October, 2014 Bonus Post Political Class Insanity: Obese Americans Girls, Unbalanced Sex In India, and More

Apologies upfront: yesterday we thought we had finished up all of the political class nonsense from the past month or so in our record setting eighth post in one month. However, by the time we finished that write up and assumed we were done, another avalanche of insanity, wasteful spending, and general idiocy hit the fan. 

We have captured the latest below and promise, absolutely, that this will be the last political class insanity post for this month. Not because it is over but because it is too depressing to keep pointing out how inane and ineffective our current politicians have become. We all need a break until next month’s update. 

We started dong these updates several years ago, usually taking one or two days every month to get all of their insanity covered. Unfortunately, over time, the insanity has seemed to accelerate almost exponentially, causing us to now have to take six or seven posts each month to get it all in. This month will be no different. As our foreign policy implodes, the economy stagnates, and the midtem elections approach, the insanity levels are intensifying daily.

To check out past instances of political class insanity in this post, simply go to the first week of each month and check out the posts that begin, “Political class insanity.” This is the ninth entry in this series for this month, with the first eight posts appearing over the past few days. 

1) A recent article by Elizabeth Harris writing for the Washington Free Beacon discussed the reality that the Federal government is spending almost a half a million dollars to find out why obese teenage girls have a hard time getting dates. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a $466,642 grant for the study, which will examine whether social skills have an impact on why obese girls have fewer dating experiences than their less obese counterparts.

The objective of the grant is as follows: “Mounting evidence demonstrates that weight influences intimate (i.e., dating and sexual) relationship formation and sexual negotiations among adolescent girls. Obese girls consistently report having fewer dating and sexual experiences, but more sexual risk behaviors (i.e., condom nonuse) once they are sexually active."

“The conceptual framework that has guided this research presumes that differences in the social skills for relating to peers and intimate partners along with differences in the relationship experiences of obese and non-obese girls account for these differences. However, no studies have actually examined whether the interpersonal skills and intimate relationships of obese and non-obese girls differ.”

The description goes on and on but you get the idea. This is a terrible waste of money that will be invested in a project will take four years worth of study to answer these less than pressing questions. 

This does not mean I am not sympathetic to the lives of obese girls. But rather than waste money on such a nonsensical long term study, wouldn’t it be put to better use to put forth a national public health initiative to help ALL obese people to control their weight for their health and never mind about worrying how obesity affects sexual behavior and attitudes? 

Better yet, would it not be better and much more immediate to use half a million dollars to get veterans the immediate medial help the need, to get our homeless the immediate shelter they need, to get our drug addicted the immediate medical help they need? Such a terrible sense of priorities when so many Americans are suffering and such a terrible waste of taxpayer wealth.

2) A recent Federally and taxpayer funded sex research project is even more absurd than the obesity study we just reviewed. An October 1, 2014 article for CNS news by Melanie Hunter discussed a National Institutes of Health grant worth $288,503 that went to the State University of New York at Albany to study, wait for it…., family and health consequences of the sex ratio imbalance in India caused by sex-selective abortion technologies.

So in this case of dreadfully wasted money, the research is not even to be used in this country or by any stretch of the imagination of any use for anyone in this country. It will study a societal situation in India: “India has long experienced a numerical shortage of females, and this sex ratio imbalance is likely to grow with the widespread adoption of sex-selective abortion technologies.India is the world’s second most populous country and projected to become the largest by 2050. Growing imbalances in India’s sex ratio have the potential to alter substantially multiple dimensions of demographic and family-related behavior, including the sexual behaviors that contribute to the spread of HIV/AIDS.” 

I get it, society has a problem, it needs to be studied, …in India by Indian researchers using Indians' wealth, not Americans’ wealth. It is amazing how garbage like this gets approved and funded with American taxpayer wealth…for research in India.

3) A research study recently published by the American Action Forum (AAF) reported that 50 financial items that banks are required to send to the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the three main Federal entities overseeing U.S. banks, cannot be submitted electronically. This requires banks and other financial institutions to submit this information and data manually to the Federal government.

Which raises two questions:

1. How many hours and resources does it take to submit such large amounts of manual data to the Federal government, resources that might be better spent reducing costs for the banks and eventually reducing costs for consumers?
2. Does anyone at those three Federal entities actually look at the mountains of manual, paper intensive reporting and even if they do look at the paper, to they have the resources to properly analyze the paper numbers and do any constructive with it?

The AAF actually took a stab at answering the first question we just posed. They estimate that nearly 37 million hours of work are annually required to complete the required paperwork. This is equivalent to an amazing 18,000-19,000 full-time jobs. Thousands of jobs, adding millions and millions of dollars to the cost of doing business, costs that are eventually passed along to us, the consumers.

There does not appear to be a readily available answer to the second question we posed: is the Federal government actually looking at these mounds and mounds of paper reports? If it took 18,000-19,000 bank employees to furnish the data, I sincerely doubt there are thousands and thousands of Federal employees that are wading through the paper. 

Thus, we are likely looking at a near total waste of resources and costs that could be much better spent expanding the economy and providing real worth to the country rather than an empty exercise in bureaucracy.

4) One last parting shot of insanity for this month, I promise. California Governor Jerry Brown recently signed a critical piece of legislation. Although California is basically bankrupt (with about a half a trillion dollars worth of unfunded future debt), it had nothing to do with plotting a course of fiscal responsibility for the state. 

Although the state’s public education system is mostly a failure, it had nothing to do with fixing the system to better educate California kids. 

Although the state has a higher unemployment rate than the rest of the country (the 5th highest state unemployment rate), it had nothing to do with getting the California economy rolling again.

No, the critical piece of legislation he signed was to impose a statewide ban on the use plastic bags for grocery stores and convenience stores. Talk about a bad sense of priorities. This is what the California political class is working on, banning plastic bags. 

Again, it is not as if I am not sensitive to the environmental impacts of plastic bags. But, come on, with all of the other unresolved, major problems facing the majority of California citizens, this is what they are working on? Insane.

But bad priorities of the American political class are a severe symptom of the illness that pervades American politics today, whether it is in a state capital or inside the D.C. Beltway. That is why we may never run out of insanity things to talk about in this blog until Americans finally decide that the inmates are running the asylum and that the only way to get rid of them is to term limit them out via the following website or other term limit effort:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com.

Because, just given the above examples of wasteful government spending and bad priorities, how much worse could it get if we started over with new people in office?

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

Wasteful Government Spending Week - National Science Foundation and Farmville Research

Our focus this week has been on what we classify as "random wasteful spending." These instances occur throughout the Federal bureaucracy on a regular basis but usually happen only once on specific initiatives or projects. Examples we have already spoken about include:

• $80 million that was spent to build a consulate building in Afghanistan that was abandoned before it was used since it was indefensible against attacks.
• $300 million that was spent to build two Navy ships that were immediately scrapped before they were ever used.
• $500 million that was spent in a program to train Iraqi police officers, a program that is likely to be shut down within a year of starting and be forever known as a failure.
• $184 million that the TSA spend on airport security screening equipment that will never be used and will continue to cost over $2 million to store.

These programs are different from what we call "systemic wasteful spending." Systemic wasteful spending occurs every day of every year and includes the waste, inefficiencies, and criminal fraud that constant destroy taxpayer wealth in the Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamp, and unemployment insurance programs.

Today's discussion on government waste is sort of a hybrid between these two categories. The National Science Foundation (NSF) wastes millions of dollars every year on idiotic and useless research programs. Thus, this type of government waste is random in that the inane research programs vary year to year but systemic in that the NSF is around every year to approve these inane research programs.

We had previously covered the NSF waste but will review it below as a close to this week's tribute to wasteful government spending (http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2011/06/national-science-foundation-wasting.html). While reading the following NSF disgraces, keep in mind that at the time of our original blog, the NSF had an annual budget of $6.9 billion. However, there was a move afoot last year to more than double that to $14 billion. It makes you wonder how this is possible, given the lackluster historic and current performance of the NSF.

According to an investigation by the Senate last year and it's final report, the NSF has spent taxpayer money on the following programs through the years:

- How to ride a bike.

- When did dogs become man's best friend?

- Are political views genetically determined?

- How to improve the quality of wine.

- Do boys like to play with trucks and girls like to play with dolls?

- How rumors get started.

- Do parents choose trendy baby names?

- When is the best time to buy a ticket to a sporting event?

- How much housework does a husband create for his wife?

- A virtual recreation of the 1964/1965 World's Fair.

- Sponsorship of a YouTube rap video.

- A review of event ticket prices on Stub Hub.

- What motivates people to make political donations.

- How politicians use the Internet.

- The impact of YouTube on the 2008 U.S. elections.

- A study to determine if playing Farmville helps adults develop and maintain relationships.

- A study on why the same college basketball teams seem to dominate March Madness.

- A study on whether or not online dating site users are racist in their dating habits.

In a time of record budget deficits and almost $16 TRILLION in national debt, do we really want to spend our limited taxpayer dollars on these kinds of research projects? In these days of  high gas prices, do we really want to spend our limited taxpayer dollars on Farmville research? In these days of terrorism, do we really want to spend our limited tax payer dollars on anything related to the 1964/1965 World's Fair?

Did neither the NSF Director or any of his 24 member Board know what was going on and what was being funded or did they actually think these were good expenditures? If they did not know what was going on, they should be fired for dereliction of duty. If they did know what was going on relative to these projects, they need to be fired for dereliction of duty and wasting taxpayer money.

But the insanity, incompetence, and waste does not stop with the stupid projects funded above. Misuse of Foundation funds and mismanagement of Foundation operations is also a big waste of taxpayer wealth:


- According to the Senate investigation, the NSF "lacks adequate oversight of its grant funding, which has led to significant mismanagement, fraud, and abuse."

- Internal reports and audits identified various types of mismanagement which resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars being lost to ineffective contracting.

- Rather than being the single government entity responsible for scientific research, the NSF is one of at least 15 Federal departments, 72 Federal agencies, and 12 independent Federal agencies that engage in research and development. These multiple agencies lead to extensive mismanagement, fraud, inefficiencies, and duplication.

- The Senate investigation into these multiple research agencies found there was at least $65 million wasted on low priority projects (see list above), $19 million lost to outright fraud, $1.2 billion wasted because of duplication, and another $1.9 billion wasted because of other forms of mismanagement.

- The Federal Office Of Inspector General (IG) found that the NSF does not have a good process or track record in overseeing how taxpayer money is spent by the grantees receiving it.

- The IG found that many NSF researchers and grantees fail to submit final and annual reports of progress as required, with a 2005 audit calculating that approximately 47% of the 151,000 required project reports were submitted late or never at all.

- Although the NSF has a policy that prevents a researcher getting new NSF funding if the previous project's final report has not been submitted, the audit found that almost 13% of researchers who did not submit a final report did indeed receive new grant money.

- The Inspector General  (IG) concluded that while the NSF has tried to improve its management processes, "the IG believes that grant oversight remains as an ongoing management challenge at NSF." In other words, it still stinks.

- Some NSF employees are spending more time searching the Internet for pornography on the job rather than actually doing their job. One senior NSF employee was found to have spent at least 331 days looking at pornography on his government computer and chatting online with nude or partially clad women.

- These pornography escapades by just this one NSF employee cost the American taxpayer between $13,800 and $58,000.

- In one year, ten NSF employees have had misconduct cases brought against them and seven of the ten were for pornography surfing on the job.

- The administrative misuse at the NSF has become so bad that the NSF Inspector General could not even estimate how much money was lost to these types of behavior.

- Not to be outdone by simple Internet pornography surfing, an NSF employee was fired when he organized a jello wrestling event at the NSF's Antarctic research station. These jello wrestling employees were supposed to be looking after the $451 million annual investment the NSF has in Antarctica.

- A pair of NSF employees who were romantically involved were found to have fraudulently run up $144,152 in expenses as a result of their 47 trips taken together.

- Audits found that millions of dollars were misspent on alcohol and other unauthorized, non-research costs.

- And the most damning opinion of all comes from a well know science policy analyst, Daniel Sarwwitz. He is quoted in the Senate report as saying: "The NSF and other civilian research agencies lack the attributes necessary for success, including a focused mission." Well said.

I do not know from the Senate report if anyone at the NSF was fired for this type of wasteful behavior and spending. However, given the recent firing of GSA employees for wasting $832,000 worth of taxpayer wealth on a Las Vegas party, one would hope that many NSF employees were fired for wasting millions of dollars on pornography, romantic trysts, and alcohol. If they have not been fired, they should have been fired since it appears that NSF personnel wastes far more than $832,000 every year, not just one time.

As we have stressed many times this week, not only should the offending and wasteful Federal employees be fired but the Congressional committee members who oversee the NSF should be removed from their committee posts and replaced with people that will not tolerate spending taxpayer money on Farmville, dating site, World's Fair, and other idiotic projects.

One of two things need to be done relative to this waste:

1) Totally eliminate the NSF, and the other Federal research programs that seem to accomplish very little, and return the wealth to the taxpayers. At $6.9 billion a year, every American household would theoretically receive about $60 every year to do with as the want. If the proposed budget went through and this dysfunctional organizations actually got its budget doubled, that $60 a year would turn into an annual windfall of about $120 for every American household. I am positive this approach would result in more positive good for the entire country and its economy than finding out if when dogs became man's best friend.

2) The second option is actually the adult, mature thing to do but I am not sure it is within the realm of possibility and ability of our political class. This country is facing some real and challenging problems, problems that have been with us for decades but seem beyond the reach, the ability, or the brain power of the political class to solve:

• We have been losing the War On Drugs since the Nixon administration.
• We have been without a national energy plan and strategy since the oil shocks and embargoes of the Nixon and Carter administrations.
• We have had an under performing public education system and related processes since the problem was identified and studied early in the Reagan administration.
• We have had an illegal immigration and leaky borders since at least the middle of the Reagan administration when Congress ordered the Defense Department to seal the border within 45 days (never quite finished that assignment, did we?).C
• We have had the problem of ever escalating health care costs since who knows when, a problem that has and will be exacerbated by Obama Care if it is allowed to continue.
• Our country and its citizens have grown steadily more unhealthy as most Americans continue to eat too much, eat too much of the wrong kind of food, do not exercise enough, smoke too much, and as the Baby Boomers mature into their Golden Years, the propensity and incidence of aging diseases (e.g. dementia, Parkinsons, cancers, etc.) become more and more prevalent.

Thus, this second option would put in place a set of strict rules, criteria, and review processes for all Federal research organizations but certainly the NSF, given its atrocious track record of bad priorities. No Federal research money would ever be granted for an research project unless you could draw a straight line from the potential findings of that research to helping finding solutions to any of the six major issues listed above.

If a proposed research grant in the future was to study how to improve wine, it would not even make it through the first review. Trying to find out how much housework a husband creates for his wife? Do not even bother sending in the grant paperwork since it has no direct connection to the six problems listed above.

Federal research should help citizens overcome the challenges in their lives whether it is with an under performing public education system, the unaffordability of health care insurance, etc. It should not be used to satisfy some private intellectual curiosity of some researcher, a curiosity that will have an extremely minimal impact on American families and businesses.

No more researching Farmville, no more researching World's Fair re-creations, no more researching kids' names. Either focus the attention or return the money to the taxpayers, its the only honorable thing to do. And if the Federal government is going to remain in the research business, find people, both administrators, employees, and Congressional members who will treat it like a well run business and not a cesspool of waste like it is now.



We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, "The United States Of Purple," at:

http://www.unitedstatesofpurple.com/

The United States of Purple is a new grass roots approach to filling the office of President of The United States by focusing on the restoration of freedom in the United States, focusing on problem solving skills and results vs. personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just one United States Of America under the banner of Purple.

The United States Of Purple's website also provides you the formal opportunity to sign a petition to begin the process of implementing a Constitutional amendment to impose fixed term limits on all Federally elected politicians. Only by turning out the existing political class can we have a chance of addressing and finally resolving the major issues of or times.

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.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment/