May, 2016, Bonus Post, Political Class Insanity: Obama The War President, Apple Invests in China, and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc. In fact, last month we set a record, needing ten full posts to cover it all.

To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity posts we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history.

This is our 12th post this month on America’s political class insanity. It sets a record for this blog on covering such disgusting behavior from our nation’s politicians. It is a sad commentary on the state of the country and those that are supposed to be leaders. 

I thought we were done with this month's insanity yesterday but as quickly as we review and discuss their insanity and idiocy, more insanity comes raining down on us. Thus, today's insnaity bonus post which is definitely our final look at this month’s insanity:

1) We have often reported on how poorly the Obama Presidency has handled economic strategy and the dismal results it has produced. Tens of millions of Americans needing Federal food assistance every month, millions of people who cannot find a full time job, settling for no job or only a part time job, the labor participation rate at 45 year old lows, etc. And as bad as the total, national results are, segments of the population are seeing far worse results, Minority unemployment and youth unemployment are much higher than the dismal national results we just reviewed.

Thus, one would think and hope that if the Federal government had some job creation money set aside they would use it for these sub-segments of the population, especially kids, to try and help them get at least summer jobs. Well, the good news is that the Feds do have a pot of money for such an effort. The bad news, is the Obama administration has set aside $2 million of it to help refugee kids, 400 hundred of them, get a summer job in Utica, New York under the so-called Summer Opportunity Project. Not American citizens' kids getting job help, not American kids stuck in American ghettos in cities like Chicago and Detroit getting job help. No, refugee kids in a single upstate New York city. 

In addition to getting summer jobs, these refugee kids will also get tutoring in math and English while, again, disadvantaged American citizens' kids will get nothing. Am I the only one who sees the insanity of using taxpayer dollars for programs like this, while ignoring our own kids, or am I a racist?

2) Apple recently announced that it was investing $1 billion in a Chinese car service that will compete directly with Uber in China. I have no problem with this, it is Apple's money, they are certainly free to invest it anywhere where it will maximize shareholder and company value the most. I do lament the fact that they found a better opportunity to invest $1 billion in China vs. the United States though, all because of the very, very high tax rates that the Federal government has in place for businesses.

Wouldn't it have been so much better for Americans if Apple found it easier and cheaper to invest $1 billion in America rather than China? How many jobs could a $1 billion investment create in this country? How much more in tax revenue would the Federal government have received if those jobs, that would be created by the $1 billion invested here, tax revenue that would recur year after year? Instead, Washington continues to not address a broken tax system and insanely high set of tax rates that forces companies to invest billions and billions of dollars in other countries. 

As a result, the Federal government gets no revenue from billions and billions of dollars kept and stranded overseas, American workers lose out on job opportunities that those stranded dollars could afford them, and the Federal government never sees the recurring revenue from jobs created domestically if those stranded dollars were spent here rather than in places like China.

But this $1 billion China investment is really small fish relative to the bigger picture. According to a recent article on the Personal Liberty website, if Apple brought back all of the money it has stranded over sees, it would pay a whopping $50 billion in taxes on it. Instead of cutting Apple a break and getting a smaller piece of this stranded money, but billions and billions of dollars invested in our economy, the political class refuses to reform our tax code and ends up getting $0 from that $50 billion. Imagine the economic boost our economy would get if Apple was allowed to bring tens of billions of dollars back home and invest it here and not get whacked with a $50 billion tax bill?

And Apple is just one of many large companies that could bring back tens or hundreds of billions of dollars back into this country for investment if we had a tax code that incentivized investment and economic growth rather than taxation. Tax code insanity, economic idiocy.

3) Remember how earlier in this month's political class insanity we pointed out that the Washington political class, Congress and Obama were working on legislation that would make the American bison the country's official mammal? At that time we pointed out how petty and stupid their priorities were, worrying about what should be the country's official mammal when tens of millions of Americans were either hungry, homeless, unemployed, under employed, dying from drug addiction or having their kids get under educated from failing schools. 

According to a recent Associated Press report, their priorities are still petty and stupid. The House of Representatives recently spent legislative time to ban the display of Confederate flags on flagpoles at Veterans Administration cemeteries. The legislation would ban descendants, family members, and others seeking to commemorate veterans of the Confederate States of America from flying the Confederate Battle Flag over mass graves, even on days that flag displays are permitted. 

Not surprising, a Congressman from the land of fruits and nuts, California, sponsored the legislation. I am assuming that there are no hungry, homeless, unemployed or drug addicts in his state, otherwise her would not have proposed such useless legislation that will impact virtually no one in the whole country. Insanely bad priorities.

4) Remember back or a year or so ago on how everyone was worried that the so-called PIGS of Europe, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, were going to go bankrupt because their central government debt burden had gotten so out of control? European politicians were falling all over themselves to try and come up with debt relief and debt solutions before the debt crushed their economies and their nations. 

According to CNBC, Spain has not improved their debt solution much since, as of a week or so ago, the central government of Spain had a national debt burden of $1.23 TRILLION at the end of the first quarter. This enormous debt burden represents 101% of the country's GDP in 2015. In other words, the debt burden is so high that it represents over 100% of all the goods and services produced by every Spanish citizen last year. 

Oh, by the way, the U.S. national debt level is higher than Spain's 101%, putting the U.S. Federal government financials on a par, or worse, than the PIGS of Europe. All thanks to an Obama administration that doubled the debt load in eight short years, incurring more debt than EVERY Presidential administration before him.

5) Although Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, the New York Times recently ran an article proving Obama will go down in history as the only two term President that was actively involved in war and military activities the ENTIRE length of his Presidency. From prematurely withdrawing U.S. troops in Iraq in order to win a second term only to reinsert troops later to a failed military effort in Afghanistan over the past eight years to drone attacks that have killed hundreds of innocent civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to an illegal and un-Constitutional entry into the Libyan civil war to the illegal meddling in Syria which led to the the deaths, wounding, and homelessness of millions of Syrians, to putting "boots on the ground" in Syria after saying numerous times he would never to such a thing to bombings in Yemen, he will go down in history as the longest war President ever.

And to this infamous record, we add the latest bit of military forays from a CNN report. CNN reported that Obama has, probably illegally, inserted U.S. Special Forces troops into the country of Libya in an effort to contain the influence of ISIS, the worst terrorist group to ever exist that arose out of the Obama administration's meddling in Syria. The Special Forces are operating out of a base in Misrata, Libya. The Pentagon has acknowledged the new presence of our military presence in that country.

As usual with most of Obama's unilateral actions, Congress and the American people have had no input to his wild and often reckless military misadventures and the strategy behind them. And that assumes there is a military and political strategy to Obama using military forces and might in at least six countries. Our military actions have killed and wounded thousands of civilians, hundreds of our own troops, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, with no measurable or apparent return benefit. That is certainly insanity of the nth degree.

That will do it for this month's record breaking review of political class insanity. Unfortunately, this might be a short term record, given the accelerating rate of political class insanity.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

January, 2015, Part 7, Political Class Insanity: Ripping Off The Defense Department, Presidential Profanity, and Debt Through The Roof

jan2015insanity7.txt

Open with

It is the beginning of both another year and another month which means it is time to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. For regular readers of this blog, you know that as 2014 progressed, the insanity, stupid quotes, ineffective governing and legislating, and general incompetence of our politicians seemed to accelerate as the year grinded on. No major issues got addressed, never mind resolved. Obama Care’s implications across the entire country and entire economy continued to unfold in disaster after disaster. Our foreign policy, or what was passed off as a foreign policy, was in tatters. Terrorism was on the march across the world. Veterans were dying because the Federal government could not fulfill the medical and health care promises those brave veterans were promised. The national debt hit a mind boggling $18 TRILLION. 

And our President continued to play golf and go on political campaign swings like no other President ever did. Congress narrowly missed becoming the least productive Congress of all time. Billions were spent and wasted on the November elections to elect people that did not deserve the time of day never mind billions of dollars. Racial division spread across the country, a division that was fomented and spread by those in office with something to gain. 

And guess what? Over the past week or so, we have seen nothing has changed except the calendar. The political class is still out of control, the government entities that they rule over are bloated and ineffective, and the quality of life and freedom in this country continues to deteriorate. 

Today will be the last post in this series of political class insanity so enjoy one last day of the many ways that the political class wastes your tax dollars, screws up our freedoms and liberties, and generally messes up everything it touches. 

1) Of all the Federal government entities, the Department of Defense is probably the most pathetic when it comes to financial and accounting integrity. We once reported that their accounting processes are so screwed up that even highly trained auditors gave up trying to figure out where they spend their out of control budget dollars. 

Yahoo Finance on December 9, 2014 uploaded an Associated Press article about some food service companies that had formally admitted to cheating the U.S. military out of millions of dollars via their Afghanistan food contracts. Even worse than the scamming of taxpayer wealth, the two guilty companies were not even American companies that our government had contracted out the food service operations to. Supreme Group B.V. is a privately held Dutch corporation, and its subsidiaries, Supreme Foodservice GmbH and Supreme Foodservice FZE are based in Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates, respectively. 

The companies agreed to pay back $288 million in fines and restitution, plus $101 million to resolve a whistleblower suit: "Supreme Group accepts full responsibility for, and deeply regrets our actions that led to this situation," Emma Sharma, a Supreme Group attorney and ethics officer, said in a statement on the company's website. 

The scam involved the companies fraudulently inflating the price of fresh fruits and vegetables, bottled water and other products as part of its contract with the Defense Department. The government was overcharged by $48 million between 2005 and 2009. 

At least these bad guys got caught and are paying the price for criminal activity. Makes you wonder how many hundreds of other contractors for the clueless defense Department accountants are getting away with similar schemes. 

2) One saying that has me get through life goes as follows: people curse and swear because at the time they are cursing they are not intelligent enough or creative enough not to curse.” Everybody gets frustrated in life and everyone has probably cursed or swore in their own way at a life obstacle. 

But according to the above saying, that reflects at least a temporary brain freeze of lack of intelligence or creativity. When a President does that in public then I get really worried because that to me indicates a leader who is out of control, lacking intelligence and creativity at that point in time. 

And apparently the current residence of the White House fits that leadership shortfall description. According to long time Washington journalist Ann Compton, Obama is not below swearing up a storm and directing that wrath at journalists who are trying to do their job. 

Former ABC News White House correspondent Ann Compton told C-SPAN she saw President Barack Obama get so angry twice when he purposely went off the record to curse at the White House press corps. She Compton told C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb in an interview that one time his tirade was "profanity-laced, where he thought the press was making too much of scandals that he didn’t think were scandals." 

In the other case or Presidential profanity, Obama took the Washington press corp. to task for not understanding the limits that he has with foreign policy "and the way he’s dealing with the Middle East and Iraq and Afghanistan." 

Very childlike, very immature. Not cool having a President who loses control, his intelligence, and creativity because a professional journalist says bad things about him. Compton, in fact, showed more maturity with her response to the profanity laced tirades: "When policy decisions and Presidents are inaccessible and don’t take questions from the press on a regular basis, I think they reap what they sow." 

To see her C=SPAN interview and comments go to:

http://www.newsmax.com/US/Ann-Compton-Obama-media/2014/12/08/id/611806/?ns_mail_uid=32283367&ns_mail_job=1598664_12092014&s=al&dkt_nbr=uxtc9qfh 

3) We have often made the case that this country is headed to a national debt disaster as the Washington political class continues to spend money that it does not have. Recently, Washington pushed the national debt level to over 418 TRILLION. This comes out to a household debt burden of about $156,000 for every household in the country. 

And while every previous Presidency has contributed to this overbearing debt burden, it is the Obama administration that has taken bad debt management to new lows. Consider the following U.S. Bureau of Public Debt graph which shows national debt as a percentage of the nation’s GDP. This is a good way to get a feel whether or not the country can pay that debt as both the economy and the debt level grows (double click on the graph for a bigger view): 

As you can see, through both the Clinton and Bush administrations, the Debt to GDP ratio was quite constant at around 60%. However, once Obama took office and the Democrats still had control of Congress in 2009, our debt situation went desperately wrong. Our Debt to GDP ratio has skyrocketed up to over 100%, a lofty position that puts us into the area where Spain and Greece got into so much financial trouble. 

No one in Washington seems to care or have the will or intelligence to address this issue. At some point, though, the debt bomb that the Washington political class has inflated, especially during the Obama Presidency, is going to explode into an economic crash, the likes of which we may have never seen before. And that would truly be insanity. 

Okay, I know I promised today would be the last post on this month’s political class insanity but I failed, we will need tomorrow to wrap up the craziness and incompetence that is the American political class.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

The Corurption and Hunger Games Mentality of the Political Class, Part 2: First Class Travel For Second Class Politicians

This is our second in a series this month that examines the many examples and various forms of corruption and Hunger Games mentality that infect the political class in Washington. Yesterday, we examined the corruption of the constantly moving of Obama Care dates and deadlines and how that corrupted one of the definitions Webster puts forth on corruption: Corruption: d : a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct. Given the many, many unilateral and un-Constitutional changes Obama has made to the health care legislation, it is certainly not pure, correct, or in its original form, making his actions a form of corruption.

For reference today and in the forthcoming corruption posts, we will review political corruption along the following lines of the corruption definition from Webster:

a : impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle : depravity 

b : decay, decomposition 

c: inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means (as bribery) 

d : a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct 

Today we will focus on the world wide travels of the First family and other Washington politicians in the context of impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle, depravity. 

Before we get into the details of the political depravity and abuse of tax payer wealth, how the Washington elite treat themselves like royalty while the rest of the country suffers, similar to the “Hunger Games” mentality, consider the state of the country and what it means to regular, non-Washington Americans:

• Over twenty million Americans are unemployed or under employed.
• The number of long term unemployed Americans sets a new record every month for its high levels for consecutive months at such a high level.
• About fifty million Americans receive food assistance every month from the Federal government.
• Over three hundred thousand new Americans apply for unemployment benefits every month.
• Rather than treat and help drug addicts, we lock them up for possessing minimal amounts of drugs and self abuse of drugs.
• Many of our largest cities are havens for homeless Americans.
• The Washington political class recently reduced the pension benefits of our brave servicemen and women as a budget cutting scheme.
• Our national debt has soared well past $17 TRILLION, burdening current and future American generations with a very heavy debt burden to carry.

In light of these burdens that regular Americans face everyday, consider some of the acts of impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle and depravity that Obama, Biden, and other Washington politicians treat themselves to despite the eight existing American maladies listed above [Note: the first five bullet points below come courtesy of a recent Independent Journal Review analysis]:

• With 31 international trips for a total of 119 days abroad, President Obama has now traveled more than any other President before him.
• Air Force One Costs over $228,000 per hour to fly.
• The President often travels with a 900-person, 45-car, 2 Air-Force Ones, 3-cargo plane entourage.
• The 13-hour visit in South Africa for Mandela’s funeral cost an estimated $11 million (including 127 hotel rooms and not including the flight costs).
• Annual costs for supporting the White House expenses exceed $1.4 billion.
• To give an example of how out of control this spending has been within the Obama Presidency, travel expenses for the royal family of Great Britain was less than $9 million in 2012 and the cost to maintain them annually is about $55 million. Plus, the properties owned by the royals generate more than $200 million in rent, so when you include that revenue stream, England actually makes money on the expenses of the British royal family, something America does not enjoy from the Obama royal family.
• The First Lady’s current “non-political” trip to China, a trip where she took her daughters and her mother along on taxpayer expense, likely also costs millions of dollars, a lot of which is caused by her stay at the Westin hotel in Beijing, a hotel suite that is costing the American taxpayer $8,400 per night. 
• In a bit of irony, Vice President Joe Biden, a person who was actually elected by the American people, who actually has a real government job, and possibly actually works at that job, (compared to Michelle Obama who was not elected to any office, does not have a government job, and does not work at a government job), was not allowed to stay at this same hotel when he was in Beijing because… wait for it… it was deemed too expensive.
• Since President Obama has become President, the First Family has taken vacations to Hawaii every holiday season for at least several weeks, has vacationed in Ireland, has vacationed in Kenya, and in many expensive places within in the United States.
• In addition, the First Lady has taken vacations to at least Spain, Mexico, and Aspen, Colorado without the President. 
• In the first three months of 2014, the First Lady has been on vacation for parts of EVERY month of 2014 including Hawaii, Aspen, and now China, on taxpayer expense.
• The President has flown off to Florida and California in the past two months for golf vacations, on taxpayer expense.
• Last year, the Vice President’s trip to Europe for only two days cost the American taxpayer over $1 million just in hotel rooms.

You get the idea, while America suffers, the political royalty in Washington party on and vacation on in the most extravagant and frequent ways possible, illustrated the impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle : depravity definition of corruption.

The China trip by Michelle Obama is particularly galling in its corruption. It is no doubt a personal vacation since:

• She took her kids and mother along.
• She is not allowing any press coverage of her trip despite it being paid for by the American taxpayer.
• The only photo that has been made public is her and her kids at the Great Wall of China, certainly a vacation and tourist spot.
• Doing a few short presentations about kids’ health does not justify the millions of dollars being wasted and burned through on this trip, that is purely a bad charade at importance.

If Obama and the rest of the Washington political class were leaders and truly non-corrupt, if they truly had empathy and compassion for the rest of America, they would not be wasting money like this. The Obamas and a record high number of Congressional members are millionaires, they should be making the sacrifices that lead the country, not sopping up every last taxpayer dollar they can justify spending for their own benefit, enrichment, and comfort.

It is not just the Obamas that have this corruption affliction. Consider the highlights of a recent news reports which talk about a Congressman who does not have the corruption affliction and who wants to rid others in Washington of the affliction. Congressman Paul A. Gosar is trying to prohibit Members of Congress from flying first class using taxpayer funds. 

Specifically, the Congressman has submitted a proposal to the Committee on Appropriations for specific language to be included in the Fiscal Year 2015 Legislative Branch Appropriations Act that would prohibit this practice, forcing every member of Congress to pay for first class treatment if they want it, relieving the citizens from doing so. 

The proposal reads as follows:

Members of Congress are servants of the people and should not be considered a privileged class. Luxury airfare accommodations utilizing taxpayer monies would seem inappropriate in any fiscal climate but at a time of soaring deficits and with a federal debt in excess of $17 trillion such expenditures are especially wasteful. If federal restrictions prohibit members of our military from traveling first-class, this same standard should also apply to Members of Congress.

Kudos to this Congressman who gets it, who recognizes the Hunger Games mentality of Washington and is trying to do something about it, unlike the Obama family and the other 500 or so members of Congress. This is how you get the $17 TRILLION national debt under control: one first class flight at a time (along with hundreds of thousands of other wasteful government spending items).

Ask yourself these questions:

1. How many more unemployed Americans could undergo job training if Washington did not waste so much money on themselves and their vacation travels?
2. how many homeless could be sheltered if Washington did not waste so much money on themselves and their vacation travels?
3. How many hungry could be fed if Washington did not waste so much money on themselves and their vacation travels?
4. How many drug addicts could be helped if Washington did not waste so much money on themselves ands their vacations travels?

Webster must have had the current political class in mind when he put forth his first definition of corruption: a : impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle : depravity. More and varied corruption tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

January, 2014 Poltiical Class Insanity, Part 2: A Do Nothing Washington, Pardoning Turkeys But Not People, Economic Pessimism, and More

This is the second in this month’s political class insanity series where we go through the insanity, stupidity, wasteful spending, and general idiocy of the political class. This is the same political class that has brought us over 20 million Americans being unemployed or under employed, a $17 TRILLION national debt burden, an ineffective foreign policy, wasteful spending on absolutely insane programs and projects, the destruction of First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights, and a slew of other insults and failures.

Over the past week of so we have been reviewing the wasteful spending of the political class and every month for the past five months we have set done a monthly series of posts of the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. Thus, the current political class insanity reviews will focus on just general and varied types of political class insanity with minimal reference to wasteful pending and Obama Care, two topics that deserved the infamy of being singled out in dedicated posts.

1) A Politico article that was reviewed in the December 6, 2013 issue of The Week magazine pointed out that the past Congress, the 113th, was on course to pass less legislation than any U.S. Congress in history. The expected output from this Congress is about 49 laws. The article pointed out that the so-called “Do Nothing’ Congress denounced by Harry Truman in 1947 passed 906 pieces of legislation.

Now, I would never want this political class to pass laws for the sake of passing laws. If the 49 laws they do pass actually resolved 49 major issues facing Americans, I could not be happier. However, the vast majority of these laws were probably either renewals of existing laws or approval of new Post Office location names, actions that do nothing to fix the economy, the environment, foreign policy, public schools, etc. 

For this type of minimal output, these people are paid over $170,000 a year, get great benefits, probably work less than 150 days a year, and are accountable to no one.

2) A more detailed view of their incompetence followed a few weeks later in an issue of Business Week. The final tally apparently was not 49 pieces of passed legislation, members of this Congress actually passed 50 pieces of legislation. Still pathetic.

The article provided a pictorial view of their incompetence:

• 5,660 bills were introduced but only 50 passed, a success rate of less than a paltry 1%. Maybe in the future they should spend a little more time developing fewer proposed pieces of legislation and focus on passing more beneficial pieces of legislation.
• 550 armed forces and national security bills were proposed but only seven were passed, a rousing success rate of 1.3%. 
• Only one of ninety proposed bills related to housing and community development were passed.
• A whopping 684 bills related to health care were introduced but only six were passed into law, a success rate of less than 1%. 
• Many major categories of life had dozens and dozens of related bills proposed but NONE were enacted including the categories of environmental protection, commerce, and foreign trade.

Again, just a pathetic performance all around. With so many bills proposed and so many not enacted, it is obvious that this is a dysfunctional set of people operating in a dysfunctional environment where there is no overarching strategy, no cooperation, not strategic plan. Just 535 individuals going in their own direction, getting nothing done of any value. 

If you do the math, divide the 5,660 bills by the 535 members of Congress, you end up with every member of Congress, on average, proposing between ten and eleven bills each, the vast majority of which never see the light of day. Unbelievably poor performance.

3) While some in the Obama administration and their wing of the main stream media may be applauding what they think are good economic times and the fine job the Obama administration did in handling the economy, that optimism does not resonate down to the typical American. According to a recent poll discussed by the Washington Post, a record high 62% of Americans are worried about losing their jobs.

This is the highest it has ever been, going all the way back to the survey’s early results in the 1970s. Americans in households earning less than $35,000 are even more pessimistic with 75% worried about losing their jobs. 54% have already had their work or salaries cut.

This is not surprising since we know that well over 20 million Americans are under employed or unemployed and that hundreds of companies and organizations have had to cut staff and cut hours of staff in order to survive the Obama Care legislation. Add in the fact that nearly 50 million Americans are receiving food assistance from the Federal government, more people than the entire population of Spain, and it becomes obvious that this political class, from the President down to the newest member of Congress, have failed miserably in providing a sound economic policy and strategy.

4) According to an article in The Economist that was summarized in the December 6, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, at least 3,200 Americans are serving life sentences without chance of parole for such nonviolent crimes as cursing at a policeman and selling $10 worth of drugs. The vast majority of these life sentences are the result of mandatory sentencing laws.

Such a waste of life and taxpayer resources used to maintain prison space for these thousands of citizens who are serving time for nonsensical crimes. Fortunately, the Constitution provides a way for these injustices to be undone via Presidential pardons. 

But, according to a Washington Post article, that was summarized in the December 13, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, President Obama has pardoned only 40 people during his Presidency, currently a record low number of pardons for modern day Presidents. At the same time in his Presidency, President Reagan had pardoned 313 people. 

The article did point out that President Obama had pardoned 10 Thanksgiving turkeys in addition to the 40 human pardons he had dealt out.

5) Back to the current convoluted and ineffective law making process present in Congress today. The December 16, 2013 issue of Business Week discussed the Rube Goldberg machinations of something called the Volcker rule. The Volcker rule was stated as a single paragraph in the Dodd-Frank legislation that was passed in response to the banking debacles of the Great Recession. 

The Volcker rule is supposed to make banks safer by forbidding certain types of risky trading practices. According to the lead paragraph in the story:

In 2009, former Federal Reserve Chariman Paul Volcker had a simple idea to prohibit deposit taking banks from trading for their own accounts. Proprietary trading - wherein banks make bets in pursuit of profit, putting depositors and taxpayers at risk - shouldn’t be that hard to define, he told the Independent, a British newspaper, last year. “It’s like pornography,” he said. “You know it when you see it.”

Well, he could not have been any further from the truth since the people that needed to operationalize that one paragraph from Dodd-Frank were members of the Washington political class. That one paragraph resulted in 1,238 days of discussion and agony, 18,223 comments, 71 pages of final rules, an 893 page preamble, all spread across five Federal agencies. Never do the simple thing when politicians can make it complicated, vague, and probably unworkable.

How could it have been made simple? Well, for decades, there was a Federal law on the books, Glass-Steagall, which prohibited this very type of activity by barring deposit taking banks from investment banking activities. You were either a deposit bank or an investment bank, but not both. That law had worked perfectly well for about fifty years but within ten years or so after its repeal, banks got too big and too careless, resulting in the Great Recession and resultant bank bailouts.

Why didn’t Congress to the smart, easy thing and just reinstate Glass-Steagall, resulting in a safer banking system and less chance of bailouts? In all likelihood, it was because big banks make big donations to political incumbents to ensure big bank executives get big bonus checks and their desire to maintain the status quo. 

Is this new Volcker rule likely to work? Probably not, it is too big, too complicated and according to the article conclusion, “the newly approved Volcker Rule leaves many questions unanswered.” So, more than three years later and almost a thousands pages later, we are probably no closer to eliminating “too big to fail” and the nasty ramifications of that issue. Another pathetic, insane job of failure by the political class.

More failure and insanity tomorrow. In the meantime, please consider visiting our term limits website at:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

Because really, if we dumped all of the incumbents out of office, how much worse could it get if they were replaced with new Congressional representatives and a new President?

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

Fun With Math, Part 2 - How Bad Could Life Get With A $16 TRILLION National Debt?

Last week we dedicated a post to doing some simple math to try and get our hands around how big our $16 TRILLION national debt really is. We calculated how many times we could circle the globe if we laid 16 trillion one dollar bills end-to-end (60,000), how far out into space we could go if we laid those same bills end-to-end (back and forth to Mars about 2,100 times), etc. The other examples and subsequent discussion can be found at:

 http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/09/fun-with-math-making-our-16-trillion.html.

Although having a debt of $16 TRILLION is really, really bad, saddling each American family with about $140,000 each, it could get much worse before it gets better. We started doing that calculation last week when we used Obama's White House budget website, which shows that the $16 TRILLION is expected to grow another $3.4 TRILLION by 2017 under Obama's current budget assumptions. This would bring the total national debt to just under a whopping $20 TRILLION.

However, Obama's budget calls for some unbelievably aggressive growth rates in government tax revenue in each of the next five years, growth rates that have never been sustained over a five year period in the history of the country. Thus, we found the $3.4 TRILLION increase to be unfounded and highly unlikely not to happen. Using the long term average growth rate of the U.S. economy, around 3%, we recalculated the next five years' worth of tax revenue, keeping Obama's government spending assumptions unchanged. This results in another $7 TRILLION being added to our burdensome national debt, not his overly optimistic $3.4 TRILLION increase.

An additional $7 TRILLION in national debt theoretically adds another $61,000 or so to each American household's share of the Federal government debt. This would bring the total household debt responsibility to $200,000, a level that would never be sustained.

But it gets worse. Fortunately, for the political class and the country, the U.S. Treasury is paying record low interest rates to finance this ongoing and growing debt load. This is caused by what I call the "queen of the pigs" theory.

As most people know, many, many countries in Europe are economic basket cases. Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc. are having severe economic problems and their own outsized national debt difficulties, which has made their sovereign debt riskier. Riskier investments make it harder to get investors to buy your bonds and those that do buy, want higher returns for their risk. This has pushed the interest for some European sovereign bonds up into the 6-7% range.

The Chinese economy is slowing, the Japanese economy is still in a twenty year funk, the U.S. stock market has been volatile and generally providing low returns, and the U.S. housing market is still in the ditch. With so much economic uncertainty in the world, many investors are looking to park their wealth and money somewhere safe in order to not lose their principle.

The best place to do that recently has been with U.S. Treasury bonds. Basic economic theory prevails: high demand for a limited supply keeps your costs down. In this case, the demand is high for T-bills, the supply is limited, which pushes down the interest rates.

Thus, while we do have historically high national debt levels, the cost to service that debt is historically low. If you go to the official White House budget website and its EXCEL spreadsheets, you will find that the interest expected to be paid (about $224 billion) on the expected 2012 year end national debt level (about $16.3 TRILLION) is about 1.4%. Not a bad interest rate to be paying for such a large debt load.

Let's look at Obama's own numbers. By 2017, our national debt should be about $20 TRILLION according to the White House website. The cost of servicing that debt load in 2017, again, according to Obama's numbers, would be about $565 billion. This comes out to an overall interest rate of about 2.9%. Thus, our debt cost under this base case scenario will go from about $224 billion a year at a 1.4% interest rate to $565 billion a year at a 2.9% interest rate. Thus, Obama is planning to more than double the amount of taxpayer wealth diverted solely to interest payments and the interest rate we pay to service that debt in the next five years.

Hang in there, we are almost there from a math perspective. If you take Obama's 2012 expected tax revenue estimate and divide it into his expected interest payment budget line for 2012 you will calculate a number of 9.1%, i.e. about nine percent of Federal tax revenues will be used to pay interest. By 2017, he expects that number to increase by about 50% with about 14.4% of 2017 tax revenues to be used to pay for interest payments. All bad trends.

However, that debt load will have to be constantly serviced over time as the existing bonds are sold and new bonds issued. The very real concern is that at some point in time, the rest of the world's economic opportunities begin to improve. Let's say that somehow Europe struggles through its economic problems and gets itself on solid financial footing. Investors will start to look to Europe to increase their return on their wealth.

Let's assume that China gets out of its doldrums and with its large population starts humming again, from an economic perspective. An improving U.S. housing market and stock market may be better options for investors than getting 1.4% or so on its investment in Treasury bonds.

Thus, as the world's economy improves, including our economy, and the rating agencies, investors, and the rest of the world get more and more antsy about our ever escalating debt load, there is an excellent chance that there will be fewer and fewer investors willing to give the U.S. Treasury Department some of their wealth to invest. This will require that Treasury interest rates increase just to get money for servicing the debt and our deficit spending. Thus, those 1.4% and 2.9%interest rates may very soon be a pipe dream.

Let's assume that we start to look like Greece and Spain by 2017, given our ever rising debt load. Our interest rate would certainly no longer be so low. Let's assume that the 2.9% rate in 2017 is a more Greece-like 6%. Simple math would say that we would no longer be paying $565 billion a year to service our debt. At 6%, a $20 TRILLION debt financing cost would increase to $1.2 TRILLION a year, more than double up from $565 billion.

Under this scenario over 30% of the Federal government's tax revenue would go solely to servicing the $20 TRILLION debt.

If we assume that we are up to about 120 million households by 2017, on average every American household would have to pay $10,000 each just in 2017 just to pay for the debt servicing. Obviously, more taxes would then have to be collected to cover Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense spending, and every other government function. Scary, scary numbers.

But we can make it worse without stretching the bounds of reasonability. We do not believe that Obama's revenue numbers are realistic, they are much too high. Let's assume that government revenue only grows around 3% a year for the next five years. Then, by 2017, the Federal government revenue stream is not $3.92 TRILLION, it is closer to $2.86 TRILLION. In this scenario, about 42% of every Federal tax dollar goes to debt servicing.

The good news, which is really really bad news, is that this may never happen. We may see an economic collapse long before we get to these 2017 numbers. If we get another recession within the next five years, highly likely, we may have such a suppression in government tax revenue that it cannot service the debt, leading to default. In that situation, any saving bonds or Treasury bonds that any American holds could be worthless, leading to economic hardship for many American families but especially elderly Americans who may have counted on those government securities for their retirement.

Going back to Obama's numbers, a 2017 best case scenario says that expected government spending, $4.5 TRILLION would quickly be reduced by $612 billion or 13% in order for actual tax revenue to equal actual expenditures, no more financing spending and deficit spending. Thus, best case in a default is that every government function, every Social Security check, every Medicare payment, every Federal employee salary, etc. would immediately be reduced by 13%. And I believe that the 13% is best case, it would likely be far worse.

There would be no immediate change/improvement in our economic situation after a default since no one would be willing to lend the Federal government any money. We would have to live only on what the government could tax collect with no deficit spending.

And these calculations do not even bring into account the likelihood of high or even runaway inflation. The Federal Reserve has done two rounds of "quantitative easing," which is nothing more than printing money and injecting it into the financial systems in the hope that it will eventually lead to economic growth.

The first two rounds of easing resulting in the printing of $2.3 TRILLION, money that is sitting somewhere in the banking system waiting for the right opportunity to be invested. If the Fed is not careful, if that investing comes all at once, inflation is likely to skyrocket, putting further pressure on the Federal government, raising interest rates dramatically, raising interest rates, and crushing individual household budgets and savings.

Not a pretty sight. But this is the path we are on. You may dispute some of my numbers, assumptions and calculations since I am not a financial or economics expert. I am just doing some simple, logical math with official government statistics and forecasts.

But I doubt anyone would arrive at a substantially different overall conclusion using any other approach. Using Obama's own numbers, we are heading for a fiscal meltdown that could happen within just a few years, taking our economic well being and our democracy with it. Using more realistic numbers than the official Federal government.White House view results in a much worse economic scenario.

Study Germany in the 1920s and Argentina a few decades ago to see what an economic meltdown and default looks like. Observe what happens to Greece and Spain in the next six months or so to see what is in store for us.

But there might still be time to get our outrageous Federal government spending habits under control. Tomorrow we will go through a detailed plan that will remove $9 TRILLION from our debt load. And best of all, it does that without raising taxes and with minimal impact to most American families.

It can be done. The question is whether it can be done by those sitting in the White House and Congress today. Their lack of courage track record says they cannot and thus, they need to all be removed from office on November 6, 2012 if we are to have any chance of avoiding what I have laid out above.

Note: for those of you who want to tinker with the Obama numbers we used above, go to the following web page for the original numbers and forecasts:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals

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

Economic Update - Part 4: Taxmageddon, Bank Runs, Bankrupt Students, and More

Okay, this time I really promise this will be the last post for a while regarding our nation's economic condition. I know I promised to stop talking about the situation yesterday but additional bad news continues to brought to my attention. I will cut off the news after today, and tomorrow I will present a series of ideas on what could and should be done to finally start turning the economy around in this country.

However, if I have not scared you enough about our financial and economic plight over the past three days, consider the following, additional bad news:

- In an article from http://www.theatlantic.com/, that was summarized in the May 25, 2012 issue of The Week magazine: "Europe is about to experience the mother of all bank runs. If Greece exits the Euro, depositors in Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Italy will transfer their cash to safe countries like Germany. That capital flight will encourage international investors to start betting on a breakup, causing borrowing costs to soar and making the Euro's collapse even more likely."

- In that same issue of The Week magazine, a summary of an Associated Press article predicted that the pain of a Euro breakup would extend to the U.S. The article claims that Wall Street has trillions of dollars tied up in European banks, and it the Euro goes kaput, those American banks are likely to curtail their lending due to the resultant cash squeeze.

- Speaking of banks, an article that appeared at http://www.theatlantic.com/, which was summarized, you guessed it, in the May 25, 2012 issue of The Week magazine, reported that the five largest banks in the country control $8.5 TRILLION in assets, which is equivalent to about 56% of the nation's economy. These are both bigger numbers than in 2008 when the rallying cry "too big to fail" resulted in the despised, ineffective, and very expensive taxpayer funded bank bailouts.

Obviously, Washington and the political class never figured out how to make the big banks not be too big to fail. If the Euro crisis smacks these big banks, will the taxpayers put up with another round of bailouts for Wall Street? And if not, what would happen to our economy if one be of the big five goes down the tubes?

- A Huffington Post article that was also summarized in the May 25, 2012 issue of The Week, reported that less than half of the U.S. graduates since 2009 have found a job within a year of leaving school. Those in the other half that did find a job have an average starting salary of about $27,000, 10% lower than the graduating classes of 2006 and 2007.

- From that same issue of The Week (a busy week of bad economic news to appear in just one issue!), a summarized New York Times article reported that 94% of college students borrow money to pay for their education, double the percentage from twenty years ago. The heavy debt load their incur restricts their ability to buy cars, rent an apartment, and conduct other economy growing activities due to the diversion of their income to paying off their debt.

- A recent Gallup poll, reported int he May 18, 2012 issue of The Week magazine, found that Americans' "personal financial comfort" is at the lowest level since Gallup began tracking the measure ten years ago. 39% of those polled said they do not have enough money to live comfortably, up from 34% last year and 24% in 2002.

- A recent Associated Press article reported that the Organization For Economic Cooperation and Development warned the 17 countries in the Euro zone that they risked falling into a severe recession, and bringing the rest of the world into a recession with them, unless more was done to stem the debt crisis.

- We have already talked about the so-called "taxmageddon," the economic doomsday scenario that will occur in early 2013 unless the political class can get together beforehand and agree on how to effectively handle a multitude of tax issues and spending issues beforehand.

According to a recent Washington Post article (and it too was summarized in the May 25, 2012 issue of The Week magazine), the lack of leadership and effective planning from Washington is resulting in defense contractors already slowing their hiring plans and hospitals cutting costs in anticipation of the end of year deadline. Neither of these actions, and probably thousands of other,similar  actions by thousands of companies across hundreds of industries, will help the state of the economy in 2012.

- And one last blast of bad, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed last Friday down over 9% from its 52 week high. I believe that we are considered in a bear stock market environment when the market drops more than 20% below is annual high. Thus, we are almost half way to a bear market and the trend is not good.

Really scary stuff. That is why we wanted to get all of the bad news out so that people would begin to realize how dangerous a time we are in from a debt, financial, and economic perspective. Starting tomorrow, and probably going for at least two days, we will present our recommendations for getting this situation under control and moving forward in a positive direction.

It is obvious that the political class in Washington has no clue on what to do. Otherwise, I would have thought they would have done it already and we would not be in this economic death spiral. The information shared over the past three days should be reason enough to 1) dump out all incumbents in November, from the President through the first term members of Congress, 2) start the process of implementing term limits, and 3) start the implementation of the economic salvation plan we will propose in the next few days.

I will leave you with two quotes to ponder in the light of the dire economic news we have shared over the past four posts:

Albert Einstein: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." We have continually allowed the same tired politicians with the same tired ideas to continually get reelected. As a result, we find ourselves in the dire economic straits we are in today.

The second quote comes from Eric Bonse, writing for the German publication, Die Tagezeitung. Mr. Bonse summarized the recent meeting of the leaders from Canada, Russia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. who got together at Camp David in mid-May to try and figure out how to fix the broken economies around the world. Mr. Bonse found Barack Obama to be "a fine host" but not much of a leader or facilitator.

The outcome form the meeting resulted in only a tepid statement that all of the leaders were "in favor of growth." That's about as deep, inspiring, and effective as saying I would rather have a cupcake than a root canal. But Mr; Bonse had a much better observation: "Which proves that they don't have the slightest idea how to get about solving the Euro crisis. The summit produced on a general sense of bewilderment." Well said.


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/