November, 2014, Part 3, Political Class Insanity: Screwing Up The Army, Arming The Middle East Crazies, and More

It is the start of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity that has been dumped on us by the worst set of politicians to ever hold office in the history of this country. From wasteful spending to bad priorities to general ineffectiveness, the insanity rolling out of Washington and other political centers and governments around the country seems to be accelerating as the idiocy of our political times increases.

Last month we set a record by needing almost two full weeks of posts to get all of the insanity documented and discussed. Given what I see today, we will be hard pressed not to get close to or exceed that record of insanity this month. It keeps getting worse and worse and the effectiveness of the political class gets less and less.

1) The U.S. Army has a proud tradition of fighting and winning land wars over the centuries. It is the main component of any “boots on the ground” facet of American foreign policy. Which brings to the latest insanity out of the Pentagon, namely right out of the mouth of Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. At a recent conference he suggested that part of the U.S. Army be repurposed as “a coastal defense force.”

Say what? A coastal defense force against who? ISIS is marching through the Middle East, Russia is busy annexing parts of Europe, our southern border is being overrun with illegal immigrants and the top ranking person in charge of our armed forces thinks that the Army should be used to protect our coasts? From who?

Now, if he had said to protect our land borders with Mexico, that may have made at least a little sense. But no, he very specifically talked about coastal defense, a non-existent threat today if there ever was one. Insanity.

2) The October 31, 2014 issue of The Week magazine had a summary of an article from MarketWatch.com. The main thrust of the article is that from 1995 through 2012, American taxpayers paid out $11.3 million in farm subsidies to billionaire-owned farms and agribusinesses. Thus, non-millionaires were paying millions to billionaires, that is how upside down and illogical our political class and Federal government have become.

How many homeless and hungry Americans could have been taking care of with $11.3 million without having any trace of downside to billionaires? How many veterans would get much needed medical help without crimping a billionaire’s lifestyle? Shameful.

3) Very few people would disagree that the Middle East is a mess. Shiites fighting Sunni, religious minorities fleeing or fighting for their lives, Iran trying to go nuclear, Israelis fighting Palestinians, etc. A lot of different entities get blamed for the turmoil including ISIS, religious terrorists, poverty, and dictators.

But perhaps the worst element in the whole mess is not over there but right here in this country. According to an article from VOX.com, that was summarized in the October 10, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, in just the first seven months of this year, the U.S. exported $557 million worth of guided missile technology to more than twenty countries around the world. And more troubling,  Middle East countries were six of the top ten buyers.

This is just guided missile technology. This does not include the other arms and weapons that have been sold or given by the U.S. to various ground forces in the countries throughout the region. So maybe, just maybe, we are the ones causing a lot of the turmoil, using American taxpayer dollars, to make the Middle East more of a violent mess than it otherwise would be.

4) The Obama administration recently tried to make points with the fact that this year’s Federal budget deficit will dip below half a TRILLION dollars for the first time since Obama took office. Of course, they failed to point out the insanity that this lower annual deficit number is still higher than ANY deficit put forth by ANY previous Presidential administration.

They also failed to point out a recent analysis from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University which shows that Federal government spending will outpace tax revenue by $9 trillion from 2014-2024. The details of their analysis are highlighted in the following chart:

If this estimate comes true, it will add $9 TRILLION onto our already obscene $18 TRILLION national debt burden, resulting in a total national debt load of about $27 TRILLION or over $200,000 for every household in America. As you can see, unless the political class grows some backbone and finds a way to truly reform Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the main drivers of this ever growing national debt, the debt load will likely collapse the economy and our democracy long before ten years are up.

5) One last piece of insanity for today. The Heritage Foundation recently ran a nice summary of President Obama’s campaign fundraising activities (see chart below). While his administration has accomplished very little in the first six years of its run, one cannot deny that the President has been very busy doing political fundraising.

While he has been hopping around the country on strictly political junkets and activities, Americans are suffering through the worst economic recovery of recent history, the Middle East is spinning out of control, Russia is aggressively expanding its influence in Europe, the Chinese economy continues to outgrow ours, Iran and North Korea advance their nuclear weapons programs, etc., etc., etc. I think it can safely be said that when Presidential leadership was required, this President was more often out of town doing political fundraising or on the golf course.

According to the Heritage count, in less than six years in office, Obama has attended 426 political fundraisers or about 74 a year, an amazing 1.4 fund raisers a WEEK since he has been in office. Bush attended a total of 318 political fund raisers in his eight years in office, an average of less than 40 a year, a rate that is 46% less than Obama’s.

Add in Obama’s 200 plus rounds of golf and we see that this President has been out of the White House raising political funds or playing golf more than twice a week during his term. An insane focus on bad priorities in the face of a country with so many problems.

That will do it for today. A clueless Secretary of Defense, enriching billionaires, arming the Middle East crazies, exploding the national debt upwards, and an absentee President. So much insanity in such varied ways, and more to come 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

May, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 5: Tapxayers Pay For A Congressman's Crimes, Making Tanks Nobody Wants,The Illinois Fiscal Cliff and More

This is our fifth post this month in our monthly series nonpolitical class insanity. Every month we spend more and more time trying to keep up with the wasteful spending, idiotic programs and laws, and general ineptness of the American political class. This is a task that seems to get harder and harder to do every month as their incompetence seems to be growing exponentially.

1) There are still over twenty million Americans who are either unemployed or under employed throughout this nation. One reason might be because of what the following graph illustrates, as presented in a recent Independent Journal Review article:



Since 1978, the percentages of businesses being created every year (‘firm entry” rate) has generally been declining while the percentage of businesses being terminated every year (“firm exit” rate) has recently been increasing. These two trends crossed over in 2008 when the rate of business creation fell below the rate of business termination.

One could try and fine tune the data to their own political views and by blame patterns. However, the bottom line is that over the past 36 years, a time period when Democrats and Republicans controlled Congress and the Presidency at different times, no one in the political class was able to reverse the two negative trends illustrated in this graph.

Their economic incompetence as created a death spiral of business the business failure rate increasing and the business creation rate decreasing, getting us into the position where over 20 million Americans can not find a good job for themselves and their families. 

Einstein once said the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Our political class has been doing the same lame economic dance for 36 years, raising existing taxes and creating new business taxes, expecting different results but proving Einstein right after all: pure insanity. 

2) All parts of the Federal government are big wasters of taxpayer wealth but the Pentagon has to be one of the biggest black holes of waste. Recall in past posts that we have discussed the fact that government auditors have thrown up their hands trying to get their arms around the wasteful spending in the Pentagon and actually gave up, contending that Pentagon spending is so out of control that it is not possible to even audit and document the waste.

A recent example of how bad and insane Pentagon spending is concerns the production of the Abrams tank, a tank that is only made in one location in Ohio:

• The Army currently has more than 2,300 in active use around the world to serve its needs.
• Unbelievably, it also has another 3,000 in storage that it does not need or use.
• In the most recent budget agreement in Congress, another $181 m illion was authorized to continue production of more tanks that the Army does not need into the next year or so.
• Even those in the actual Army do not want more unused and unneeded tanks: “If we had our choice, we would use that money in a different way,” Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army’s chief of staff, told the Associated Press in April.
• Even the Pentagon’s assessments estimate that holding off on tank production and refurbishment for just three years would save the taxpayers $3 billion.
• But there are Ohio jobs and political careers at stake along with the financial results of General Dynamics who makes the tanks so the combination of corny capitalism and political cowardice in thousands of tanks being produced but never used.

So rather than restore the reductions in military benefit packages that Congress and the White House recently approved, rather than divert some of this wealth back to the taxpayer wallets or some other worthy cause such as job training, feeding the hungry, treating the addicted, housing the homeless, etc., our political class in Washington would rather just continue making unused and unneeded tanks. Pathetic.

3) Now this is a nice racket if you can get it. Unfortunately, you have to be a card carrying member of the Washington political class so god luck with that. Jess Jackson. Jr. was convicted of a number of financial felonies in connection with and his wife’s misuse and abuse of campaign contributions he was sentenced to two and half years in jail for his crimes. Remember those two words: “convicted” and “crimes.”

Despite having no mental problems for his entire life and his seventeen years in Congress, the former Congressman has suddenly developed a “mood disorder,“ allegedly happening as the Feds started closing in and examining his crimes. As a result of this sudden trauma to his odd, he has somehow been approved to receive a whopping $8,700 MONTHLY payment in Federal government disability pay. Remember those words, convicted and crimes, but still eligible to get $8,700 a month of taxpayer wealth for his mental state.

But it gets better. Despite him being “convicted” for his “crimes,” he is somehow still elibigle for an annual Federal pension of $450,000 a year. Thus, between his monthly $8,700 in disability payments and his annual $45,000 Congressional pension, he will be earning almost $150,000 a year despite having been :convicted for felonious “crimes.“ Again, great work if you can get it.

Thus, for doing nothing in the future, he will earn almost as much as if he was still a Congressman ($150,000 in pension and disability vs. a Congressional salary of about $170,000.) Even worse, at $150,000, he will be making about three times as much as what the median U.S. household earns in a year even though the members of that household have to go to a job everyday to get one third of what this convicted politician will earn. It does not get much more insane that this.

4) But it is not just rich Washington politicians that stick it to working Americans and taxpayers. Consider a recent, in-depth analysis done by the Taxpayer Union of America (TUA) relative to the horrid financial condition of the state government of Illinois:

• Just the pension liabilities for government workers in Illinois is an unreal $187 billion.
• This means that every Illinois household would have to write a check for over $35,000 just to pay for the current liability of the Illinois pension system.
• And that $187 billion is the estimate today, but given that the state political class and state government has not put any true reforms into place, that number is highly likely to grow in the coming years.
• The real insult is when you get underneath the $187 billion number and find 11,054 Illinois state pensioners now get more than $100,000 per year in pension payments, twice what the median U.S. household income level is. 
• By the year 2020, number will more than double to 25,000. 
• There are over 78,526 state pensioners receiving annual pension payments over $50,000. The TUA pointed out in their analysis that these robust pensions are funded by taxpayers who get an average Social Security pension of about $15,000.
• Funding those impossible pension liabilities is even more difficult since Illinois has the second highest unemployment rates at 8.4%, the second highest property taxes in the country, and the lowest rating in the country for its general operating bonds, making it difficult to raise more taxes when taxes are already so high and so many citizens are unemployed and contributing nothing to the tax revenue.
• Getting even further down into the TUA analysis on finds that someone named Tapas das Gupta has annual pension of $452,843, about nine times more than what the typical U.S. household earns in a year. 
• His estimated lifetime pension payout of $5,276,384 makes him a millionaire five times over.
• Edward Abraham has an Illinois state annual pension of $439,965, or $9,073,587 in estimated lifetime payouts according to the TUA. 
• Larry K. Fleming retired from Lincolnshire-Prairie View District 103 at the age of 55 and is now receiving $258,163 per year while only paying in $326,507 into the system during his career. In other words, he recoup his payments into the system in less than 16 months of pensions payouts. Disgraceful.

Again, nice work if you can get it as long as you and your union keep supporting the same crooked politicians in office.

Something has to break at some point. You cannot keep rewarding Washington politicians for non-performance and criminal performance and expect no consequences. 

You cannot keep having exorbitant pension payouts to your union supporters and not expect the entire Illinois financial system to crash at some point in time. 

You cannot keep building Army tanks that never get used and which contribute nothing to society except any ever increasing national debt burden without the Federal government eventually crashing under that burden.

And you cannot keep increasing the tax burden on businesses, both existing and new, and expect them to continue creating jobs and economic vitality as they did in the past.

Our politicians are taking us to the edge of a very steep cliff in so many ways and one day, probably sooner than later, we are all or some going over that steep cliff for a nasty fall. That is why we call it insanity, going over a cliff even though we see it ahead of us in so many ways.

To avoid that cliff, please consider joining our term limits effort 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

October, 2013 PoliticalClass Insanity, Part 4: Scamming Food Stamps, Scamming the Army, and Scamming The American Taxpayer

Please note: Nancy Pelosi recently made the outrageous comment that there was no waste to be cut in the Federal govnerment, i.e. EVERY dollar the Washington political class spends is essential to our country. Keep this insanity in mind as we go through this month's polticial class insanity, you will quickly see that she is very much out of touch with the reality of today's wasteful federal government.

This is our fourth post this month that documents and identifies the massive political class insanity and incompetence of our ruling politicians. From idiotic programs and laws to massive fraud and wasteful spending, every month reveals a whole new set of antics that bankrupt the country and its taxpayers while leaving major issues of our times unresolved.

1) Our first piece of insanity today comes from News 11 television in Baltimore. One store in Maryland, that changed its name to “Second Obama Express,” was one of nine convenience/grocery stores in the Baltimore area involved in a massive food stamp fraud operation. The dishonest, store owners illegally scammed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka SNAP) out almost $7 million in cash.

Nine retailers have been arrested for conspiring with customers to redeem food stamps illegally for cash. The customers then got a cash kickback from the transaction. No actual merchandise, food or otherwise, changed hands. The indictment gives a brief overview of how the scheme worked:

The indictments allege that the defendants exchanged EBT benefits for cash, in violation of the food stamp program rules. The indictments allege that the defendants typically paid half the value of the EBT benefits in cash. To avoid detection, the defendants often debited the funds from the card in multiple transactions over a period of hours or days. As a result of unlawful cash transactions, the defendants obtained more than $6,898,000 in EBT deposits for transactions in which the stores did not provide food.

One of the retailers indicted was Abdullah Alijaradi, 51, who was running the scam in two of his stores, one called D&M Deli and Grocery, and the other rejoicing under the euphonious name of “Second Obama Express.” According to the indictment, “From October 2010 through July 2013, Aljaradi allegedly obtained more than $2 million in payments for food sales that never occurred.”

Mr. Alijaradi and his scamming friends each face up to 20 years in jail. Sadly for the taxpayers, though, the money they stole from us is gone forever. Additional sadness since this is merely a drop in the bucket of the overall food assistance program fraid over these [ast few years.

2) This local government piece of insanity is really a lulu. Detroit is broke. Detroit has declared bankruptcy. Detroit does not have enough police to properly respond to 911 calls. Detroit public schools are atrocious. Detroit’s population has plummeted and is still dropping. Detroit does not even have enough money to keep all of its street light lit. Many, many property owners have stopped paying property taxes on the Detroit property they own. But…Detroit is going to build a $140 million, 3.3 mile light rail system in the middle of the city.

Whoa, back up to that last item: building a light rail system when so many other basic functions need to be addressed? Definitely insanity. And even worse, the American taxpayer is chipping in about $25 million to make it a reality. 

Although I am not a fan of giving Detroit any aid until they make the hard decisions on how they are going to turn the city around, I would much rather hire more police, improve the schools, buy them some street lights, etc. before throwing $25 million into a useless light rail system, the history of which of similar systems around the country is spotty at best. And those cities actually had people living in their cities and working in their cities. Insane.

3) We have often made the case in this blog that the Federal government has grown so large and so unwieldy that it basically looks like Jabba The Hutt from the Star Wars movies. A large, tyrannical  blob of a being that absorbs resources without any societal benefit in return. Well, an early August report from the Washington Examiner proves our Jabba hypothesis again.

The Defense Department has admitted that over the years it continued to do business with some contractors even AFTER those same contractors had previously been found to be doing unethical or illegal activities, wasting billions of taxpayer wealth in the process:

• Although only 30 defense contractors were criminally convicted of fraud over a recent three-year period, 11 of those 30 contractors have been paid a total of $354 million FOLLOWING their convictions,
• This conclusion comes from a 2011 report by the Pentagon's Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.
• The Department debarred, or banned, 164 companies but paid $15 million to a dozen of these same companies afterwards. 
• The Department also  reached settlements with 120 other companies and THEN paid $46 million for additional work to nine. 
• Apparently, misbehavior settlements do not prohibit companies from receiving future Department of Defense work.

Nice work if you can get it. Get a lucrative Defense Department contract and if you screw up, either with illegal or unethical behavior, you can still come back to the taxpayer trough for more anyway.

Despite being in business for a few hundred years, the Defense Department has gotten so large that its different systems and coding and company identification processes do not make it possible for one part of the Department to learn from the mistakes of another part of the Department. As a result, billions and billions of taxpayer dollars have probably been wasted over the years by incompetent or unscrupulous contractors.

And even when they try to fix the situation, their incompetence rises to the surface again. In 2008, Congress approved  the creation of a “Panel on Contracting Integrity,” led by the Pentagon's Inspector General and which focused on this type of contractor fraud. That effort came up lame and short, with only the following pathetic “accomplishments” to discuss five years later:

• The panel created a Defense Acquisition University training module of Procurement Fraud Indicators.
• It updated a handbook
• It created a web site to "increase awareness of procurement fraud"
• It hosted a conference
• It created a podcast about fraud
• It published an article.

Nowhere do they acknowledge that the panel actually identified the root causes of the problem, e.g. too many different systems with too many different codings, and how they remedied those root causes. Pathetic.

4) Let’s stay with the Department of Defense for a bit since they are so good at finding different ways to waste taxpayer wealth. According to an Associated Press article from September 28, 2013, a recent audit that was done on the Army revealed that the it had paid out $16 million over a two and one half year period to soldiers who were either AWOL or were actual deserters. 

Good work if you can get it. Run away from the Army for no good reason but still get paid. And this audit apparently was only for the Army, it does not include any similar, additional payment errors in the Air Force, Navy, or Marines.

The really sad part of this incompetence, besides the fact that the Army wasted $16 million that could have funded public White House tours for over 16 years, is that the Army was told a similar accounting mistake was done back in a 2006 audit. That audit found at least 68 soldiers, who were officially considered deserters, were wrongly paid a total of $684,000 AFTER they were designated deserters. Apparently, the Army learned nothing from this earlier wasteful spending.

Pathetic, and Nancy Pelosi seems to think that not one dollar should be cut from Federal government spending. Here is almost $17 million that could have been cut from the budget if only Congress and government bureaucrats were doing their jobs.

5) A few pieces of lunacy from the failed war on drugs. According to a National Review article that was summarized in the September 13, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, U.S. prisons hold about 100,000 American citizens who were arrested and convicted for using marijuana on a small scale. Not dealing, not growing, small scale usage. 

This costs the American taxpayer about $15 billion a year to lock up people for getting a little high in their life without doing anything to anyone else. $15 billion.

6) A similar article appeared in the Briefing section of The Week magazine on September 20, 2013. According to the article, since mandatory jail sentencing was introduced back in the 1970s, the U.S. jail population has quadrupled in size to 2.4 million citizens. We now hold the dubious honor of jailing a higher percentage of our citizens than every other country in the world including the dictatorships in China and Iran. 

The cost of this prison population comes out to $80 billion a year of taxpayer wealth. I am not saying that evil and bad people should not be locked up forever. However, at a cost of $80 billion a year and having the highest incarceration rate in the world, maybe we should force the political class to reconsider some of the laws that it has put on the books at such a high cost, both financially and humanely.

7) Several months ago President Obama okayed the shipment of a about a billion dollars worth of taxpayer wealth in the form of F-16 jet fighters and many, many Abrams tanks to the government of Egypt. Many of us found this expense to be atrocious, why do we need to arm the Egyptian armed forces with a billion dollars worth of goods when there was such an economic mess in this country?

We were told at that time by the political class that we needed to send this billion dollars worth of arms to continue to have “leverage” over present and future Egyptian leaders. What makes that strategy so stupid is the news that appeared in the September 6, 2013 issue of The Week magazine. The current leader of Egypt had recently accepted a $12 billon aid package from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.

Thus, who believes that we will have any leverage in Egypt in crunch time when others have given them twelve times as much in financial support? Another billion dollars wasted for no leverage, no benefit, and not loyalty in return. Are you listening, Nancy Pelosi, another billion dollars wasted.

The waste and ineptness rolls on. More tomorrow and probably another day or so afterwards is required to get it all in.

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

April, 2013 Political Class Insanity, Part 3: Tax Evading Politicians, Unwanted Army Tanks, and More

This is Act III in this month’s political class insanity review. The first two acts can be reviewed at the following links:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/04/april-2013-political-class-insanity_4.html

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/04/april-2013-political-class-insanity.html

Act III starts now.

1) The Democratic controlled Senate recently put together its first full budget since April, 2009, breaking standing law for the four years since then. Their budget calls for tax increases of over one trillion dollars on Americans over the next ten years. As regular readers of this blog know, this is a ridiculous position to hold given the wasteful spending, inefficiencies, and government redundancy that exist today in the Federal government, insanity that has been presided over by this Democratically controlled Senate since 2007.

One reason why Democrats are so fast to raise taxes is possibly because they do not pay all of the current taxes that they owe. The prime example of this comes from an article done by the Daily Caller on February 18, 2013. According to their research of D.C. tax records, Louisiana’s Democrat Senator Mary Landrieu is very big on raising taxes on the country, having openly advocated for higher taxes on Americans during Senate hearings last month. However, she seems a bit less excited and punctual to pay her own taxes:

According to public records available online in the District of Columbia’s “Real Property Assessment Database,” the D.C. government has penalized Landrieu $1,003.33, plus $202.62 in interest, for 2012 taxes on her mansion on East Capitol Street. It is unclear what the penalty is for.

Talk about hypocrisy, she wants to raise your taxes but is late paying her taxes, to late that penalties are now attached. But we should not be surprised when a politician calls for us to pay higher taxes but decides they do not have to pay even their current tax burden:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/02/washingtons-hunger-games-approach-to_11.html

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2011/01/politicians-creed-do-as-i-say-not-as-i.html

If you get into these posts you will find a whole cadre of politicians who have tried to avoid paying current taxes while they concurrently say that we should pay more in taxes.

2) A recent Federal government inspector general report and analysis found that in 2012, the Federal government spent about $337 million for shipping and postal costs. Of that $337 million, the U.S. Post Office’s share of that business was about $4.8 million or only about 1.42%. That’s right, one on the most incompetent and inefficient organizations in the history of mankind, the Federal government, finds that they cannot trust or use a sister entity within the Federal government to deliver its mail. I can think of no worst insult than to have the Federal government view you as less trustworthy and inefficient than itself.

3) CBS released a survey of its own on March 26, 2013 and the results should not surprise most Americans who are fed up with the insanity and idiocy of the American political class:

• CBS reports 80% of Americans are unhappy with Washington, and 30% are “angry” at the nation’s politicians.
• 30% are now “angry”, a result that is up 9 points since December, 2012.
• Those who say the U.S. is heading in the right direction is down 8 points to 32% in just one month.
• Those who say America is on the wrong track is up to 64% from 51% over that time frame.
• President Obama’s approval rating is down to 45% and his polling on most issues (including the economy) are down almost across the board from last month. Note: given that the sample for this survey significantly overweighted Democrats in the sample vs. Republicans, Obama’s decline in approval is probably worse than reported by this survey vs. if an honest, balanced sample size had been used.

Makes you wonder if those sitting in Congress and the White House really know how much we hold them in contempt for screwing up the country’s financials, liberties, and future.

4) A particularly galling aspect of the survey is in one of the subset of questions in the CBS survey. When asked what is the most important issue facing America today, 41% of the survey takers said it was the economy and jobs. The budget deficit/national debt, health care, and partisan politics were the next three most important problems.

Guns was the fifth most important problem facing the country but it is probably the problem getting the most attention from Washington politicians today. Another set of bad priorities with Washington out of touch with what Americans find important.

It could be that since he political class has not been able to fix the economy/jobs, national debt/deficit, health care, and partisan politics issues, they have just moved on to something that they will probably not be able to resolve either.

5) In the their never ending quest to take more and more of our money for their own selfish use, Gordon Wozniak, a Berkeley, California city councilman, proposed taxing citizens’ email usage during a recent council meeting. He believes that by taxing email usage, it would prevent professional marketers and spammers from sending out thousands and thousands of emails at one time. Taking the insanity one step further, Wozniak said an email tax could then be given to the U.S. Postal System to keep it in operation.

How stupid is this idea. First, how would this tax be collected and what would it cost to collect it. Since many people use free email services, the logistics to set this up would be expensive and offset much of the revenue it would collect.

Second, I am pretty sure that spammers and marketers are smarter and more clever than most politicians so I am confident they would find a way to get around the payment process.

Third, why would we flush good money after bad by giving it to the Post Office without fixing what ails the Post office from a financial perspective. Fix the root causes of the problem, do not just throw money at a continuing bad situation.

6) The October 5, 2012 issue of disgraceful wasteful spending by the Federal government. According to the article, in 2011 the U.S. Army made an unusual request to Congress: stop sending us new tanks.

Congress and the Washington political class ignored this plea, adding a Defense Department budget line that added $255 million to the overall budget for 42 new M1 Abrams tanks. Apparently, the Army already has 2,300 M1 tanks deployed around the world and 3,000 tanks sitting idle around the country. Thus, the Army’s plea not to send any more tanks to them.

But Ohio politicians, from both parties, pushed to get the tanks made using taxpayer money. Apparently, these tanks would be produced in an Ohio factory and the politicians did not want to see those factory jobs to go away or be reduced. Better to waste taxpayer money on useless military equipment than to give that money back to the rightful owners, the American taxpayers.

An Ohio Republican Congressman issued a most inane comment in defending the production of unneeded military tanks: "I think it’s in the best interests of the U.S. to defend our country." Could not agree more on the need to defend our country but with over 5,100 M1 tanks already in existence, and 60% of them not being used, I doubt another 42 tanks are vital to national security. Nice try Congressman but truly an idiotic statement and idiotic expense.

So, let’s review:

1. Politicians want higher taxes but do not pay their “fair share.”
2. The Federal government does not even trust its own postal system.
3. A recent poll proves what we all know, most Americans think Washington politicians are doing a lousy job.
4. The politicians are working on guns why Americans hold that as a very minor priority in their lives.
5. A silly politician wants to tax our email transmissions.
6. An even the Army wants to spend less on defense but our politicians do not.

Insanity, idiocy and bad priorities. And still more to come 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:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w