having a law does not mean that criminals will obey the laws, they are criminal for heaven’s sakes. So let’s see what is going on in Chicago now that the nicer spring weather has started:

• According to Warner Todd Huston writing for the Godfathers Politics website, gun violence resulted in 18 citizens in Chicago getting shot in just one day, a recent Monday.
• Of the 18 who were shot, three died.
• Chicago has usually had 10 to 30 people shot every weekend but in just one recent day 18 were shot.
• The previous weekend, 28 people were shot and five died.
• Of the 28, 6 people were shot at a baby shower according to the Chicago Sun Times including two toddlers.

The carnage in the city has been going on for years and not a single city or state politician seems to have any clue on how to fix the problem except to make it more and more difficult for honest, non-gang member, non-criminals to use the Second Amendment to protect themselves.

2) According to the Pro Publica website in an article by Justin Elliot, the IRS has had a long standing dream to provide a simple, online process that would allow ordinary citizens to easily, at no cost, to file their income tax returns without the use of a tax preparation service or accountant. The dream is that a citizen could go to the website and the IRS would have already populated a lot of the taxpayer’s tax forms since they would already have access to to a taxpayer’s 1099 and W-2 forms.

Nice idea which is probably why Congress is about to enact legislation that would permanently ban the IRS from providing a free, easy service to citizens:

• The pending legislation is called the deceptive Taxpayer First Act.
• One of the parts of the legislation is to make “it illegal for the IRS to create its own online system of tax filing.”
• Not surprisingly, tax preparation companies like TurboTax, H&R Block and others have long lobbied Washington politicians to not allow the IRS to provide a free, easy service to taxpayers since it would likely reduce their customer and revenue base.
• Apparently, other countries already provide such a process to their own taxpayers.
• The Free File Alliance, a deceptively named industry group consisting of tax preparation companies, “says 70% of American taxpayers are eligible to file for free. Those taxpayers, who must make less than $66,000, have access to free tax software provided by the companies. But just 3% of eligible U.S. taxpayers actually use the free program each year. Critics of the program say that companies use it as a cross-marketing tool to up sell paid products, that they have deliberately under promoted the free option and that it leaves consumer data open to privacy breaches.”
• In fact, a member of the group once publicly told its own shareholders that if the IRS went forward “developing software or other systems to facilitate tax return preparation … may present a continued competitive threat to our business for the foreseeable future.”
• Oh, by the way, the Democrat heading up the House Ways and Means committee which is writing the legislation just happened to receive $16,000 in political campaign contributions from Intuit and H&R Block.
• Overall, last year these two companies have poured $6.6 million into lobbying efforts in Washington as it relates to IRS actions and plans.

But we should not be surprised since when it comes to providing low cost, easy opportunities and advantages for ordinary citizens who have no lobbying punch, it is always the money of big special interests that come first over citizens.

3) In Colorado at least, some citizens are trying to take back their freedoms:

• According to the Conservative Alert website, Democrats control both houses of the state government in Colorado and also have a Democratic governor.
• And they have busy executing a very liberal, radical agenda that includes attacking the oil and gas industry, introducing a pro-LGBT sex education bill that prohibits charter schools from opting out of the program, and a new gun control act. 
• But the last time the state Democrats introduced a severe Second Amendment restrictive bill two Democrats were actually taken down with recall efforts.
• And Coloradans are taking this liberal agenda on again.
• Recall actions are back on the burner with angry citizens circulating a petition to repeal some of these Democratic policies and possibly recall the governor.

Hopefully this effort to regain freedom and control over their lives will be successful and state citizens can go about their lives with minimal interference by politicians.

Another day of insanity: carnage continues in Chicago with no end in sight, Washington politicians continue to be driven by money and greed and not the best interests of the country, and Colorado citizens make a bid to be free again.

More insanity to follow.

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:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

May, 2016, Part 5, Political Class Insanity: Retirement Blues, HIllary's Gun Control Misalignment, and Obama Phone Fraud

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. In fact, last month we set a record, needing ten full posts to cover it all.

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) We have often spent discussion time lamenting how poorly the Obama administration has handled economic matters in the past seven years, with the following dismal results:

• 45 million Americans still require government food assistance every month despite being six years out of the recession.
• The real unemployment rate is still just under 10%.
• Wages and household income levels have been stagnant for years.
• The labor participation rate is at historically low levels.
• According to the Federal Reserve, fully 47% of Americans could not withstand an unexpected expense of just $400.
• Over 94 million American adults are not working.
• Almost 6 million Americans are working part time because they cannot find full time work.

And according to a recent Newsmax article, this current economic malaise is likely to make retirement for today’s workers and unemployed very difficult:

• According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), 60% of U.S. households currently have no formal retirement savings or plan, either a traditional pension plan, an IRA, or a 401k.
• The lower the household income level the higher the probability that household does not have a formal retirement plan.
• By retirement time decades from now, the GAO estimates that 20% of all households will have zero retirement savings to rely on with 35% of lower income households having no retirement savings.
• While the GAO report offered a number of suggestions on how Americans today can boost their retirement savings for later, the fact that people today cannot find enough full time jobs and wages and household incomes are not rising much at all, those suggestions are moot if today’s workers have no spare cash to stow away.

As if these dire realities were not depressing enough, many of today’s workers will have nothing but Social Security as an income when they retire, a mismanaged government program that is hurtling towards insolvency and which is currently in a massive and growing negative cash flow situation. Just another example when we allow politicians to mess with and mangle the economy in this country, not only do we suffer today but today’s economic sufferings are likely to carry over into the future retirement years.

2) Hillary Clinton seems hell bent on taking American citizens’ guns away from them under some severely misguided notion that if you strip the Second Amendment rights of law abiding citizens somehow criminal citizens will not have access to guns. This follows the same faulty logic of the Obama administration, which should know better, as we have shown countless times that the very strict gun laws in his home town of Chicago actually have substantially increased the criminal violence in that city.

But are their views in alignment with the views of Americans when it comes to gun control? Apparently not, according to a recent Rasmussen poll which found:

• 66 percent of those polled believe self-defense is why people purchase firearms
• 5 percent believe it's to commit a criminal act
• 1 percent believe it's for job-related purposes
• 22 percent say it's for "some other reason."

Thus, only 5% of Americans believe that people purchase a gun in order to commit a criminal act. Which means, as always, the priorities of the political class are out of alignment with what Americans want. 

As we have previously reported, while Obama focuses his efforts on global warming, more gun control, and immigration, these are three of the lowest priorities of Americans who would prefer he work on the economy, jobs, and other more important issues. Looks like Hillary will be more of the same misalignment with Americans’ priorities.

To further illustrate this misalignment, the poll also found that law abiding Americans are buying guns at a record pace with 23% saying that they themselves or someone in their family has purchase a gun in the past year. Are you listening Hillary? More gun control and gun confiscation is not what Americans want.

3) The Washington Free Beacon reported on an Associated Press article by Tom Wheeler on April 13, 2016 on how the FCC purposely kept the massive fraud present under the so-called Obamaphone program under wraps until after it had expanded and expanded the corrupted program. Specifically:

• The regulators in the FCC were told to keep a massive fraud investigation secret until a day after a controversial FCC vote to the expand the program was taken.
• This was an accusation of one of the actual sitting FCC commissioners.
• The investigation found that the current program was so corrupt that it allegedly was being used to steal tens of millions of taxpayer dollars.
• After the vote, the FCC announced that it was going after the cellular phone company, Total Call Mobile, that had allegedly defrauded the Federal lifeline cell phone program of almost $10 million.
• The FCC was seeking $51 million in damages.
• The whistleblower Commissioner, Ajit Pai, wrote: “Commissioners were told that the Notice of Apparent Liability could not be released or publicly discussed until April 1, 2016, conveniently one day after the Commission was scheduled to expand the Lifeline program to broadband. That’s not right.”
• FCC spokesman, Will Wiquist, insisted that the timing of the delay on the fraud investigation announcement and the vote on the expanded program was just a coincidence: “The timing of the enforcement action was in no way related to the timing of the vote on the program modernization.” Given this administration’s penchant for lying on any and all topics, does anyone really believe this coincidence assertion?
• According to the accusations, Total Call Mobile employees enrolled tens of thousands of duplicate beneficiaries and the company pocketed the extra taxpayer subsidies. 
• The FCC uncovered the fraud scheme when the company enrolled an undercover FCC investigator in the program without asking for any eligibility documentation.
• Pai went on to make several more scathing accusations against the Federal government;s mishandling of the program: “Even though [the FCC] identified 32,498 intra-company duplicates, we pursue only 2,587. Even though we have evidence that Total Call Mobile bypassed federal safeguards to enroll 99.8% of its subscribers, we hold the company liable for only 16%. Under these circumstances, our precedent suggests that a forfeiture of at least $84,295,910 would have been appropriate. Yet the Commission settles for something much less.”
• While this alleged fraud was going on,the company was shelling out well over $100,000 in lobbying expenses to protect its interests in Washington.

Just another fraud ridden, taxpayer wasting, government program that has lax oversight, a lack of transparency, and criminal elements. As always, how many hungry Americans, homeless Americans, drug addicted Americans, and healthcare deprived American citizens and military personnel could have been helped rather than allegedly pouring $10 million of fraud money into a corrupt government program? So sad, so pathetic, so insane.

That will do it for today’s political class insanity. More fraud in a large government program that apparently was hushed up for political reasons, the dire retirement situation of today’s American workers, and HIllary’s total misalignment with American when it comes to the Second Amendment. More insanity 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