November, 2020, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: Ocasio-Cortez Designer Clothes, The First Family Of NYC Wastes A Billion Dollars, and States Cannot Pay Their Bills

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.

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.

1) We used to blog a lot about Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York City. Her ignorance and inane comments and plans were actually entertaining for a while as we wondered how anyone that naive about the world could be elected to Congress and actually vote on legislation. 

However, over time her ranting and self-centeredness and inability to understand reality and numbers got really tiring. Thus, we haven't done a lot about her lately since it was the same ignorance, the same stupidity, and the same inability to ever have a decent solution to any problem, just empty ranting. But we cannot let the latest bit of hypocrisy from her go by unnoticed:

• Recall in a previous post how she appeared at a public function about helping the poor and putting more socialism programs in place and yet was wearing a designer outfit that was priced at well over a thousand dollars, blatant hypocrisy.
• Well, she is at it again. 
• She was recently featured on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine wearing a $14,000 outfit.
• This behavior from someone who more than once portrayed herself as a friend of the working class and how she had a struggling background… until she could parade around in extremely expensive designer clothes.
• While wearing such expensive clothes she still continues to try and pass herself as a “working woman, that it is “legitimately hard being a first-generation woman … and being working class, trying to navigate a professional environment. … It continues to take me so long to try to figure out how to look put-together without having a huge designer closet.”
• Note that she does not deny she has a ”designer closet,” just that she doesn't have a “huge” designer closet.

I bet most of her constituents do not even have a “designer closet” of any size. Please, dress anyway you want, spend your money on any clothes, cheap or expensive that you want, but do not try to pass yourself off as a friend of the working class and the poor when you are wearing designer clothes that cost thousands and thousands of dollars.

2) Recently, we have been spending a lot of time reviewing the latest budget numbers of cities, states, and the Federal budget and the numbers in almost all cases are not good. Cities such as Chicago are likely to go bankrupt really soon, given the following financial death spiral realities:

• Chicago cannot pay its own current bills, never mind paying down billions and billions of dollars of unfunded future financial liabilities.
• Chicago is now the murder capital of the country which has endangered the lives of residents who are leaving the city much faster than people are moving into the city, taking their tax dollars with them and thus, making the city’s financial situation more bleak.
• The inept mayor, Lori Lightfoot, has had to grovel at the feet of employers not to leave the city because of the safety of their employees and property, taking more tax dollars and jobs with them as they abandon the city.
• The city’s municipal bond rating is just a shade above junk bond status meaning that it will be difficult for the city to finance its debt and revenue shortfalls with more debt.
• And since Chicago's home state of Illinois is probably going to be the first state to go bankrupt, it cannot provide any financial relief to Chicago.

New York, San Francisco and other cities are not much better off. But the cities are not the only government entities that are in serious financial shape:

• The watchdog group, Truth In Accounting, recently released its annual report, “Financial State of the States.”
• According to standard accounting practices, the report found that 39 states, (78%) did not have enough money coming in via taxes to pay off their bills.
• Total unpaid bills amounted to a whopping $1.4 TRILLION at the end of fiscal year 2019 BEFORE the added expenses of the covid fight kicked in.
• The report estimates that the states will see their 2020 fiscal year revenue reduced by just under $400 billion, making their ability to pay their bills in 2020 even more difficult.
• The states with the biggest unpaid bill problem are New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, Hawaii, and Massachusetts.

Since we have predicted that Illinois will be the first state to go bankrupt and that New Jersey will be one of the states that will quickly follow Illinois into bankruptcy, it is no surprise they are the top two states that cannot pay their bills.

3) Maybe one of the reasons that cities and states are going bankrupt is that they cannot keep track of the money they spend in order to decide if it is going to the right functions to address the right problems. Such is the case of New York City, our choice for the second most likely city to go bankrupt after Chicago.

It appears that the mayor’s wife is having trouble explaining how almost a billion dollars of city tax money not only went missing but failed to come close to fulfilling the objectives the money was intended for:

• Mayor Bill de Blasoi’s wife, Chirlane McCray, is in charge of a city mental health project.
• But according to reporting by the Daily Mail, she cannot adequately explain where and how her program has spent $850 million worth of taxpayer money.
• In the three years it took to spend the $850 million, the organization she heads, ThriveNYC, has generally been unable or unwilling to document how that money was spent and whether or not it actually did any good.
• ThriveNYC was supposed to have 417 metrics to measure its performance but according to reporting by Politico, the data for those metrics is minimal and what data does exist shows what a gigantic failure the program was.
• For example, one of the metrics was to screen 78,000 new mothers a year for post natal depression.
• But in a recent two year period, the program did not screen the 156,000 it was supposed to screen but screened just over 28,000, only 18% of the target.
• Even worse, it was supposed to help 12,000 to 15,000 new mothers over that time and ended up treating only 570, a tiny fraction of its metric goal.
• In another example, the organization records showed it had given out 190,000 MARCAN kits to those in need of opioid treatment but there is no record of how many of those kits were used and how many addicted people it helped.

Despite the failures, despite the shoddy bookkeeping and results tracking, the program has been given more funding and will spend over a billion dollars very shortly over its life with very little success to show for it. But that is how politics works, put a program out there, fund it, not have a clue whether it works or not and then fund with more taxpayer money. Insanity.

4) But it is not just de Blasio’s wife that wastes NYC taxpayer funds, apparently the mayor recently conceded that he also wasted a huge chunk of taxpayer funds:

• Three years ago, de Blasio put aside a whopping $773 million dollars to improve 100 of the city’s worst schools.
• After three years, that $773 million was only good enough to improve 25 schools to a degree that they were not considered the worst performing city schools.
• Thus, on average, $7.73 million was spent on each school and only 25 of them showed any significant improvement despite having a whopping $7 million or so poured into each of them.
• Adding insult to injury, 25 of those 100 worst schools were just closed or merged with other schools despite $7 million spent on each of them on average.

Even de Blasio knew when the failure was too great to continue, having recently terminated the program that has failed so miserably.

States cannot pay their bills, the First Family of New York wastes over $1 billion of taxpayer money, and Ocasio-Cortez’s hypocrisy and high fashion maintenance continues unabated. The inability of the American political class to do anything right continues to amaze and disappoint.

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

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=loce+my+country%2C+loathe+my+government&ref=nb_sb_noss

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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

August, 2019, Part 2, By The Numbers: Wasting Billions In Baltimore and New York

On a periodic basis we do some posts that fall under the theme of “by the numbers.” Rather than trust what the American political tells us about reality, we like to examine the real numbers and the real reality in the world to understand what is actually going on. Relying on politicians, and their cohorts in the media, to tell us what is reality is always a sucker bet. They have their own agendas and goals, usually centering around their needs and self-enrichment. So we need to look at the reality of the numbers to determine what is really going on.

Previous analyses of “by the numbers” can be accessed by entering the phrase in the search box above. We will do a few “by the numbers” posts this month where we look at the numbers to truly find out how good, not likely, or bad, most likely, the American political class is doing in managing our tax dollars, protecting our freedoms, and resolving major issues that affect all of us. 

1) According to a recent article on the Conservative and Free website, the Federal agency, Housing and Urban Development, is curious as to where billions of Federal taxpayer dollars were spent, or wasted:

• $15.7 billion from the Federal government has been sent to the city of Baltimore over the past two years.
• But despite this grant and the other billions and billions that have been given to the city over time, it still has a poverty rate of about 24%, 60% higher than the national poverty level.
• If that $15.7 billion had been given directly to every Baltimore resident, each person would have received over $25,000, a family of four would have gotten $100,000.
• Obviously, given the poverty situation, that money really never made it down to those living in the city, so what happened?
• The murder rate in Baltimore is 56 murders per 100,000 residents compared to El Salvador’s 50, Guatemala’s 22 and Honduras’ 38.
• Thus, the murder rate in the city is higher than the murder rate in third world countries.
• And while Chicago gets more press for its number of murders every year, at 24 murders per 100,000 residents, it is less than half of what Baltimore’s rate is.
• Every week, 6 people on average are murdered in the city.

So while the city’s Congressman is busy berating hard working border patrol agents thousands of miles away, the people he represents are not getting the benefit of the billions and billions of dollars that have flowed from the Federal government to Baltimore. And the numbers show they continue to live in a violent and poor city. The numbers do not lie.

2) According to the Godfather Politics website, the Mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio and his wife, may actually be worse at financial management than the wasteful spending of Baltimore politicians:

• Alicia F. Luke wrote back in March that the Mayor’s wife cannot account for the $850 million she was given by her husband for a city mental health project.
• His wife, Chirlane McCray, runs the ThriveNYC mental health program.
• After three years, the organization failed to keep records of it spending and has badly missed its objectives and targets.
• ThriveNYC claims it has 417 metrics but fails to track many of these metrics.
• One metric called for the program to work with 29 hospitals to serve 78,000 mothers with postnatal depression every year.
• But over the past two years, only 28,000 patients were screened, only 35% of objective, and worse yet, only 570 patients were actually offered help.
• The expectation that between 12,000 and 15,000 were supposed to be offered help, meaning that the program achieved only between 3.8% and 4.7% of its objective.

A lot of money for very little return. And worse, no one knows where the money went since the Mayor’s wife and her cohorts have lousy record keeping skills and/or intent, leading one to assume the worse: the money was a front for fraud and the stealing of taxpayer wealth.

3) But the numbers show that de Blasio’s wife is not the only family member that can waste, lose, and screw up when it comes to taxpayer money. Consider the failure and related numbers of one of his own doomed projects:

• Apparently de Blasio was high on a program called Renewal which was supposed to boost the performance of some of NYC’s lower performing schools.
• The program has failed miserably at a cost of $773 million.
• As a result of the failure, it is being shut down.
• Since many of the lower performing schools were not helped, the city and the Mayor will now just shut down 100 of the failing city schools.
• Let’s play with some numbers, starting with the reality that there are 1,700 public schools in NYC.
• Rather than have the Mayor and his minions administer, and waste, $773 million, for no measurable positive return, would if that money had simply been disbursed to the worst performing 20% of the 1,700 schools?
• That means the 340 lowest performing schools would have gotten a cash infusion of just under $2.3 million EACH.
• Best Buy currently has a nice HP 14” laptop computer for sale which means that each low performing school, if they had gotten that money directly, would be able to purchase just 7,500 computers for EACH school, obviously much more than they would need to give each kid in their school a new laptop for educational purposes.
• In fact, given that there are about 1.1 million public school kids in NYC, EVERY student in EVERY school could have been bought TWO of these HP laptops and had money to spare.
• Let’s look at it another way: it appears that the starting salary for a new teacher in NYC schools earns about $60,000.
• This means that the $773 million that the Mayor’s program wasted could have theoretically been used to hire almost 13,000 new teachers for a year.
• Rather than hiring 13,000 for a year, we could theoretically hire 2,600 new teachers and pay them for five years with this wasted $773 million.
• If we took these 2,600 new teachers and spread across the worse schools, each school would have another 7-8 teachers on staff to help turn around these poorly performing schools.
• Instead, there are no new computers and no new teachers, the NYC education process is not any better, and the city taxpayers are out $773 million.

Look, I know the computer numbers and teacher numbers estimated above only exist in a perfect world. But just magnitude of these estimates are large enough to show how much more good could have been done with the straight hiring of new teachers and the purchasing of new computers for NYC kids getting a less than stellar education vs. letting politicians and bureaucrats like de Blasio and his minions handle the money.

So, between husband and wife, the de Blasio family has spent or skimmed over $1.5 billion off of the city’s tax coffers with really nothing to show for it. Nice work if you can get it, the numbers do not lie.

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

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

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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