January 2016, Part 1, Political CLass Insanity: The TSA, VA and Medicare Continue to Stink At What They Do

It is the start of another month which means it is time for our monthly review of the latest political class insanity that continually spews forth from America’s politicians. Their actions, words, quotes, incompetency, and general ineptness continue to reinforce our theory that we are currently being served by the worst set of politicians in the history of the nation.

As you read about the latest shenanigans and ineptness of the political class, keep in mind what should be their priorities in these difficult times and compare this list to what they are actually working on:

• NBC recently reported that ISIS forces are getting larger and stronger despite the Obama administration spending billions of dollars on a failed air campaign and military strategy.
• The stock market is stalling.
• Job creation is barely keeping up with population growth.
• Wage growth is anemic, growing just .2% in the second quarter, the lowest quarterly growth since 1982.
• The labor participation rate is at the lowest level in decades because the Obama economy cannot generate enough jobs.
• Thousands of veterans are still not getting the medical care they were promised by the Federal government.
• 45 million Americans are still receiving monthly Federal food assistance.
• Our borders still leak and thousands of illegal immigrant criminals continue to walk our streets.
• Major programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are hurtling towards insolvency and lose hundreds of billions of dollars every year to fraud and mismanagement.
• Our kids are still getting lousy public educations at most public schools.
• The IRS and other government functions seem to be getting their computer systems hacked on a regular basis, exposing tens of millions of Americans to identity theft potential.
• Obama Care is a failure along so many dimensions as health care costs continue to soar despite the Obama promise that they would decrease.
• Annual Federal deficits, while down, are still about half a TRILLION a year meaning that even though the Federal government is collecting more in taxes than ever before, it still cannot run a balanced budget.

Again, keep these real crises in mind as you read what our politicians are actually doing, saying and wasting.

1) We often debate in this blog what is the most inept, ineffective Federal government entity. While a number of different agencies are often incompetent enough to grab this title, it is usually the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that wins out. This is critical since national security is currently a big concern for most Americans. 

Our President keeps telling us that we are safe despite recent terrorist attacks in California and France, the rise of ISIS, and leaky U.S. borders. He keeps asserting that he and his administration are on top of the whole terrorist problem and for us not to worry, led by the TSA and DHS.

However, a recent news story kind of undermines this Presidential viewpoint. American Airlines announced that hundreds of its airport security badges have disappeared at various airports across the country. These badges allow possessors of those badges to bypass airport security checkpoints at airports. Given how wealthy the leading terror organization, ISIS, has become, it does not take a genius to figure out how valuable those missing airport badges would be to a would be terrorist and how much they would be willing and able to pay for them.

Just a little something else to worry about during your travels, is that airport employee real or is he a terrorist with a fake badge, brought to you by the Federal government and the TSA?

2) Prior to the Obama administration, the Secret Service would probably have ranked very high in competence vs. the rest of the Federal government. It had never been involved in any scandals or had royally screwed up in its job functions in any way. It had been fifty years since a President had been assassinated. This looked like one government organization that was efficient and effective and competent.

That illusion has certainly been shattered in the past few years. People have successfully jumped the fence surrounding the White House, with one fence jumper actually getting deep into the White House itself. The White House windows have been shot out be a drive by shooter. Just prior to a Presidential visit to Columbia, Secret Service agents were caught partying with prostitutes that may have been funded by drug cartels.

To this tawdry set of incidents we now can add another tale of Secret Service incompetence. According to CNN, a Secret Service agent recently had his gun, badge, radio, handcuffs, and computer flash drive stolen in the middle of the day from his car that was parked near the Secret Service headquarters in D.C. Not only were they stolen from his car, the agent had left the stolen items in a car that, according to the police report, had a window that had been “unzipped,” making stealing anything from the agent’s vehicle easy and not need to have a window broken.

As always, you cannot make this stuff up when it comes to government incompetence. A Secret Service agent, who works on the Presidential Protection detail, leaves his gun and other important material in a car that has a zip out window and parks it on a busy street in D.C. How lax, how amateurish, how stupid can one be? And this President wants to take control over all of our guns when a trained Secret Service agent cannot even protect his own gun? Insanity.

3) One reason writing this blog is so easy to write is that politicians constantly think that they can make up facts and reality and that we are too stupid to not checkout the validity of their claims, making them appear to be the outright, pathological liars that they mostly are. Our current President is particularly active in asserting things that are just not reality.

And apparently his former Secretary of State has the same problem with truth. In a recent Presidential debate, Hillary proclaimed that Donald Trump is being used as a recruiting tool for the terror group, ISIS. She claimed that ISIS is using videos of Trump to recruit others throughout the world to their cause. 

Bad claim to make without having the proof. Since her accusation, no one has been able to find any videos from any terror group that is using Trump as a recruiting tool. What has been uncovered, though, as a result of her claim, is that her husband, Bill Clinton, is being featured in ISIS video recruiting videos. A four-minute ISIS video released last month, “No Respite,” includes an image of Bill Clinton, who is called a “fornicator,” a probable reference to his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, among many others. The video also showed pictures of Bush and Obama.

Note to Hillary and her staff: do not spread lies that can be easily checked out for facts, especially if your own husband is playing the role that you accuse your political opponent of playing. In other words, stay in integrity and don’t be stupid.

4) We have already discussed today another adventure in incompetence from the TSA but the Veterans Administration (VA) almost always gives the TSA a run for its money for ineptness. Recently the VA mistakenly declared that 115 veterans were dead but in reality, they were still alive. Unfortunately, by declaring these living veterans to be dead veterans these vets had their government benefits terminated for no reason.

The VA admitted their mistake in a letter to Congress and promised to do better in the future. But given that the VA has made many promises over the years to improve all aspects of how veterans are treated and has failed on just about every one of them, Lord knows how good this new promise will be, especially since the VA stated that it could not determine the root cause for the false termination alive or dead status. If you do not know what caused a problem in the first place, resolving that problem without the right root causes can be a little challenging.

To show how comical and out of control this problem is, Philip Klein writing for the Washington Examiner, reported that Carl Colamonico was not only prematurely declared dead by the VA but they also had recorded that he been buried in Riverside National Cemetery and that he was incorrectly listed as a World War II vet when he actually was a Vietnam vet. Thus, the VA screwed up everything: he was alive not dead, he was upright, not buried and he was a Vietnam vet, not a World War II vet. Cannot be more wrong than what they did to poor Carl. Insane.

5) Alright, today we have embarrassing failures from the TSA and VA so let’s add another Federal agency into today's disaster mix, the Medicare operation. According to a recent article from the Senior America Association, written by Greg Allen on December 17, 2015:

• Twenty four year old Daniel Suarez ran what appeared to be a successful pharmacy operation, especially since he already owned a Rolls Royce and Bentley at the tender young age of 24.
• However, what he was really doing was running a criminal operation that had up until recently scammed the Medicare program out of an amazing $21 million of dollars.
• Fortunately, he was finally caught running his Medicare scam, was sentenced to nine years in prison and his mother and three other family members were also sentenced to jail.
• But this was not before he had purchased a Rolls Royce Ghost, a Bentley, a Range Rover, a Mercedes-Benz S63 AMG and two unidentified luxury cars with some of the stolen Medicare funds. 
• The Mercedes sells about $160,000 while the Rolls sells for about $300,000, according to Car and Driver.
• This 24 year old also owned two homes, more than a dozen trucks, $100,000 in jewelry, and over $2 million in credit card charges.
• This Cuban immigrant and his relatives were all licensed pharmacy techs and operated eight small pharmacies in the Miami area from which they paid patients and recruiters to gain access to Medicare ID numbers.
• They then billed Medicare for drugs that were never actually dispensed.

Disgusting. This caper raises some very serious questions on how incompetent Medicare is:

1. Why did this obvious fraud go on so long, long enough for this 24 year old to buy cars, trucks, homes, and run up millions of dollars in credit card charges?
2. Doesn’t the Medicare system have some kind of sanity check points in their data systems to help identify these types of outrageous scams from small pharmacies long before they lose millions of taxpayer dollars to these criminals?
3. Given how simple this fraud was to set up, how many other times is this type of fraud going on across the country, how many billions of dollars is it costing the American taxpayer every day of every year, and what steps, if any, is Medicare taking to shut this insanity down?

Again, disgusting. This is why no American, rich or poor, should pay an additional penny in taxes, not when the political class allows such massive and easy-to-get-away with fraud to go on.

First political class insanity report of the month, much more to go. But in early returns, the TSA, the VA and Medicare continue to prove every month that they are some of the most inept and poorly run government organizations to ever exist.

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

Part 1, September, 2013, Political Class Insanity: More Wasteful Spending, A Leaky Border, and A Federal Reserve Bank Lacking Basic Math Skills

It is the beginning of another month, which means it is time for the latest political class insanity, brought to you by the American political class. We do this segment and series of posts every month to 1) verify our hypothesis that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians in the history of our country and 2) to promote the concept of our term limits drive to rid us and the country of the politicians whose lunacy stupidity, insanity, and ignorance is causing hardships all across the country.

Last month we set the record for insanity since it took us nine days to get through it all. It is a good bet that we will get close to that record setting month total since the insanity has just kept rolling out of Washington and into our lives at an ever quickening pace. So without delay or rhyme or reasoning, let us present this month’s political class lunacy:

1) On August 20, 2013 the Heritage Foundation published 15 of their most stupid examples of government spending, spending that serves almost no Americans while needlessly driving up our tax rates and national debt. Although we have already covered some of them in previously doses of insanity, I will review all of them here in case those readers missed our previously exposures of wasteful government spending:

• The Transportation Security Administration has 5,700 pieces of unused airport security equipment worth $184 million sitting in warehouse in a Dallas, Texas, which costs $3.5 million annually to lease and manage. Taxpayers lost another $23 million in depreciation costs because most of the 472 carry-on baggage screening machines had been housed there for nine months or more.
• The National Science Foundation used part of a half-million dollar grant to develop a video game that simulates a high school prom. That’s right, a video game about proms.
• The U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research spent $300,000 on a study that concluded the first bird on Earth probably had black feathers. I do not know how this will sit with the red feather lobby in Washington. Pathetic, useless information paid for with taxpayer wealth.
• Taxpayer-funded Amtrak recovered only 44 cents of every dollar of its food and beverage costs on long-distance routes, which already annually lose money. And these same government people think they can operate the national health care industry more efficiently than anyone else?
• The Office of Naval Research spent $450,000 on a study that determined unintelligent robots do not have the ability to maintain a baby’s attention. But what about intelligent robots you ask? And I ask, who cares?
• The White House is currently undergoing a $376 million renovation. These funds could have kept the White House tours going for over 376 years. Instead, the White House will look great and the citizens who paid the $376 million will never see it. 
• The U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research spent $681,387 on a study to determine if carrying a firearm makes a man look stronger, manlier, and taller. The answer: he does, for whatever that is worth.
• The Internal Revenue Service spent $4.1 million on a lavish conference in 2010 for 2,609 of its employees in Anaheim, California. Expenses included $50,000 for line-dancing and “Star Trek” parody videos, $135,350 for outside speakers, $64,000 in conference souvenirs for the employees, plus free meals, cocktails, and hotel suite upgrades.
• In 2010, 117,000 people illegally and immorally double-dipped into Social Security’s disability insurance program and the federal unemployment insurance program to the tune of  $850 million in cash benefits paid  out fraudulently. If the Washington political class was actually doing their jobs as overseers of taxpayer wealth, the criminally lost money could have operated the White House tours for over 850 years or refunded every American household about $8.
• Thanks to the National Science Foundation, Purdue University, and $350,000 in taxpayer money, researchers analyzed whether  golfers who imagine that the hole is bigger get a boost to their confidence and accuracy. As a golfer, I could have done the study for half that amount to reach the same conclusion. It makes you wonder what government bureaucrats approved such nonsensical use of taxpayer money.
• In 2012, the U.S. Department of Agriculture spent $300,000 on activities promoting caviar produced in Idaho. I would bet that $300,000 is about the same size as ENTIRE Idaho caviar market.
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave out a $149,992 grant to researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey who are trying to eliminate the infamous “freshman 15” by studying college students’ on-campus dining selections. Here’s a better and cheaper way to eliminate the weight gain: just tell them to eat healthier and exercise. There, about $150,000 saved.
• A $100,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts funded a video game that depicts a female superhero sent to save planet Earth from climate changes allegedly caused by social issues that affect women. Nonsense.
• The USASpending.gov website is supposed to be dedicated to unveiling and tracking government spending. According to the website, the Department of Health and Human Services failed to report $800 billion in spending on time. So much for “government transparency.”
• 1,000 prisoners in U.S. jails and prisons collected weekly unemployment benefits over a recent four-month period, costing taxpayers $7 million. Nice work if you can get it. Taxpayers pay for your room and board AND send you checks for being in prison.

If these were the only 15 wastes of government funding every year, I could live with it. If the Washington politicians had actually solved real, major problems facing most Americans (e.g. high unemployment, skyrocketing national debt, failing public schools, leaky borders, etc.) then I could live with these 15 affronts. 

But that is not the case. There are probably tens of thousands of similar wastes of money done every year by the Federal government while the political class never resolves any major issues, losers on all counts.

2) In mid-August, 2013, Arizona law enforcement authorities raided a home in the Phoenix area and ended up breaking up a human smuggling ring. The newsworthy item in this story besides the smashing of a human smuggling ring is that the leader of the smuggling ring is a 35-year-old Mexican citizen named Javier Rito-Martinez. 

According to news reports, Mr. Ritz-Martinez has already been caught and deported back to Mexico right times. One of his accomplices had been caught and deported five times and another had been caught and deported four times. So much for securing the border despite taxpayers spending tens of billions of dollars every year to do so.

3) Let’s look at some inane government math. Over the past few years, the Federal Reserve Board has been inflating the money supply with no underlying wealth to support the increased money supply, i.e. “printing money,” in a vain attempt to jumpstart the economy. These various efforts have been called “quantitative easing” and we are currently in phase three of such nonsense.

The obvious question is to see if the first two phases of quantitative easy actually worked and paid off in increasing the size and health of the economy. The San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank recently complete such an analysis and the results were not pretty. 

According to their official analysis of the second phase of quantitative easing, “we estimate that the second LSAP program, known as QE2, added about 0.13 percentage point to real GDP growth in late 2010 and 0.03 percentage point to inflation.” So, this wing of the Fed actually found evidence that the $600 billion that they pumped in to the economy actually added positive economic growth to the overall economy. That is the good news. 

However, there was overwhelming bad news if you do a little bit of simple math. Back in the time of the second phase of quantitative easing, the size of the entire U.S. economy was about $15.2 TRILLION. The $600 billion the Fed spent to get their positive meager results, as identified by the San Francisco Fed, was about 3.9% of the economy. However, their analysis indicates that these quantitative easing actions increased the economy only .13% which is about $19.7 billion. 

So, the Fed risked/spent/bet $600 billion for a $19.7 billion payback. A pathetic return on investment no matter how you calculate it or cut it. Makes you wonder if anyone in Washington, either at the White House, in Congress, or in the Fed has any economic sense at all, spending $600 billion to get less than $20 billion in return.

And the saddest thing of all? If given these pathetic results and returns, the Fed still went ahead with quantitative easy phase three which is running longer and spending even more money, damaging the long term health of the economy in ways that are probably large and still unknown. Do some simple math, folks, and save the taxpayers a hundreds of billions of dollars.

So what do we have going this month? More idiotic and wasteful government spending on inane projects and programs. Borders that leak so much criminals bounce back multiple times after getting deported. A Federal Reserve that wastes hundreds of billions of dollars for minimal results. And we are just getting started with this month’s insanity, more tomorrow.

Of you want the insanity to stop, become part of our effort to impose term limits on all Federal politicians, Sign up now at:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

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 

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November, 2012 Political Class Insanity, Part 3: More TSA Theft, Lost Money In DC Schools, Congress Getting Richer, And More

This is the final set of political class activities that the political class has imposed on us as we have identified over the past month or so. It is such a shame that we are cursed with a set of politicians that continually waste our wealth on inane programs and projects, waste valuable national resources through incompetent management of these same programs and projects, and erode our democracy with oppressive regulations. They incur all of this damage as they continue to focus more on their political careers and self enrichment. Pitiful.

The final set of insults we have identified from our politicians this month:

1) According to a Washington Post article that was summarized in the October 19, 2012 issue of The Week magazine, during years from 2007 to 2010 Americans’ median household net worth slipped down by 39%. However, the median net worth of all members of Congress increased almost 5% during the same time period.

Even more insulting, the median household income of the wealthiest one third of Congress saw their median net worth rise 14%. Well, at least some Americans are surviving and actually thriving quite well in these hard economic times. As always, our politicians take care of themselves first and leave the rest of us to fend for ourselves.

2) Despite a crushing national debt of over $16 TRILLION and growing, according to a blurb in the October 12, 2012 issue of The Week magazine, the Congressional Research Service found that 2,362 Americans legally collected unemployment benefits in 2009 despite residing in households with incomes of at least $1 million.

Unemployment benefit programs should be designed and implemented to provide short term to help those Americans who have lost their jobs and need financial assistance to get over their rough spot. If your household income is over $1 million, you have no chance of hitting a “rough spot” and should not be entitled to taxpayer wealth, period.

3) What’s is a political class insanity update without extensive TSA participation? According to an ABC news report, as highlighted in the October 12, 2012 issue of The Week magazine, a culture of theft exists throughout the TSA employee base. Pythias Brown, a convicted thief of airline passenger luggage items, said that he had stolen more than $800,000 worth of passenger valuables over just a four year period when he was a TSA employee.

He stated he was part of a culture that:

• Was really a massive “crime wave” which “preyed upon passenger luggage and personal belongings.”
• There was a culture of “indifference” within the TSA organization.
• There was lax oversight and extensive sharing of potential targets among crooked colleagues.
• His observation was that extensive theft was commonplace, not the exception, at TSA checkpoints.

Disgraceful behavior and culture that never seems to get any better even though this type of nonsense has been going on for years with no sustainable outrage or corrections form our political class.

4) According to a Reason magazine article form earlier this year, the American taxpayer via the Washington political class had given the Washington D.C. school district an extra $190 million for its school district. Unfortunately, a government audit found that no one n the D.C. school system was able to provide a credible accounting or paper trial of what actually happened to this extra money.

A General Accountability Office (GAO) audit found:

• The records of the expenditures of this money were incomplete or non-existent.
• The school district received $37.4 million for literacy improvement but the school district could not provide even basic information to describe the program’s objectives and goals or provide any outcomes as a result of the money.
• A grant of $85 million to expand charter schools was also unmonitored.
• The administration office of the school system could not even locate three of the seventeen files that the audit team wanted to review.

The head of the GAO was quoted in the article as saying: “They have longstanding problems,” when referring to the school district. You think? More waste, no accountability either within the school district, the Federal government entity that granted the money, or the Congressional committee responsible for overseeing the expenditures.

5) Prior to being elected, President Obama repeatedly condemned excessively long prison sentences, particularly in the cases of non-violent offenders, according to an article in the November, 2012 issue of reason magazine. Unfortunately, along with reducing the deficit, closing Guantanamo, not hiring lobbyists for his administration, etc., this seems to be another political campaign promise going unfulfilled since he was sworn into office the President has approve one sentence commutation out of 5,500 case that have been presented to him. So much for his campaign condemnation.

6) If it is any consolation, politicians and governments around the world have very similar problems to us, wasteful political class spending and high taxation. According to an article in the September 7, 2012 issue of The Week magazine, Sapo, the Swedish government’s spy agency, is trying to explain how it spent about $800,000 on a James Bond themed party for its staff.

The party included casino tables, a swing band, and extensive gourmet food spread. The only reason the secret and expensive party came to light was because of an accounting error. The head of the spy agency said that his staff had been under tremendous pressure and deserved a party. However, there is a difference between an office party and an $800,000 taxpayer-funded gala bash.

Enough insanity, waste, and lunacy for this month, it was a bad thirty days or so if you are a taxpayer or a citizen supposedly living in a democracy. This month’s political class antics continue to prove that at least the following three steps from “Love My Country,Loathe my Government” are needed to stop the pain and waste:

1. Step 34 would remove politicians from their political committees when they continue to allow the insanity and wasteful spending that we continually cover every month. The members of the committee or subcommittee that lost track of the $190 million that went down the drain at the D.C. school district should be removed form their post. EVERY politician that has any oversight for the disgraceful and corrupt TSA entity should have been removed from their committee posts long ago. Until the politicians overseeing these malfunctioning government actions are held accountable, nothing will improve.
2. Step 39 would impose term limit on all Federal politicians. These types of shenanigans and insanity have been going on for a very long time. Those politicians that have been along for this wasteful ride are now part of the problem since they have not been able or willing to fix these problems. They need to have their political careers terminated.
3. Step 44 would not allow any Federal taxpayer money to be spent on any project or program that did not substantially impact a substantial number of residences in at least five states. Federal money is for national programs and projects, not state and local ones. This would eliminate the earmarks and pontifical payback schemes that sacrifice taxpayer money for campaign election favors and funding.

I would like to say that this is the last post regarding political class insanity. Unfortunately, I am pretty sure we will be back in December with more of the same.

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.blgspot.com/
http://www.flipcongres2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment/

Political Class Insanity, June, 2012 - Part 2: More TSA Incompetence, Shipping Solar Dollars To Canada And More

Today will complete the review of the latest political class insanity that we have come across over the past month or so. Yesterday's post covered the first set of idiocy, waste, and bad priority setting that the political class constantly reigns down on us. Yesterday included the continuing saga of Washington wasting billions of dollars on unneeded and foolish alternative energy projects, a U.S. Senator more worried about kids' seating arrangements on airplanes than the major issues facing the country, the city of Chicago's multiple payments to a local strip club establishment, and other follies and disgraces from the political class.

Unfortunately, one day was not enough to present all of the insanity, as the following examples show:

1) Seems like we can never get through a month without some insanity from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). According to a May 16, 2012 report from the Associated Press, a TSA security supervisor at Newark Liberty Airport is facing criminal charges because it is alleged that he assumed the identity of a murdered New Yorker from long ago and used that identity to become an important person in airport security. His arrest raises questions about whether the TSA actually knows the real identities of people who work in airport security around the country and are responsible for our safety.

Although the TSA requires background, criminal, and terrorist checks for employees who work at airports, the suspect got through the screening processes simply because he worked at the airport for so long and the TSA did not do a separate check that would verify his real identification, according to the AP report.

Other distressful findings from the article include:

• A Congressional committee responsible for homeland security recently held an oversight hearing where a senior TSA official, assistant administrator John Sammon, said he could not assure lawmakers there were no other such cases around the country.
• "We don't know whether they are who they say they are," said Congressman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.
• Apparently, individuals who pose a threat can obtain government security badges for U.S. airports because the TSA inadequately investigates the backgrounds of badge applicants, said the agency's acting inspector general, Charles Edwards.

Much like every other government agency we review in this blog, one would have thought and hoped that some government agency, any government agency, would know how to do their job by now. That is what they get paid to do and have been doing it for years, decades, or centuries. But alas, the main agency which is supposed to protect us at our airports does not even know how to do background checks. Insanity.

2) According to a May 10, 2012 article, that appeared on the Nevada Journal website, a Canadian company behind a recently opened Nevada solar energy facility could legally to receive up to $50 million in Federal tax credits under the Obama’s stimulus program, even though the solar plant created only two full-time jobs.

The Nevada Journal article cites a Department of Interior memo which identifies Enbridge Energy Partners, a Canadian-based company with extensive energy holdings in the U.S., as a company that “can apply for payments of up to 30 percent of the eligible costs of the project — approximately $50 million.”


Thus, not only were only a minuscule number of jobs created by this Nevada effort, two, but we are going to have to send $50 million out of the country to attain this less than lofty job creation goal of two as a result of this effort. Insanity.

3) I have often referred to some of the inane comments that Nancy Pelosi has made over the past few years when it comes to her gross misunderstanding of economic theory and thought. However, I recently came across another high ranking of the Washington political class who is just as uninformed about basic economic theory.

A few months ago, White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett was speaking at the Student Summit at North Carolina Central University where she hilariously claimed unemployment checks stimulate the economy: "And so we need to make sure that we continue to support that important safety net. It not only is good for the family, but it's good for the economy. People who receive that unemployment check go out and spend it and help stimulate the economy, so that's healthy as well." Her actual comments can be heard at: http://mrctv.org/videos/white-house-senior-advisor-unemployment-stimulates-economy

So in Ms. Jarrett's world, the more people that are unemployed the more jobs will be created because unemployed people go out and spend their unemployment checks and create jobs... Thus, I have to assume that her economic policy, if she was boss, would be to make sure everyone did not have a job but received and spent unemployment checks in order to create jobs for everyone.

Is it any wonder that underemployment and unemployment continue at record highs for record periods of time as the national debt quickly approaches $16 TRILLION when these are the types of people in charge? Insanity.

4)An Associated Press article from May 10, 2012 reported on the dire financial status of the U.S. Post Office:

• Second quarter losses were $3.2 billion, more than three times higher than the same quarter last year.
• Year-to-date losses are $6.5 billion, about two and a half times higher than the same period last year.
• The Postmaster General estimates that financial losses could exceed $14 billion this year and go to $21 billion a year by 2016 under a business as usual scenario.
• First class mail volume continues to decline, down about 4% on a year over year basis, as first class mail is replaced with email and other electronic communication vehicles.
• Despite the obvious declining health and viability of the current Post Office business model , the Washington political class has been unable to agree on both long term and short term fixes and has actually become part of the problem as the Congress continues to stymie logical and needed reforms being suggested by Post Office management.

Who wants to bet that no action will be taken until next year since our politicians are not courageous enough to face the problem during an election year, preferring to dodge the issue and allow the American taxpayer to take on a larger and larger role of bailing out another floundering government operation?

5) According to a USA Today article that was summarized in the May 18, 2012 issue of The Week magazine, 93% of immigrants applying for U.S. Citizenship can correctly answer six out of ten questions about United States history. In a survey, only 65% of native born Americans could correctly answer six out of ten of the same questions correct.y. Does anyone still think that we do not have a major crisis in this country with the under education of American kids?

6) According to a report from The Hill on May 21, 2012, the Health and Human Services Department has recently signed a $20 million contract with a public-relations firm to highlight part of the Obama Care legislation. This PR effort is supposed to educate Americans about how to stay healthy and prevent illnesses.

Now, while I am a great believer is preventive health care actions and life style choices, and I also believe that getting Americans to make better health, eating, smoking, and exercise decisions would be much more effective than most of the bureaucracy within Obama Care, why did the Obama administration commit $20 million to this effort just weeks before the Supreme Court is to rule on the Constitutionality of the entire legislation?


What if (hopefully) the Supreme Court finds the entire law invalid and we have to start over again with health care reform? Wouldn't the more prudent action have been to delay the signing of this contract for just a few weeks to see if the Obama Care mandate for the contract was still valid? Seems like the political class and Federal bureaucrats are back into their silly Ready! Fire! Aim! mode. Insanity.

7) Mayor Bloomberg of New York City created quite a stir recently when he announced that the city might make it impossible to buy 32 ounce or 64 ounces of soda in one container at one time since soda makes people fat. At about the same time he heartily endorsed Donut Day and has previously enthusiastically endorsed the annual hot dog eating contest in his city, a contest where contestants shove dozens of fat laden hot dogs into themselves in a very short amount of time. Little bit of hypocrisy, and insanity, Mr. Mayor?

8) And finally, proof that political class insanity does indeed cross international borders. According to a June 5, 2012 Associated Press report, Russia is about to pass a law that makes it more of a crime and more expensive to participate in an unauthorized public demonstration than to mishandle nuclear material. The AP report detailed various crimes currently in effect in Russia:

• Prostitution: A fine of 2,500 rubles ($75).
• Illegal use of an automobile: 120,000 rubles ($3,600).
• Nuclear materials storage violations: 5,000 rubles ($150) for regular citizens, 40,000 ($1,200) for public officials.
• Performing an abortion without medical qualification: 80,000 rubles ($2,400).
• Violating safety precautions in designing, building and using nuclear energy facilities that could cause danger or radioactive contagion: 200,000 rubles ($6,000).

If, as expected, the proposed demonstration bill becomes law, protesters whose rallies aren't officially sanctioned will face fines of up to 300,000 rubles ($9,000), up from the current 2,000 ($60). Seems like freedom costs a lot more in Russia while crime appears to pay more.

That should do it for this month. A serious fear and belief I have is that as the November election gets closer and closer, the insanity levels will increase to levels never seen before as the political class delays beyond November any hard decisions on the issues that face Americans today, wastes more taxpayer money on short term expenses that benefit only their reelection chances, leave silly and ineffective strategies and programs in place (such as the idiotic sense that unemployment benefits are good for the economy), continue to allow a dysfunctional TSA to muddle along while endangering the traveling public, etc.

The really serious fear is that even after the November election, the insanity will continue, regardless of who gets elected.


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/

Wasteful Government Spending Week - TSA Screws Up Again

This is a second in a series of posts regarding recent instances of wasteful government spending. Yesterday, we reviewed the continuing insult to American taxpayers relative to House of Representatives members having the American taxpayers pay for free auto leases for a subset of those politicians, many of whom lease luxury cars.

The purpose of the posts this week is to review what I call "random wasteful spending" that exists throughout most, if not all, of the Federal bureaucracy. This is different from what I call "systemic wasteful spending" that is anything but random. Systemic wasteful spending occurs everyday, every month, every year, in the same manner, almost like clockwork.

Examples of systemic wasteful spending have been reviewed many times in this blog, based on official and credible sources:

• Social Security loses over $100 million every year through waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud.
• Medicare loses between $70 and $90 billion every year through waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud.
• Medicaid loses $40 and $60 billion every year through waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud.
• Just one Federal unemployment program loses about $19 billion every year through waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud.
• The IRS fails to collect almost $400 billion every year in taxes that are legally owed to the Federal government by tax evaders.

This systemic fraud goes on and on and on. But random wasteful spending is no less important. It happens once or twice as the opportunity arises. Other recent random wasteful spending insults to the American taxpayer include the following atrocities:

1. General Services Administration personnel threw themselves a giant party in Las Vegas, a party that was thinly disguised as a conference, wasting about $832,000 of taxpayer money while doing skits that mocked those same taxpayers.
2. The State Department spent about $80 billion to build a consulate in northern Afghanistan and THEN decided that the location and the building that was supposed to house the consulate could not be adequately protected from Taliban and terrorist attacks.
3. The most viewed post in this blog reviewed how the U.S. Navy  spent about $300 million to build two new Navy ships and THEN decided that they were not needed and spent another $10 million to scrap the two ships that were never used.
4. The Obama administration has wasted a ton of taxpayer money by handing out Federal grants, loans, and loan guarantees to a whole spectrum of alternative energy companies (Solyndra, ENER1, Spectra, Beacon, etc.), making these expenditures fall into the random wasteful spending category since most of these alternative energy companies have already gone bankrupt or out of business before they could become systemic wastes of money.

Which brings us to today's main topic of random wasteful spending, courtesy of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). We have often talked about the ineptness of the TSA in this blog, citing numerous examples of where TSA employees have failed to do their job in screening out dangerous situations that could have resulted in catastrophic airline disasters or where other TSA employees were caught stealing from travelers luggage or using their clearances to smuggle drugs and other contraband through the airlines network.

However, today's waste is not centered on field TSA employees but rather the upper management staff of the TSA. According to recent news reports:

• The Huffington Post reported on May 5, 2012 that the TSA had purchased thousands of pieces of security equipment at a  taxpayer cost estimated at about $184 million, equipment that was supposed to be installed at airport checkpoints to screen airline passengers. 
• Unfortunately, that $184 million worth of equipment is collecting dust in government warehouses, a finding that came to light at a recent joint Congressional panel investigation.
• Adding insult to injury, not only is the equipment not being used, the Congressional panel found that 85% of 5,700 unused security units are being stored at a TSA warehouse facility in Dallas at an annual storage cost of $3.5 million.
• About 85 percent of the approximately 5,700 pieces of security equipment was stored for longer than six months; 35 percent had been stored for more than one year. One piece of equipment had been in storage more than six years.
• There were 472 carry-on baggage screening machines in the warehouse, 34 percent of which had been stored for longer than a year.
• The committee estimated the delayed deployment of TSA equipment "has resulted in a massive depreciated loss of equipment utility at an estimated cost to taxpayers of nearly $23 million."
• TSA had 1,462 explosive-trace detectors worth nearly $44 million in storage, far more than it could use in the 463 airports where TSA provides screening operations. When asked why the agency bought so many, agency officials testified they needed that many in order to get a discount, i.e. the "more you buy, the bigger the discount" theory of procurement even if you do not need the extra ones you bought to get the discount. Insanity.
• The Congressional investigation found that the TSA storage facility tried to hide about 1,300 pieces of screening equipment from Congressional investigators by giving  Congressional staffers a list of disposed items "that falsely identified disposal dates and directly contradicted the inventory of equipment." Great, lying to Congress in addition to wasting taxpayer money.

Three observations on this random act of wasteful spending. First, there is obviously a lack of inventory control here combined with a lack of good forecasting skills. Any successful organization knows how to put forth a good business plan that forecasts and anticipates its future asset needs and budgets and spends accordingly.

This does not appear to be a characteristic of the TSA. They appear to have been either bad forecasters of their needs or bad procurers since they obviously have massive amounts of unused and expensive equipment laying around idle. For this inability to efficiently operate a budget and an organization, someone needs to be fired at the TSA and replaced with professional inventory managers.

Second, I found the reader comments interesting relative to the Huffington Post article. Democrats blamed Bush since the TSA organization was created during his term. Republicans blamed Obama since the waste of $184 million was uncovered three and a half years into his administration. And that is a wider problem than $184 million of waste. As citizens we end up fighting among ourselves, blaming the other political side for whatever weekly government screwup that comes by.

Unfortunately, as we focus on blaming each other, the weekly screwups continue unabated and the political class never gets called to task. While I find it difficult to blame Bush for the waste so far into this administration, does it really matter who is to blame? If it is Bush's fault, remember that Congress was controlled by Democrats in the last two years of his administration and did nothing to change the waste mentality of Washington. Obama has been President for a long time and obviously systemic and random wasteful spending still occurs at horrific levels.

Regardless of blame, why don't we just focus on fixing the problem? That is the right course of action rather than expending so much energy yelling at each other. We need to hold the political class accountable and the Federal bureaucrats responsible for the rampant waste.

We can hold the political class responsible by implementing Step 34 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." Step 34 would remove politicians from their committee and subcommittee posts for not performing the duties required of that committee. In this case, any politician sitting on the Congressional committee responsible for this TSA screwup would lose their committee post and be replaced by some one else who might be a little more diligent in the jobs.

If this Step was in place, I would bet that Congressional oversight would be more extensive and effective since I doubt any politician wants to be publicly removed from a committee post. "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" suggests some processes that could be used to put this procedure in effect.

I see no other way of getting Federal bureaucrats in line other than to make an example of some of the non-performers by just firing them. It happens in real businesses, exceed reasonable inventory requirements with outlandish expenses of excess equipment, get fired. Do the same in government positions with taxpayer money, get fired. I would bet that like Step 34, if you make an example of a few bureaucrats, most of the others would step up their diligence in their job performance.

The first glimmer of hope in this area occurred when high ranking TSA officials were fired for misspending $832,000 of taxpayer money on their luxury Las Vegas party. If wasting $832,000 of taxpayer money gets Federal bureaucrats fired, I can see not excuse for not firing TSA bureaucrats who wasted $184 million, 221 times as much than the TSA waste.

Final observation, we need to implement term limits for every Federal politician, "one and done."  If systemic and random wasteful spending has gone on for multiple Presidential administrations and various configurations of Congress, maybe it is time to get rid of the long term members of the Washington political class and replace them with people that would actually care about how taxpayer money is spent.

Certainly seems like a better idea than continuing to yell at ourselves, solving nothing. Regardless of who is to blame, let's just fix the problem before we run out of warehouse storage space.

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/

The Transportation Security Adminstration - Shaking Us Down in More Ways Than One

As most airline travelers know, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is the Federal agency that is supposed to keep us safe when traveling, with their most visible responsibility being the screening stations and pat down routines that we all have to go through to get to our airline flights. It has been well documented that the TSA does not do the greatest job possible, with complaints of aggressive pat downs and groping and incidents where tools, guns, ammunition and other potential weapons got past the TSA screeners.

Now, a new investigation from the House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure identifies other areas where the taxpayer gets shaken down by the TSA, wasteful spending and inefficient operations. Their recently released investigative report, "TSA Ignores More Cost-Effective Screening Model" was released last week. A major finding from the investigation was the conclusion that a private business/Federal screening option, the Screening Partnership Program (SPP), does a much better screening job than TSA's own employees.

The SSP was established after the 9-11 attacks in 2001. The program allowed individual airports to opt out of TSA operated screening processes and employees and request the use of approved private screening contractors. These contractors would have to adhere to TSA standards and procedures, be pre-approved before an airport could use them, and would be subjected to TSA oversight. Starting in 2002, five airports initially used private company screeners and that number has increased to sixteen, with many other airports requesting this option over TSA's own employees.

Despite airports' desires to switch to private screening companies, their legal right to do so, and Congress' intent to allow them to do so under the law, the TSA unilaterally decided to stop approving new requests for private screeners. This Congressional investigation, according to the authors of the report, proved that the cost and financial justifications the TSA used to block new requests were invalid. Findings from the investigation include the following:

- Screening under private SPP screeners is far more effective and efficient than TSA screeners.
- The investigators estimated that private screeners were 65% more efficient and could reduce costs by 42%.
- If the nation's top 35 airports used private screeners, it is estimated that U.S. taxpayers would save over a $1 billion over the next five years.
- Congressional investigators concluded that the TSA "cooked the books" when doing their cost analysis, falsely increasing the costs of using the private companies vs. TSA's own screeners.
- When the committee compared the security operations at Los Angeles International Airport, which has TSA screeners, to the security operations at San Francisco International Airport, which has been using private screeners, they concluded that taxpayers could save $38.6 million a year if Los Angeles adopted San Francisco's operations model.
- The TSA has much higher job attrition rates than the private screening companies, resulting in high employee turnover, a less experienced staff, significantly higher training costs, and a very expensive mobile screening force that is flown and stationed around the country, at great expense, to temporarily fill the many TSA staffing needs.
- The United States is one of the very few governments around the world that operates its own screening staff, most other countries oversee private companies who do the actual screening.
- There are clear and significant advantages for forcing the TSA to approve five pending SPP requests.

Two observations here, one good and one bad. First, the good news. This is one of the few times in my life where I actually saw a Congressional committee do its job in a stellar manner. Most of the time, the Congressional committees seem to just go through the motions. This committee actually did an in-depth investigation, identified root causes of the problems, quantified the problems, and came up with the necessary changes listed below, all to the benefit of the American traveler and taxpayer.

The bad news. According to the committee, the TSA did not cooperate at all in this investigation, despite the Obama administration's claims that this was the most transparent Presidential administration of all time. The investigators claimed that the TSA did not comply with multiple requests from the Committee. If true, this is a disgraceful situation. A Congressional committee is trying to do its job under the tenets of the Constitution but administration bureaucrats refuse to cooperate, even if it would make airline travel safer, more efficient, and less costly for American taxpayers.

Not surprisingly, the investigators found evidence that TSA officials lied when they denied talking to union representatives about the SPP. This implies another example where the potitical class sells out the American taxpayer for votes, in this case, union votes.

As a result of this extensive investigation. the committee developed the following recommendations:

- The TSA should adopt the model for airport screeners that most of the rest of the world uses, i.e. TSA should not be the regulator, operator, and auditor at airports.
- The TSA should immediately approve any valid SPP request that was previously placed on hold and approve any valid current applications.
- The head of the TSA should not have blanket power to approve or disprove any airport's SPP request.
- The TSA should pre-qualify private screening companies to compete with SPP contracts.

This is good government in action. It is consistent with Step 1 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." That step would reduce Federal government spending by 10% a year for five years in order to get government spending under control. However, a major underpinning of Step 1 was a ground up review of all government operations. Such an effort would uncover inefficiencies and wasteful spending in every government nook and cranny, just like the Congressional committee did with this TSA analysis.

If this type of Congressional committee behavior and Step 1 were widely implemented, the American taxpayer would no longer be shook down by politicians that use government functions for votes and bureaucrats who would rather protect their turf than protect American lives and wealth.


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