January, 2020, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Stupidity Of Medicare For All Continues

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in the current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wasteful spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care. To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

When we started this theme many years ago, it was all about the failure that is Obama Care. Over time, many of the failures that we predicted or other smart people predicted came true. Obama Care did not reduce annual health insurance premiums by up to $2,500 as promised. Obama Care did not bend the cost curve of health care as promised. Obama Care did not get insurance for over 21 million Americans as promised. And Obama Care did not allow you to keep your doctors, your hospitals or insurance plans as promised.

But with the failure of Obama Care has come a much worse idea, “Medicare For All.” Thus, most of these types of posts going forward will focus on this inane idea since the previous big healthcare inane idea, Obama Care, has basically collapsed in failure.

1) In our previous posts and many posts before that we pointed out the reality of what happens when government and politicians take over the healthcare industry in a country: 

1. Costs go up.
2. Quality of care goes down.
3. Access to health care goes down.
4. People suffer more pain for longer periods of time.

This is not a guess, it is based on real life experiences of ordinary citizens living in Canada, England and elsewhere were somehow, someone thought that government bureaucrats and the politicians who direct them can be more efficient and effective than the free market and individuals making decisions based on their own needs and wants.

And yet, Democrats and liberals around the country, including those running for President, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, think that the so-called “Medicare For” all concept, basically abdicating all health care decisions and responsibilities to the Federal government, is a good idea despite the failure of similar concepts around the world.

One of the main but false selling points of Medicare For All is that ordinary Americans would be better off financially under this system because 1) politicians would get rich in this country to pay for the program and 2) this program would be much more efficient and thus, overall, families would pay less vs. what they pay today.

A couple of problems with this scenario:

• Many research and analysis efforts have shown that the cost for such a program would require the Federal government to obtain over $3 TRILLION a year in extra taxes to pay for this $3 TRILLION Medicare For All program.
• We have shown in previous analyses that you cannot cover these extra Medicare For All costs even if you confiscate all of the wealth of the rich in this country, never mind just raising their taxes.
• And this approach is not more efficient since in other countries where this approach was actually implemented, the wait time for a doctor appointment, the lead time to get an operation, and the lead time just to get a simple X-ray or MRI is eons longer than the wait times in this country.
• This is why rich folks from other countries come to this country for medical care, they do not want to wait and suffer the long lead times in their own socialized medicine countries.

Medicare For All is a plan stupid idea, as pointed out from a financial perspective in a recent Heritage Foundation analysis:

• This research found that the majority of American families, possibly three out of four, would be worse off financially under a Medicare For All program.
• Obviously, if this analysis is right, then far more than just the wealthy will be paying more out of pocket expenses than what Warren and Sanders are promising.
• The Heritage analysis found that under the Medicare For All effort some families would be paying more for than what they currently pay for electricity, gas for their cars, and possibly their food budget while abdicating their decisions for healthcare to nameless and faceless government bureaucrats guided by mostly inane and ignorant politicians.
• The total bottom line of the analysis found that 73.5% of Americans families would have less money in their pocket under the Medicare For All program than under the current healthcare market structure that exists today with likely worse healthcare quality.
• The analysis used the financial method used by other countries to finance their nationalized health care systems, payroll taxes.
• American households who currently get healthcare coverage via their employer healthcare program would be hit the hardest, seeing their after income tax take home pay shrink an average of about $10,544 a year, leading to the finding that 87% of those Americans currently getting employer sponsored health care being financially worse off under the Medicare For All plan.
• Lower-income working families, which currently get health care through government programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, would also be worse off to the tune of seeing their average household income shrink by about $5,592 a year. 
• Nationally the analysis found that Medicare For All would “require an additional tax of 21.2 cents on every dollar that every American earns. (Right now, most workers and their employers pay 15.3 cents on the dollar in payroll taxes.)”
• Combining this 21.2 cents for every dollar earned with current income tax rates, Social Security taxes, and Medicare taxes, the Federal government would likely be taking over 50% of your annual household income under the Medicare For All program before the state and local governments take even more.
• The Heritage Foundation analysis was kind to the Medicare For All Program because it assumed that Americans would still continue working as hard and to the same number of hours despite having over half of their income confiscated, a shaky assumption since most level headed people would work less and less as the government took more and more.
• The Heritage Foundation got down to the real nitty gritty of what would happen to certain types of Americans under Medicare For All, not just high level, gross estimates. 
• For example, Olivia Williams, an unmarried mother of two earning $31,000 a year, would be worse off by $1,547 or a decrease in income by 5.3%, the amount she spends on electricity every year.
• The Suarezes, a median-income married couple earning about $98,000, with two kids and employer health benefits, would be worse off by $9,201, or a reduction in their income of 13.3%.
• The Joneses, a lower-middle-income married couple earning nearly $50,000, with two kids and employer health benefits, would be $1,619 worse off or 4.4%, the amount they spend annually on gas for their cars.

You get the idea, we would be spending more and getting less in terms of healthcare quality and quantity. Now, some might say that the Heritage Foundation is biased towards free market solutions and they would probably be right. But until Sanders and Warren come up with detailed analysis on how Americans will be better off under Medicare For All, something that have not done, then the Heritage Foundation, and others like it which show how stupid Medicare For All is, have the final say in how bad this concept is. Or as summarized by the Heritage Foundation: “Those pushing for Medicare for All have left out some essential details. No legislative sponsor of this plan has offered a way to fully pay for its promises. Instead, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren have put out plans that don’t fully pay for what they’ve promised to provide, and they dramatically overestimate the revenue that new taxes on the rich could raise.”

2) And even if after all the analysis we have shown, above, the previous post, and other posts, you still think that the concept of government control of your health care decisions is a good idea, consider the following realities:

• A Georgia Congressman actually spoke out in a televised Congressional hearing that he thought the island of Guam could actually tip over in the middle of the ocean if too many Navy resources were deployed there.
• A Texas Congresswoman proclaimed that the Constitution is 400 years old (it isn’t), that her Congressional district sits 50 feet below sea level, (it doesn’t), and that she was curious if one of the Mars Rover vehicles would be going anywhere near where Neil Armstorng walked on the moon.
• A Speaker of The House once proclaimed that Congress had to pass a piece of major legislation (i.e. Obama Care) to actually see what was in it.
• A New York Congresswoman had no idea what the three branches of our government was and could not accurately define how to calculate the basic unemployment rate despite having a business college degree.

I do not know about you but I do not want stupid people determining every aspect of my healthcare. The way to fix the healthcare problems in this country is to first understand the root causes of high healthcare costs, as listed above, and then attack those specific root causes. Throwing TRILLIONS of dollars at a problem without attacking the root causes is a recipe for financial disaster.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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

December, 2019, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Stupidity and Gross Reality Of Medicare For All

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care. To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

When we started this theme many years ago, it was all about the failure that is Obama Care. Over time, many of the failures that we predicted or other smart people predicted became true. Obama Care did not reduce annual health insurance premiums by up to $2,500 as promised. Obama Care did not bend the cost curve of health care as promised. Obama Care did not get insurance for over 21 million Americans as promised. And Obama Care did not allow you to keep your doctors, your hospitals or insurance plans as promised.

But with the failure of Obama Care has come a much worse idea, “Medicare For All.” Thus, most of these types of posts going forward will focus on this inane idea since the previous big healthcare inane idea, Obama Care, has basically collapsed in failure.

1) Let’s start today’s discussion with one of the biggest advocates of Medicare For All, Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren. At a recent political rally in North Carolina, Warren promised that her Medicare For All program will provide health care and health insurance for millions and millions of illegal immigrants.

At the rally Warren was asked by someone: “We know that you have included undocumented people in your plans to provide Medicare for All, so my question is why did you decide to include people regardless of immigration status, and would this include obtaining subsidies like the ACA’s – Affordable Care Act’s – affordability subsidies? Would you also support access to the children’s health insurance program without regard to immigration stuff?” 

To which Warren answered: “I’m really glad you asked this. Medicare for All, as I put this together, covers everyone, regardless of immigration status, and that’s it.” 

So:

• Warren wants to take taxpayer wealth from hard working American citizens to subsidize the healthcare of illegal immigrants.
• Warren wants to take taxpayer wealth from hard working American citizens to subsidize the healthcare of illegal immigrants even though millions of American citizens cannot afford health care today.
• Warren wants to take taxpayer wealth from hard working American citizens to subsidize the healthcare of illegal immigrants even though millions of Americans are homeless, hungry, or drug addicted and not getting support to help their needs.

Just another example of a leading liberal in this country who values illegal immigrants over legal, taxpaying, and needy Americans.

2) We have often documented how bad health care is in some foreign countries, e.g. England and Canada, countries that basically have implemented similar programs to “Medicare For All.” High costs, long wait times, inferior treatment, spotty coverage, etc. are all consequences of having the government run all of a country’s health care processes. James Schmitz, writing for the Heritage Foundation on November 21, 2019, recounted his own horror stories of dealing with “Medicare For All” type programs overseas:

• When he was very young, Mr. Schmitz suffered a hellacious fit and spasm that required him to be rushed to the hospital.
• He was rushed into a CT scanner that night and afterwards a neurologist told his parents that their small child had West Syndrome.
• This syndrome is a severe form of epilepsy and his parents were told that he had about a 90% chance that their son would never be able to speak, walk, eat, or think, there is no cure.
• He was treated almost immediately with Adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) which may have been the reason why he defied the odds and according to him, “I found myself in the top 1 percentile of people with West syndrome who could enjoy a mostly normal life. Thanks to the top-notch medical treatment I’ve received in America, I can do most of the things the neurologist predicted I wouldn’t be able to.”
• Flash forward many years ahead and Mr. Schmitz is a college graduate and living in England.
• Although he was living a mostly normal life he still needs anti-seizure drugs and visits to a doctor every three months.
• He also needs access to a doctor within a week’s notice if needed.
• So imagine his surprise and fear when he walked into an urgent care clinic in England, expecting to easily set up an appointment with a local neurologist within a few weeks.
• The general practitioner working in the clinic said she would be glad to set up an appointment with a recommended neurologist but that it would be for about nine months out.
• When Schmitz panicked, the urgent care doctor said she could make a call and possibly, possibly see if an appointment could be made for three to four months out.
• At that point, his dream of living, working, and traveling throughout Europe had come to an end: “Disheartened by the news, I knew staying in the U.K. was out of the question. I had to return to the U.S. in order to keep accessing the routine medical care that had saved my life so many years before. A month later, I packed my bags and left for Heathrow Airport having spent less than three months in the country. It’s a shame, because Britain is an amazing country and I would have loved to stay longer. Health care should not be a reason to have to leave a modern, First World country. I cannot go a day without taking medicine or without knowing if I’ll be able to see my doctor in a timely manner. My life is only made possible by the high-quality care and access I get in the United States. It’s something other countries don’t enjoy.”

This is what nationalized medicine and Medicare For All means: you will have less access to medical treatment, less access to specialized doctors, you will experience more pain and stress, and the overall cost will be higher. Higher, costs lower quality, less access, not a great combination. And somehow, people like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and others think this is a good idea. Insanity.

3) The Heritage Article cited above went on to lay some realities about nationalized medicine:

• On average, in England and Canada sick people wait twice as long vs. the U.S. to see a specialist, according to the National Community Pharmacists Association.
• We have discussed other studies which estimate that the wait time in England and Canada is much longer than twice as long.
• Nearly 1.8 million people in England are currently sick and ailing but are on a long waiting list to get admitted to a hospital for treatment or for outpatient treatment.
• Tens of thousands of foreigners come to the U.S. every year for medical treatment since the wait time to get treated in their home countries is just way too long, too painful, and too agonizing.

One reason why people like Warren and Sanders are so high on Medicare For All is that they know that they will write the legislation so that they personally do not suffer from the poor and expensive healthcare that will result in this country. They will take care of themselves, much like they did for Obama Care and every other aspects of life, and we will be sicker, more pained, and poorer for their ideas.

Thus, the stupidity of Medicare For All and the stupidity of making taxpaying real Americans pay the medical bills of illegal immigrants. Did no one learn anything from the failure of Obama Care?

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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

December, 2019, Part 6, Political Class Insanity: Hillary Sees Russians Everywhere, Elizabeth Warren's Failed Math Skills, and CNN Continues to Commit Integrity Suicide

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) First, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats accused Trump of being a secret Russian agent. The country spent about $30 million on the Robert Mueller investigation and found out that Trump was not a Russian agent. Then Clinton accused fellow Democrat and Democratic Presidential candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, of being a Russian agent without providing any evidence to support this accusation. Gabbard rebutted and admonished Clinton for making this baseless accusation.

Clinton is still at it, apparently seeing Russians behind every tree. In a recent Howard Stern interview she asserted that the Russians have said, “let’s do everything we can to elect Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.” Again, I am not aware that she provided any proof that the Russians were colluding with Sanders, I guess we are supposed to take her word for it.

But later on in the interview you get why she is slandering Sanders. She complains that Sanders “hurt her.” She followed that up with, “I hope he doesn’t do it again to whoever gets the nomination.” It seems that she is still bitter about losing not only to Trump but she blames Sanders for undercutting her. And thus, she brands him as a Russian agent as revenge for him daring to oppose her.

As far as Gabbard is concerned, maybe Clinton is envious of another Democratic woman besides herself becoming the first woman President. Whatever the case, her infatuation with branding everyone a Russian agent is sad and dangerous since if there ever is an American politician who is actually a Russian agent, we probably will not believe it since Hillary played the Chicken Little/Russian agent card too often based on nothing.

2) We have often shown examples of the many skills that most politicians lack: logic, economic training, project management, etc. Elizabeth Warren recently illustrated another skill that politicians lack, basic math skills:

• Warren has been running around the country promising a lot of free stuff to voters and vowing to enact a whole slew of government operated programs and processes in an attempt to appeal to liberals and socialists in this country, most socialists.
• This free stuff includes Medicare For All, the New Green Deal, forgiving college debt, free college tuition, etc. 
• The obvious question is how Warren would pay for all of these socialism goodies since nothing is free in life.
• Most estimates of the Medicare for All idea would be an increment $3.2 TRILLION a year in government spending, the cost of forgiving college debt would be $1.6, and the cost of the New Green Deal could be another $1 TRILLION a year bringing just these three promises to about $44 TRILLION over ten years.
• Keep those numbers in mind when you consider what Warren recently said at a National Education Association meeting when questioned how she would fund additional educational programs.
• She answered by flippantly and ignorantly stating that “there’s always money. It’s there.”
• She seems to think that she owns all of our wealth and it is at her disposal to do as she pleases.
• She also seems to think that there is no end to the amount of wealth there is in this country, a completely ignorant economic position.
• She went on to say that she would change budget priorities to fund her pipe dreams including reducing the defense budget.
• Now, while the defense budget should probably be reduced, given how much money the Pentagon wastes every year, let’s do some math to show how out of touch Warren is with mathematics reality.
• The annual Pentagon budget is about $700 billion every year.
• If she reduced the Pentagon budget by 100%, something that is impossible and stupid to do, she would free up about $7 TRILLION for her freebies and other socialism projects over the next ten years.
• But we just showed how over ten years she would need $44 TRILLION to fund just three of her pet programs.
• Thus, reducing the Defense Department budget to $0 would still leave her $37 TRILLION short of her needed funding or about 84% short of her funding needs.
• To fill this $37 TRILLION hole every American citizen, men, women, and kids would have to pay about $115,000 EACH to get the funding she needs or about $11,5000 a year for ten year per person. 
• Thus, a family of four would have to pay $46,000 a year.
• And this would leave us without any armed forces at all.
• If she reduced the Pentagon budget by 10%, a more realistic assumption, she would be over $43 TRILLION short of her needed funding.

As you can see, we are in the ridiculous arena of math calculations. But that is because her program ideas and the needed funding are ridiculous. Do none of these people have any logic or math skills? And even if they do not have these basic skills, is there no one on their staffs that can point out how stupid these ideas are? Scary that these types of people are trying to run the country.

3) We have often pointed out how important a free, unbiased press is in a democracy and for liberty of a nation’s citizens. And we have also lamented how the free press and the journalism profession in this country has failed miserably in this important responsibility. Most mainstream news outlets in this country lean heavily in favor of the left side of the spectrum, so much so that poll after poll show that the American public realize how biased and dangerous such bias is:

• Recent Pew Research found that respondents felt that journalists behave unethically almost always or sometimes 66% of the time.
• Recent Gallup research shows that only 23% of respondents felt that they only had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers.

Which shows that we really do not trust the people/”journalists” that are bringing us the news today. But that is also a good news story in that we at least know we are not being fed the truth in an unbiased way and that good news has manifested itself in the recent crash of CNN ratings, a news institution that was once felt to be trustworthy, a time that has long passed:

• CNN’s TV ratings have recently hit a multi-year low.
• Over Thanksgiving weekend, in the important 25-64 demographic, CNN hit a three year new low in ratings, according to Nielsen Media Research.
• In total, CNN averaged only 620,000 viewers every night over that weekend.
• This put their performance below other cable networks including AMC, the Food Network, and the Hallmark Channel.
• Thus, there is a very good chance that the biased reporting of CNN often lost out to Cupcake Wars on the Food Channel or they fell below a hokey Christmas movie on the Hallmark channel.
• At the same time, Fox News had more than three times as many viewers, two million, and MSNBC had more than twice as many than CNN.

Again, this is a double edged sword. On one hand, CNN and other mainstream news outlets have failed the American people and their own industry’s integrity and trust standards with their biased and skewed news reporting. This has endangered our democracy and freedoms since a free, unbiased press has always been an anti-tyranny bastion. 

The good news is that a good many Americans have realized that CNN and others are not really journalism outlets anymore as much as they are biased ratings machines, truth be damned. We can only hope that at some point in time real journalism returns to this country as opposed to what the likes of CNN is now propagating.

That will do it for today: in Hillary’s world everyone is a Russian agent, In Elizabeth Warren’s world basic math laws math are suspended, and in the news world, CNN’s integrity and trust continue to plummet as their reporting becomes more and more skewed.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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

April, 2019, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Government Health Care Intervention Equals Less Quality Health Care

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

Let's continue with more disasters today:

1) Although Obama Care and its socialistic tenets turned out to be a massive failure, liberals and Democrats want to go further down this road of failure to a single payer, socialistic health care system in this country. They like to point out that other countries, usually using the Scandinavian countries as an example, have a single payer system and thus, based on that fact alone, we should have it in this country.

But numerous times we have shown what a failure the single payer system is. Long delays to get in to see a doctor, waiting months to get a simple diagnostic test done. Higher and higher healthcare taxes to get less and less healthcare coverage. Citizens leaving a country to come to the U.S. because the wait times for a procedure is so long in a single payer system. Basically, expensive healthcare that makes you die younger.

But the Legal Insurrection website recently ran article that shows that single payer systems in Scandinavian countries are not all that liberals think they are or dream they are:

• The Washington Free Beacon reported: The government of Finland collapsed Friday “due to the rising cost of universal health care and the prime minister’s failure to enact reforms to the system.”
• This caused Prime Minister Juha Sipila and his entire cabinet to resign after his governing coalition could pass the necessary laws to reform the government’s single payer health care system.Much like the U.S., Finland has an aging population with 26% of its citizens expected to be over the age of 65 by 2030.An aging population almost always means higher and higher healthcare costs.
• To head off financial disaster, Finland has tried to cut costs and boost health care efficiency for years but has been unsuccessful in doing so, resulting in more and more financial distress for the government.
• And according to Reuters, Finland is not alone in this crisis: “Nordic countries, where comprehensive welfare is the cornerstone of the social model, have been among the most affected. But reform has been controversial and, in Finland, plans to cut costs and boost efficiency have stalled for years.”
• Other Nordic countries with single payer systems such as Sweden and Norway are facing similar health care financial stress.

Nasty stuff, people getting older and their government likely not going to be able to fulfill its commitment of health care. And yet, liberals and Democrat in Washington continue to champion a losing approach to healthcare with a recent tweet by Bernie Sanders showing just how ignorant he is of reality and finance: “In the United States it costs on average $12,000 to have a baby. In Finland it costs $60.”

So Sanders thinks that for $60 you can give birth to a baby in Finland and that $60 will cover hospital, doctor, nurse, and medicine costs for the birth. It does not cost $60, Bernie. It costs much more, it is just that the couple having the baby pay less while the rest of Finland society and taxpayers pay much more than $60. Are you that ignorant of finance or are you just a flat out liar? In either case, single payer systems are not efficient, effective, or healthy for sick citizens. Obama Care proved that and the Scandinavian countries, along with England and Canada, prove that every day.

2) Chris Pope, recently writing for the National Review website, wrote an excellent article that not only showed how bad Obama Care was but how bad Medicare For All would be, which is really Obama Care on steroids. Rather than review all aspects of his in depth and well researched and reasoned article, I encourage you to read it at:

https://webmail.earthlink.net/wam/msg.jsp?msgid=22&folder=0/b6bb4176c6d599b2e6f150162a4126e9&isSeen=true&x=-838493755

My trying to summarize his analysis and logic would not do it justice. But let me pull out some facts and realities from his work that prove again that Obama Care is nothing more than a series of unfolding disasters, much like Medicare For All would be:

• Mr. Pope reminds us that Obama and the entire set of Washington Democrats promised us that Obama Care would reduce costs and improve medical and health care delivery.
• Obama actually promised that an average American family could actually see their annual health care insurance costs go down by up to $2,500 a year.
• Of course that did not happen, health insurance premiums skyrocketed, health insurance copays skyrocketed, millions of American lost access to their favorite doctors and hospitals and drug costs continued to escalate.
• By the numbers, health insurance premiums for individual health insurance programs under Obama Care doubled within three years of the legislation being passed.
• Premiums for Obama Care health insurance plans now average $4,700 a year, almost $400 a month, hardly the $2,500 reduction Obama promised.
• And yet Democrats want even more government intervention in the market even though Obama Care’s intervention was a disaster.
• The state of Vermont, a very liberal state that is the home of Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, a big Medicare For All advocate, tried to implement a single payer system in 2014.
• Thus, if any part of the country had any chance of making a single payer system work, it was Vermont.
• And yet, when the liberal politicians in Vermont ran the numbers and actually looked at the reality, they decided they could not afford a single payer system.
• The costs on a national level, costs that Vermont found out quite rudely, would add $3 TRILLION to the Federal government operating costs every year, more than double the amount that the Federal government collects in personal income taxes.
• This $3 TRILLION annual incremental cost was independently arrived by analysis done by both the liberal leaning Urban Institute and the conservative leaning Mercatus Center.
• Even Nancy Pelosi’s health policy advisor, Wendell Primus, notes that, “recently noted as fundamental obstacles to Medicare for All the large number of potential losers, widespread opposition from stakeholders, and the desire to reserve funds for other priorities. As the party’s presidential candidates for 2020 have jockeyed for position, many have endorsed proposals in full knowledge that they cannot be implemented. Indeed, even Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose state enacted single-payer but abandoned the plan when the scale of associated tax increases became clear, has refused to advocate abolishing the filibuster in order to enact Medicare for All.”
• One version of Medicare For All that is less expensive than the full blown Medicare for All theory is to allow people of all ages to “buy in” to the program, a facet of Medicare that already exists for senior citizens that have not contributed enough in payroll taxes over their lifetime to qualify for regular Medicare.
• However, this program would cost Medicare For All customers to currently pay $974 a month for Medicare Parts A,B, and D, hardly affordable for most Americans.
• Many Obama Care programs cost much less than $974 a month so things would be worse, not better, under Medicare For All.
• But as soon as liberals decide that the $974 should be subsidized then we are right back to an incremental $3 TRILLION a year in cost.
• And liberals never seem to talk about the reality, that according to Gallup, 80% of Americans rate their current health care as excellent or good so why would the vast majority of Americans want to give up their current excellent or good health care for a long shot, long odds program like Medicare For All?
• Plus, the average out of pocket costs that Americans pay as a share of average household consumption (3%) is actually slightly less than the average among developed countries, another reality that liberals like to ignore.

But consider another reality that the article does not cover: do you really think that Washington, like the following idiots, should be trusted with every aspect of your medical care:

• Democratic Congressman Hank Johnson actually stated in a televised Congressional hearing that he was worried the island of Guam could tip over in the Pacific Ocean.
• Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee thinks the Constitution is over 400 years old, that her Congressional district is 50 feet below sea level (it is not), and wondered out loud if a Mars Rover mission would drive by the place where Neil Armstrong planted the flag on the moon.
• Democratic Speaker of The House Nancy Pelosi once proudly stated that the Obama Care legislation had to be passed so that she and the rest of the country could see what was in it, like a Christmas present.
• And of course, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does not know the simple definition of the unemployment rate, does not know how tax credits work, chased Amazon and its 25,000 high paying jobs out of her Congressional district, etc., etc., etc.

So, Scandinavian countries’ single payer healthcare plans are going bankrupt, with costs increasing as quality goes down, and Medicare For All is so stupid and ill fated along every dimension imaginable. It is a no brainer that the ore government and the politicians who operate it the less healthy and less wealthy people become.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Insanity, Part 3: Being "Morally Right" But "Factually Wrong", The Idiocy Of The New Green Deal and More

Over the past few months, New York City Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has established herself as a human gaffe machine. Her inability to do simple math, her outlandish ideas based on an alternative reality, her economic ignorance, and lack of common sense has resulted in an almost daily stream of idiocy, inane comments, and ridiculous ideas that have no basis in reality.

As a result, most of our recent political class insanity posts have almost always had an Ocasio-Cortez piece of insanity. Thus, we have decided to separately track her craziness and idiotic takes on economics, business, government, and whatever else on a regular basis under its own set of posts. She deserves to have a separate effort that captures all of the ridiculousness she espouses.

The format we will do is to start with a set of her original inane ideas and just continue to build on that initial list as time goes by. If the list gets too large, which it is likely to do, we will then find a good breaking point to start another list. We will try to source the original source of all of her gaffes, trying to use her own words that were stated either orally or via her Twitter account, a source of endless inane comments and ideas.

We have already listed out eleven major gaffes from her in the following post:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2019/02/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-insanity-part_22.html

Thus, we start today’s array of missteps with misstep number 12. The original eleven are listed further down the post after the “*************” line.

12- According to Ocasio-Cortez: “I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right." So, according to her philosophy of life, it is better to ignore reality than to ignore what you think should be reality. 

I have trouble dealing with this type of illogical and inane thinking. You cannot resolve any problem in life without knowing the root cause of that problem. This another way of saying find out what the reality of the situation is and then apply the right solutions to that reality. She would rather ignore reality and live in some sort of fantasy world, a perception of life that will never allow here to resolve any of the problems facing the country and the reality we find ourselves in.

She obviously does not understand the reality of some of her proposed socialist programs: Medicare For All, New Green Deal, free college, free daycare, etc. As we have pointed out many times, the country is about to collapse under the crushing debt and unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare. The total of the debt of the Federal and state governments and the unfunded liabilities is well over $100 TRILLION. Since the TOTAL wealth of every American is well under $100 TRILLION, there is simply not enough wealth to fund the financial hole that politicians have already dug for us as a nation.

So why in her mind it might be “morally right” to fund free college, free daycare, Medicare for All etc., the simple reality that she does not understand is that factually there is not enough wealth to fund her morally right programs.

But that is the beauty of existing in a “morally right” alternative like hers. You can get to dream up all of these wonderful ideas, unburdened by reality.

13- One of the more idiotic programs she is proposing is the New Green Deal. This is an impossible program to execute (see her “morally right” obsession above) since it involves transforming the entire country’s energy infrastructure to solar and wind within ten years. She ignores the realities that it took hundreds of years to build the country’s infrastructure up to what it is today, no way that gets replaced in ten years. I say ten years because that is about when she claims the world will end because of manmade climate change unless we listen to her.

Before we conclude why this is such an ignorant statement to make, consider some climate history:

• In 1970, high regarded biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted that "all important animal life in the sea will be extinct" in 10 years or so. 49 years later most important animal life is still with us. 
• Also in 1970, Nobel laureate biology professor at Harvard, George Wald, forecasted that: “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” 49 years later we are still hanging around. 
• Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, also said that the world’s population would soon outstrip food supplies. 49 years later crop yields are as high as ever and the number of humans starving around has dropped significantly over the past decades. 
• Ehrlich followed up on this starvation prediction when he claimed that, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.” 49 years later people are still starving but nowhere close to the rate he predicted. 
• In 1968 he predicted: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Good thing that he did not lay down that bet since 19 years later England is still hanging around. 
• Noted British science writer Nigel Calder warned in a July, 1975 International Wildlife article that, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” So, as recently as about 44 years ago we were all going to die from an Ice Age, not global warming. 
• Meteorologist C.C. Wallen claimed in 1975 in a Science News article that, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” But according to other scientists it reversed a few years later when the exact opposite climate trend became popular, global warming. 
• In 2000, British climate researcher David Viner told The Independent, a British newspaper, that in just “a few years” snow would become a “very rare and exciting event” in Britain and that “children just aren’t going to know what snow is...Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” In the next few years, Britain experienced some of its lowest temperatures and snowfall accumulations since records started being kept in 1914. Also, given that most of the U.S. Midwest is suffering through below zero temperatures, 19 years after Viner predicted the death of snow, I do not think they would agree with Viner either. 
• Ecologist Kenneth Watt told a college audience in 1970: “The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years. If present trends continue, the world will be about 4 degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990 but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” But those predictions never came true. 
• In 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin wrote in Look magazine: “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian (Institution), believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Not even close 49 years later. 
• In 2009, self proclaimed climate expert Al Gore predicted that there was an excellent chance that the North Pole would be melted within five years. Ten years later, the ice cap is still there, generating increment amounts of cold air as witnessed by the American living in the Midwest today. 
• Scientist Harrison Brown predicted in 1970 that mankind would run out of copper shortly after the 2000 and that lead, zinc, gold and silver would be gone ten years earlier. 49 years later, these elements are still around and in good supply. 

So, famous scientists across many different fields, a Nobel laureate, the head of the Smithsonian,and Al Gore have predicted many catastrophic events related to climate. None of them, not a single one of their predictions came true. 

And yet 29 year old, former bartender, non-scientist Ocasio-Cortez wants to upset the entire country’s energy and financial conditions because she predicts the world will end in about a decade. Somehow we should believe her, someone who is not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, someone who does not know the simple definition of unemployment despite having an economics degree, someone who does not know the three branches of government despite being a member of Congress, and someone who denies reality and lives in a fantasy world of what she considers “morally right.” Insane.

14- Some of the published details of her New Green Deal are really too insane to believe. Consider a direct quote from the proposal: “We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero."

A number of observations: 

• She wants to get rid of cows because they fart methane and that destroys the climate. So, while we are destroying our dairy industry, China and India alone are proceeding with building about 2,400 carbon spewing coal plants that will overwhelm the reduction in cow farting that the U.S. manages to do. 
• She wants to destroy the airline industry while the rest of the world continues to fly about using their airplanes while in the U.S. we are forced to walk, use a non-existent national train system, or just stay home. Keep in mind that California could not build a single high speed train line despite years and billions of dollars of trying so to think an inept Federal government can do it any better to replace airline travel is a “morally right” fantasy. 
• Within ten years she wants to retrofit EVERY building in America, overhaul transportation, and overhaul agriculture. But this is a government that after hundreds of years, still cannot operate a postal system efficiently and effectively. This is a government that after decades still cannot operate a non-high speed train system (Amtrak) efficiently and effectively. To think it can do anything right of any magnitude is crazy. 

Look, let’s face a few realities: 

• The Federal government is not capable of doing what she wants it to do, not in ten years, not in a hundred years. 
• This plan will destroy entire industries, e.g. agriculture and airlines, and not provide a suitable replacement industries….in addition to eliminating cheese, yogurt and milk from our diets once she kills off all of the farting cows. 
• To think the rest of the world will follow our example is a total pipe dream, the rest of the world will continue to expand and use coal, oil, airplanes, and cows to expand and improve their economies, the world’s failure to live up to the Paris Climate Agreement proves this point emphatically. 
• The devastation caused by moving to purely renewable sources of energy will be devastating to the Earth; wind turbines kill millions of birds every year, more wind turbines will kill billions more, the mining of precious metals for solar cells is a dirty and ecologically devastating process, mining more of those metals, assuming enough of them can be found and mined, will be more devastating. 
• The production of batteries to store the renewable energy will also be a disaster for nature and virtually impossible to implement; we have already shown that for California to get to 80% renewable energy it would have to deploy 500 million Tesla Powerwall units to store and supply constant electrical power. To do this for the entire U.S. in ten years would be impossible, would require millions of acres of land which would devastate the ecology of major parts of the country and billions of storage units, and would cost trillions of dollars to produce, deploy and operate. 

Alright, enough already. This is an Ocasio-Cortez plan that fails on so many levels in so many ways. But this is what happens when someone lives in a “morally right” fantasy world, the facts and realities listed above do not enter into their thinking. This guarantees that at some point in time reality will jump up and bite her fantasy plans where the sun does not shine, ensuring failure and devastation of our economy, our freedoms, and our safety.

And while her gaffes may make us smile, given how out of touch she is with reality, sadly remember that she helps write and vote on legislation that affects all of us.

Never forget: M.A.B.A. - Make Alexandria a Bartender Again which would allow her to screw up a drink or two but not screw up the country or our freedoms.
********************************************
8-Probably most people now know that Amazon has decided not to create a mega headquarters location in Queens, New York and has pulled out of its plans there. If the plan had been executed, 25,000 very high paying jobs would have come to the city which would have resulted in even more jobs in the construction, building materials, retail, restaurant, and other industries that would have serviced the 25,000 high paying employees.

In addition, Amazon was willing to do the following additional niceties to make the deal even better: 

• Amazon would invest $2.5 billion in developing the location for their headquarters location. 
• This $2.5 billion would result in a load of high paying construction jobs and ancillary jobs and economic benefit to the area, e.g. food trucks to service the construction workers. 
• Eventually Amazon would station 25,000 employees at the location, highly paid employees that would buy and renovate housing in the area, eat in local restaurants, go to local movie theaters, buy clothes from local merchants, buy furniture to furnish their new homes, spend money on local transportation, etc. 
• Amazon promised to provide computer science course to 130 area high schools. 
• Amazon promised to hire at least 30 people from a nearby housing complex to work in its call center. 
• Amazon would help fund local infrastructure improvements. 
• Amazon would help fund a new 600 seat public school 
• Amazon would create a 3.5 acre waterfront park open to the public. 
• Amazon would set aside 25,000 square feet for a “community facility use/artist workspace.” 
• Amazon would set aside 10,000 square feet for an art and tech accelerator. 
• Amazon would set aside 263,000 square feet for light manufacturing space. 
• Amazon would set aside 10,000 square feet for workforce development and training space. 
• Amazon would set up internships for high school students. 
• Amazon, starting in 2020, would host semi-annual job fairs and resume workshops at the local housing complex for at least three years. 

In return, local New York government entities promised Amazon a $3 billion tax break down the road. We estimated that the local government entities would have reached a breakeven on that $3 billion incentive in less than 8 years and after that, the increased taxes from the Amazon effort would have all been incremental tax revenue.

But leave it to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and several of her other socialist friends, to screw up a great deal for the citizens of New York City. Their constant complaining about the $3 billion finally caused Amazon management to say this effort is not worth hassles.

Even worse, Ocasio-Cortez showed her total ignorance when she said that the $3 billion could be better spent on local infrastructure needs, better schools, better subways, etc. What she failed to understand is that there is no $3 billion pot of money sitting around that was going to be given to Amazon. Amazon would have paid less in taxes to the tune of $3 billion over time. Local city government entities would have gotten a little less in tax money from Amazon initially, the $3 billion does not exist as of today.

Even MSNBC, a news outlet that hates everything Trump and freedom and loves everything Democrat and socialism stepped up to show how ignorant she was: “What’s shocking to me is once again she shows how little she understands not just economics but even unemployment. She’s the one who said the reason unemployment is so low is because a lot of people have two jobs. She needs to learn basic things about what it is to be a representative … Just because she has a progressive agenda, which some people like, does not mean she has the city’s best interest. She showed me she only cares about herself and not about her colleagues ... and not about the people she represents because those people would be getting jobs themselves.”

If MSNBC thinks a Democrat show little understanding about basic concepts and cares only about herself, you know that it is that bad.

9- But being ignorant about the $3 billion, thinking that it is a pot of money that was just going to be handed over to Amazon, was not her only gaffe in this area. Consider this piece of insanity from her: “So I firmly believe that if we want to take that $3 billion dollars that we were willing to give to Amazon and invest it in our local community, we can do that. We can make those jobs. We can make 25,000 jobs. But we don’t have to give away and allow our subway system to crumble so that Amazon essentially owns a part of New York City. We can create 25,000 jobs with Mom-and-Pops.”

So much wrong with this ignorance:

• There is no $3 billion that can be invested in the local community. 
• Why would you want to make jobs, when Amazon as willing to hand you 25,000 high paying jobs without any effort on your part? 
• I can almost guarantee that the 25,000 jobs that you might be able to make with “Mom and Pops’ would on average pay nowhere near $150,000 a year. 
• And again, there is no $3 billion pot of money that she could use to fix a crumbling subway system. 

As a result of her stupidity on the subject, her constituents will not see the incredible opportunity that Ocasio-Cortez helped scare away because of her idiocy when it comes to the incentive program, a simple concept that most people would understand with little trouble….except her.

10- Recently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recently arrested a very dangerous MS-13 gang member Ramiro Gutierrez, 26 who allegedly murdered someone in Ocasio-Cortez’s Congressional district. According to the Daily Wire: “Gutierrez was arrested by authorities on Monday and charged on Tuesday with second-degree murder, gang assault, and criminal possession of a weapon. The victim has been identified as Abel Mosso, a 20-year-old reported member of the 18th Street Gang, a rival gang of MS-13. The brutal video shows a group of men wrestling on the ground. The shooter, allegedly Gutierrez, then unloads six shots, reportedly at the victim’s face. As chaos ensues from horrified passersby, the suspect flees the scene, leaving his victim’s lifeless body.”

Gutierrez had been arrested 12 prior times and was free on bail on an attempted murder charge. Nice guy. One would have thought that the Congressional member representing that district would have had some sympathy for someone murdered in her district. Instead, she showed her lack of caring by not attacking the murderer but by attacking the government’s immigration officers: “This is one of the most urgent moral issues and crises that we have in America right now. This is not a political issue. Children dying in detention centers should not be a partisan concern. It should be a universal concern for every American in the United States. ICE operates with virtually no accountability, ripping apart families and holding our friends and neighbors indefinitely in inhumane detention centers scattered across the United States. We’re here to say that an agency like ICE, which repeatedly and systematically violates human rights, does not deserve a dime.”

So many issues with this stupidity:

• ICE is accountable to the laws of the country, it is not operating like some sort of Gestapo agency. 
• My “friends and neighbors” are law abiding U.S. citizens, not illegal immigrants, a group that includes violent MS-13 gang members, violent drug cartel agents, human traffickers, and ordinary criminals. 
• Obviously, Ocasio-Cortez thinks that this latter group of people are her friends and neighbors, people who came here illegally, many of whom intend to do some nasty things to Americans once here. 
• And “children dying in detention centers” is a incredibly inflammatory and wrong-headed thing to say; to my knowledge no child has died when in ICE custody and shame on her for implying that many illegal immigrant kids have died. 
• Much like she does not care who gets murdered in her district by illegal criminal elements, she obviously does not care about the thousands of U.S. kids that are killed, abused, and attacked every year in this country. 

She is just another one of the new brand of Democrats in this country that care more about foreigners than U.S. citizens, espousing lies to make that point.

11- And finally for today, it looks like it not take her long to get into the swing of unethical behavior in Washington: 

• She could be in violation of the House ethics rules. 
• Ocasio-Cortez received campaign served and support from a millionaire donor. 
• But the campaign could not afford his services and rather than having the campaign take out a loan, she likely paid the donor directly out of her pocket. 
• In turn, the donor then hired Ocasio-Cortez’s boyfriend which means that the donor was getting paid directly by the Congresswoman while at the same time paying her boyfriend, a little nepotism. 
• This could be interpreted as donating indirectly to her campaign. 
• Ocasio-Cortez subsequently hired the donor to be her chief of staff, possibly rewarding him for hiring her boyfriend. 
• When it then became apparent that she had hired her boyfriend to be on her staff, she tried to deny that reality out of existence. 
• All of this from a Congressional candidate that raged against this type of nepotism and cronyism. 

More insanity from Ocasio-Cortez: too ignorant to understand tax incentives and rebates which has cost her Congressional district billions and billions of dollars in benefits, turning her back on 25,000 highly paid taxpayers, lying about our brave immigration officers, caring more about illegal immigrants than U.S. citizens, and hypocritically raging against nepotism while wasting no time to be what she claimed to despise.

And while her gaffes may make us smile, given how out of touch she is with reality, sadly remember that she helps write and vote on legislation that affects all of us.

Never forget: M.A.B.A. - Make Alexandria a Bartender Again which would allow her to screw up a drink or two but not screw up the country or our freedoms.

1- Despite supposedly having an economics degree, she made an initial fool of herself when she claimed that the reason the unemployment rate was so low was because so many Americans had to work more than one job to get by. Any halfway smart high school economics class student could probably tell her that the unemployment rate calculation does not care how many jobs a person is working, just whether or not they are working. And yet this college graduate had no idea.

2- She compounded this lack of knowledge on the unemployment rate by claiming that the number of people in this country holding multiple jobs was large and growing. However, a simple check of government statistics would show her that the number of people holding multiple jobs is actually quite small and shrinking, the exact opposite of what she claimed. Thus, she was either lying or making up a reality not based on actual data.

3- Despite being an elected member of Congress, she erroneously claimed that the structure of our government process included three branches: the Presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Pretty sure that the Supreme Court justices were surprised to find out that they were no longer a branch of the government.

4- A financial audit of the Pentagon found that over a twenty year period, about $21 TRILLION in budget dollars was mishandled, misclassified, or not accounted for properly. Rather than understand the audit, she immediately and incorrectly assumed that the Pentagon had misspent and wastefully spent $21 TRILLION.

However, if she had done a simple math and logic calculation based on history and actual data, she would have found out that the ENTIRE Pentagon budget over that twenty year period was only about $12 TRILLION, making it impossible to waste $21 TRILLION when the budget was about 40% less than that. This idiocy earned the highest level of lying from the Washington Post, the dreaded four Pinocchios: ”Ocasio-Cortez is not the first Twitter user to mangle information from a news report. But it’s unconvincing to try to pass this off as a rhetorical point being misread. She cited the $21 trillion figure and said ‘66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.’ That’s a direct comparison. It’s badly flawed. The same article she referenced on Twitter would have set her straight. The tweet is still up, probably causing confusion. So we will award Four Pinocchios to Ocasio-Cortez.”

5- As a socialist and/or communist, Ocasio-Cortez wants to impose massive socialism/communism programs on the country. One of her favorite pipe dreams is the so-called “Medicare For All” program that would put people like her and the Federal government in charge of every aspect of every American’s health care. A generally accepted cost estimate for this disaster is $32 TRILLION over the first ten years or about $3.2 TRILLION a year. She proposed funding this program by raising the marginal tax rate to a whopping 70% on every dollar over $10 million that any American earned. 

However, a simple calculation using public IRS data easily shows that such a plan would raise only about $50 billion a year at most, or about only 1.5% of the amount needed for the Medicare for All program. Thus, she has really, really bad math skills (highly likely given the gaffes we discussed above), she is lazy and did not do this simple calculation, or she is a liar, claiming that the rich would fund the entire program.

6- Prior to being sworn in to Congress but after being elected, she railed against Congressional members for still drawing a salary even though 800,000 Federal employees were not being paid during the government shutdown. However, once elected, she refused to not draw a salary, ducking press questions about her massive hypocrisy on the matter of berating those that took a salary in December but refusing to not draw a salary after she was sworn in in late January.

7- In a Twitter spat she had with a healthcare expert, she put forth the following tweet: ““Actually, we have for-profit “death panels” now: they are companies + boards saying you’re on your own bc they won’t cover a critical procedure or medicine.” 

As always, she is talking about a subject she knows nothing about and has not done the research for. For starters, anyone with an ObamaCare insurance policy has to have critical procedures and medicine covered. Second, According to the National Conference of State Legislatures: “There are more than 1,900 such statutes [statutes that guarantee medical coverage/treatment] among all 50 states; another analysis tallies more than 2,200 individual statute provisions, adopted over a 30+ year period.”

Do we have a health care issue and overall health insurance issue in this country? We certainly do, for a minority of citizens, but there is nothing close to being a set of death panels in this country being operated by greedy corporations, there are loads of safeguards to prevent death panels, safeguards that obviously do not exist in her world or mind.

Okay seven major faux pas and she has only be in office for about a month. Unfortunately, we have a whole folder of other bouts of idiocy and bad math that we will present over the coming weeks and months.

And while her gaffes may make us smile, given how out of touch she is with reality, sadly remember that she helps write and vote on legislation that affects all of us.

Never forget: M.A.B.A. - Make Alexandria a Bartender Again which would allow her to screw up a drink or two but not screw up the country or our freedoms.

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