Political Class Insanity, May, 2012 - Part 1: Obese in Brazil, Biden Goes To Road Island, Regulation Nation, and More

Every month we take time out to review the latest idiocy and insanity that our politicians have wrought on America and its citizens. This insanity can range from wasteful spending, to bad priorities, to outrageously idiotic quotes, and to outright stupidity in political actions and laws.

Unfortunately, the rate of the idiocy and insanity has been accelerating over the past several months. I do not know if that is because it is an election year or the quality of our political class continues to deteriorate. Regardless of the cause, it will again take us two posts in this blog, today and tomorrow, to cover all of the latest insanity.

As you read through the latest insanity, take a moment to realize what our current political processes and current politicians have done to this country. We are on the edge of national bankruptcy. Our politicians spend time, money, and resources on very bad priorities. The major issues of our times, failing public schools, a lost war on drugs, leaky borders, escalating health care costs, etc., never get resolved and continue to fester and worsen. The political discourse is venomous, divisive, and mean spirited, encouraged by incumbent politicians in order to "energize their base" to protect their incumbencies.

Keep all of these things in mind as you read the following and ask yourself: are we really going in a positive direction as a country as determined by our current politicians? I think you will agree that this is a false statement. 

Let's start with latest insanity as documented in the latest editions of Reason magazine:

- In New York City, Marilyn Louie had successfully operated her newsstand in the same Chinatown location for the past 35 years. Being business for 35 years would indicate that she ran a successful business that served a consumer need in the marketplace. However, city officials, the field force of the political class, determined that the newsstand is THREE INCHES too close to the building it has faced for 35 years and as a result, has to be torn down.

How insane is this? For 35 years the three inch violation obviously had no detrimental effects on any other business of customer. Ms. Louie was a successful businesswoman and a net positive contributor to society. But for three inches, the work of a lifetime is destroyed by the government for no reason. One would have hoped that the city's officials would worry about the many other problems in a city as large as NYC rather than hassle a citizen for no reason. But hope is very often too much to expect from our political class. 

- Staying in New York City, the second example of insanity makes you start wondering if the city has too many employees on its payroll with too little to do. NYC resident Raymond Johnson was given a $100 citation from a city worker because, gasp, Mr. Johnson had put out his garbage 33 minutes before the 4:00 pm time he was supposed to.

According to the article, Mr. Johnson was not the only local resident in Queens to be so cited. Apparently, NYC's Sanitation Department has a full time person/people who make sure that this egregious act of garbage putting out is not abused. Maybe a better solution is to go a little lighter on the time frame and get rid of the expense of the enforcement personnel of what is an arbitrary rule.

- Readers of this blog know that we consider President Obama's $830 billion economic stimulus program to have been a disastrous waste of money. It was spent on foolish projects and programs that benefited only incumbent politicians, it was spent to repair infrastructure of which only half of the repairs were needed according to following analyses by independent sources, and was allocated to a slew of domestic alternative energy companies that have either gone bankrupt or are still not viable businesses.

Even the administration indirectly admitted the stimulus program did not work. The President declared that if his stimulus program was not passed, unemployment could go as high as 8%. The stimulus was passed and implemented and unemployment went significantly higher than 8% and has not yet returned to 8%.

Now, according to Reason magazine, professor and economist Valerie Ramery has conclusive and comprehensive proof that the program was a waste of $830 billion, or the equivalent of about $7,200 for every U.S. household. Ms. Ramery did an extensive review of everyone else's analyses of the stimulus and analyzed Federal government spending patterns since World War II.

Her conclusion? "An increase in government spending never leads to a significant rise in private spending. In fact, in most cases, it leads to a significant fall [in private spending]." She concluded, based on her work, that the so-called multiplier effect, how much each dollar of government spending results in additional economic activity, was in all likelihood less than 1 for Obama's stimulus.

In other words, for every $1 the Federal government spent, less than $1 in economic activity was created, resulted in a contraction in the economy and an expansion in government debt. Great strategy, spend more for less economic growth while increasing our now $15 TRILLION debt without much affecting the unemployment rate. How much more insane and idiotic can you get?

- Seems like even those that work within the Jabba the Hutt-like Federal government, overweight, parasitic, and ineffective, have problems with the disaster our political landscape has become. U.S. Senator Tom Colburn, speaking to reporters about not voting on a payroll tax cut unless its fully paid for: "I can show you $350 billion worth of waste or fraud in our present Federal government, and we don't have the gonads to stand up and find some of that to pay for this."

That was one of the more colorful descriptions of how much money our Federal government and politicians waste every year, Mr. Senator! The insanity is why don't the five hundred of so people in Congress grow a set and actually do their job to go after the $350 billion lost to waste and criminal fraud every year?

- If you like the Senator's colorful description of ineptness in Washington, you will love some recent words from Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense: "I've been in [Congressional] hearings for the last three days. S***, I think I should get some kind of award going through that c***, I need a new combat badge going to Capitol Hill."

Mr. Panetta used the full words that I have "*"ed out above. We would agree with him, a lot of s*** and c*** goes on in Washington, some of it to the tune of wasting $350 billion a year, according to Senator Coburn, but nothing ever gets done to take out the s*** and c*** from the process.

- At a time when we should be making it as simple as possible for businesses to grow, be profitable, and hire more workers, given our high unemployment rate, the Federal government has taken just the opposite approach, generating many more regulations, all of which make it tougher to operate a business in this country.

According to an article in the Reason magazine from, April, 2012, new Federal regulations have added  almost $40 billion to the cost of the economy since Obama became President. This is equivalent to almost $400 for every American family. The White House Office Of Information and Regulatory Affairs reports that 2010 alone broke records with $26.5 billion in new costs.

And it is likely to get worse since there are 144 major new regulations already in the pipeline that have not yet hit, according to Federal regulators. The average annual number of new regulations from 2001 through 2006 was 70 regulations a year, less than half of what the Obama administration is turning out. Rather make it easy for businesses to do business, this administration wants to make it harder. No wonder our unemployment rate stays at insanely high levels.

But Reason magazine is not the only source of political class insanity. Consider some recent instances of insanity from The Week magazine:

- Last month Vice President Joe Biden's office released a schedule of the VP's appearances, showing him visiting Providence, Road Island. Is this another indictment of our failing public education system when the Vice President's office does not know how to spell a state's name or an indictment of the incompetence in Washington that they allow the press release to go out without proofreading it first? Can you imagine the uproar from the Left if Bush or Cheney's office had done the same thing?

- The Week reported in its April 20, 2012 issue that the Brazilian government is worried about the growing obesity problem in that country since nearly half of all Brazilians are now overweight or obese. In just the past five years the rate of being overweight and obesity has grown from 43% to 49%.

The government is increasing its efforts to encourage people to eat healthier and exercise more, the public health strategies this country should be undertaking to decrease our high health costs rather than rolling out a doomed Obama Care program. Why is the Brazilian government undertaking these public health initiatives? According to a spokesperson for the Health Ministry: "Now is the time to act [on obesity] to ensure we don't reach the levels of countries like the United States."

Guess that makes it official. We are now the world's poster child for obesity and our political class would rather address the problem with a new, costly, and likely failure of a bureaucracy called Obama Care rather than take the simpler, saner route of identifying and addressing the public health root causes of our high health care problems.

- In the past ten years, there have been 4,428 changes to the Federal tax code, This comes out to more than one change per day over a ten year period. As a result of the tax code's insanity and complexity, Americans now spend a total of 7.64 billion hours a year working on tax-related issues and paperwork.

To put this number in perspective, 7.64 billion hours is more than twice the number of hours spent every year by elementary school teachers in every school in the country. Imagine how much smarter and better our kids' education would be if we could divert billions of hours away from filling out tax forms and put it towards educating our kids?

What type of insanity makes us spend twice as much time and resources complying with the incredibly complex, cumbersome, confusing, and ineffective  tax code the political class has bestowed on us than teaching elementary school kids? One way to eliminate this idiocy was laid out in the following post:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/02/united-states-of-purple-fixing-our.html

It is not hard to do if you have some politicians with some common sense and a little courage, as the above link points out. 7.64 billion hours is the epitome of insanity.

- One last piece of political class insanity today that comes from a Business Week article in the April 9, 2012 issue and is related to this issue of tax code insanity. Joel Stein, the writer of the article, "Taxation With Lots of Representation," took all of his tax information and had his incomes tax return competed by four different sources:

1. Tax Slayer - a computer based tax return software program which cost Stein $30.
2. H&R Block which charged him $400 to complete his tax returns.
3. Halbreich Accounting and Tax Services in Staten Island which charged him $400 to complete his returns.
4. RBZ in Los Angeles which charged him $1,200 to complete his tax returns.

What were the end results? Taxslayer calculated that Stein would get a refund of $119,554 form the Feds and the state of California, H&R Block calculated that he would OWE a total of $2,387 to the Feds and the state, Halbreich estimated he would get total refund of $479, and RBZ estimated he would owe a total of $4,544 to the Feds and California. Four different approaches, all using the exact same information, four radically different answers.

You know the tax code is insanely complex and ridiculously confusing when the potential "correct" tax return calculations range from a refund to $119,554 to owing $4,544. In other words, depending on which tax calculation you use, you are either going to owe some money or go to jail for gross misfiling of your tax return.

This is the world we live in today, thanks to our political class. Unduly confusing, complex, inefficient, ineffective, and just plain stupid. And guess what? We are only half way through the idiocy that rains down us on every day from Washington and state capitals around the country. The second half of this month's political class insanity will be coming your way tomorrow.



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/

Homeland Security - Government Out Of Control

Just when you think that you have seen it all from a government waste and inefficiency perspective, you get blown away by more waste and more inefficiency. Today's blog is based on a recent Washington Post investigation by Dana Priest and William Arkin entitled "Top Secret America - A Hidden World Growing Beyond Control." They took a long, hard look at the homeland security, counter terrorism, and intelligence gathering function of the U.S. government. What they found is quite startling:

• 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on the nation's safety.
• About 854,000 people work on the the safety of America, 50% more than the population of Washington D.C.
• 33 building complexes (not buildings, complexes) have been built or will have been built since September, 2001 just in the Washington D.C. metro area.
• Redundancy is rampant with the article giving the example of 51 Federal organizations and military commands, across 15 U.S. cities, just trying to track the flow of money among terror networks. Unknown is whether these 51 entities do anything about the flow, or they just track it as stated in the Post article.
• The public budget part of all this effort is estimated at about $75 billion a year, two and half times what it was prior to the 9-11 attacks. The total budget is probably more but classified.
• Soon after the 9-11 attacks, the Defense Intelligence Agency's staff rose from about 7,500 employees to 16,500 people today, the National Security Agency budget doubled, and 35 FBI Joint Terrorism Task forces became 106.
• Over two hundred new Federal agencies, all somehow related to counter terrorism, intelligence, or homeland security were created since the attacks on 9-11.
• Every day the National Security Agency intercepts and stores 1.7 BILLION emails, phone calls, and other types of communications, most of which are never viewed much less analyzed.
• Intelligence analysts publish over 50,000 intelligence reports a year, a volume so large that many are just ignored.
• While Congress created the Office Of The Director Of National Intelligence (ODNI) to bring the whole intelligence effort together after 9-11, it did not give the office any legal or budgetary power which meant that all of the independent intelligence agencies more or less continued to do their own thing and to defend their turf (e.g., the Defense department moved budget around to get it out of the reach of ODNI, the CIA reclassified some of its information to keep the information away from ODNI, etc.)

You get the idea, immediately after 9-11, with Congress randomly throwing over a $100 billion at the problem in a very short time frame, things got out of control very fast since 1) there does not seem to have been any overall plan and 2) there was enough money to go around to do anything you wanted in the absence of an overall plan. Where did this chaotic political class and government approach get for us? Consider some direct quotes from the article:

• "I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility, or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities."
• "It's impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and these activities. It lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness, and waste.
• "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."
• "CIA Director Leon Panetta said he's begun mapping out a five year plan for his agency (CIA) because the spending levels are not sustainable."
• "The ODNI doesn't know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of tyring to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified analytic Web sites still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down because of lack of usefulness."
• "Who has the mission of reducing redundancy and ensuring everybody doesn't gravitate to the lowest hanging fruit? Who orchestrates what is produced so that everybody doesn't produce the same thing?"
• "The data flow is enormous, with dozens of databases feeding separate computer networks that cannot interact with on another."
• "The problem with many intelligence reports, say officers who read them, is that they simply re-slice the same facts already in circulation."

You get the idea. Mountains of data (one person interviewed for the article said God is the only one who knows everything about our intelligence apparatus) and very little actionable information. Data systems that do not talk to each other. Redundancy everywhere. Turf battles around every corner. Years to just fix one agency (CIA), assuming everything goes right. Totally unknown which parts of the whole security apparatus is effective and which parts are just wasting taxpayer money or actually gumming up the flow of information. In other words, another grandiose political class effort that started off with high hopes and very quickly sank into the abyss of failure and waste.

Speaking of failure, what do we get for all of this money? Last fall, a U.S. Army major went off at Fort Hood, indiscriminately opening fire and killed 13 people while wounding 30. The sad part of this tradegy, according to the article, was that an agency within our security apparatus was supposed to be looking at terrorism threats within the ranks of the armed forces. Data actually existed on this major, indicating that he might be a threat. However, this agency decided to do something else outside of its charter, even though other parts of the security network were already doing this outside work. As a result, the data on the major was never turned into information and 13 people are dead as a result.

Last Christmas, the so-called underwear bomber almost blew up an airliner over Detroit and failed only because of a faulty bomb and the quick actions of another passenger. The $75 billion security apparatus did not stop the bombing. However, the $75 billion security apparatus in this country actually had all of the facts/data about the bombing scheme at its disposal but again, never turned it into actionable information. But, according to the article, "nobody put them (the data points) together because, as officials would testify later, the system had gotten so big that the lines of responsibility had become hopelessly blurred."

There really are a number issues at work here.

1. First, much like the rest of what the political class touches, nothing works in this country and it does not work at great expense.
2. Second, we have no way of knowing how effective each dollar spent is in order to start making our dollars work harder in order to stop allowing shootings at Army bases, underwear bombers, etc.
3. Third, it appears we have been just plain lucky so far. The underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber failed because of their incompetence, not because of our intelligence efforts and counter terrorism effort.
4. Fourth, with our wide open borders, would not some of those 845,000 people be better used to control the flow of potential terrorists into our country rather than having them rework the same facts over and over in their offices in D.C.? Just as a fantasy, assume that you could do the whole U.S. security process with half of the people we currently use. You could then take the other 427,000 people, divide them into three eight hour shifts and would be able to place one person every 70 feet along the U.S./Mexican border 24 hours a day. I would wager that this deployment would have more anti-terrorism value than what these 427,000 people are doing today in their cubicles.
5. Finally, there is a truly George Orwell/"1984" type danger lurking below the surface. With 854,000 people looking outward for terrorists, how long will it be before some unscrupulous politicians decide to use this security apparatus to start looking inward at American citizens? If what the article claims is true, that this is a process that is too big, too cumbersome, too inefficient to be tracked today, who is to say that some George Orwell shenanigans are not already going on, infringing on the rights of innocent Americans? The potential loss of freedom and privacy with such a bad operation is very high indeed.

This is why several steps from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" need to be implemented as soon as possible. Step 1 would start reducing the Federal budget 10% every year for five years, including the intelligence budget. This is the only way to drive out redundancy and useless work, via the budgeting process. The trick is to make sure that the budgets dried up result in leaner and better remaining functions. Second, Step 34 would remove all members of any Congressional committee responsible for our intelligence community for having allowed this travesty of waste to take root and grow out of control. Steps 20 - 22 would relook at the Patriot Act and its related tentacles and hopefully, put in place the right safeguards and criminal penalties so that turning this massive security apparatus onto an innocent American citizen would likely not happen. Remember, out of control government is never a good thing for freedom and liberty.

Our new 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.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:

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