November, 2014, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: Politicians For Sale, Lost War On Poverty, More Wastebook Waste, 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.

This is our fourth post in this month’s series so the insanity continues to flow out of the political class and into our lives, our wallets, and our freedoms:

1) It is election time so it is no surprise that the many moneyed interests across the country are donating millions of dollars to various political campaigns in the hope of eventually billions of dollars in return via tax breaks, favorable legislation, etc. The top donors according to a recent Politico article to our broken political processes, in just the third quarter of 2014, are:

• U.S. Chamber ($28.4 million)
• National Association of Realtors ($18 million)
• U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform ($9.1 million)
• General Electric ($5.3 million)
• Boeing ($4.4 million)
• CVS Health ($4.3 million)
• NAM ($4.3 million)
• American Hospital Association ($4.3 million)
• American Medical Association ($4.2 million)
• Comcast Corporation ($4.2 million)
• Koch Companies Public Sector ($4 million)
• The National Association of Broadcasters ($4 million)
• Google ($4 million)
• National Cable and Telecommunications Association ($3.8 million)
• PhRMA ($3.7 million)
• United Technologies ($3.6 million)
• Lockheed Martin ($3.4 million)
• AT&T Services ($3.5 million)
• American Chemistry Council ($3.2 million)
• Occidental Petroleum ($3.2 million)

Just these twenty entities gave the political class almost $123 million in the past three months. Does anyone really think that the politicians that received these funds care more about our needs than those that gave them millions and millions of dollars? 

Never has there been more of a need for Step 6 from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government,” a step that would allow only individual American citizens to contribute to political campaigns. No businesses, no unions, no PACs, no industry trade groups, etc. should be able to contribute to political campaigns. Only individual citizens, exercising their individual First Amendment rights, should have a say in financing political campaigns.

2) Cato recently pointed out that the War on Poverty recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. Passed during the Johnson administration, this war was supposed to eliminate poverty in the country. According to Cato, the American taxpayer has spent $19 TRILLION in this “war,” making it the most expensive war in the history of the country

What do we have to show for our $19 TRILLION:

• About 46 million Americans, about one out of every seven, need monthly government food assistance.
•  The poverty rate of today is about 15%, about what it was fifty years ago.
• Millions of Americans are homeless and millions cannot afford basic medical care.
• As we reported a few days ago, much of the middle class cannot afford the luxuries that used to be taken for granted by the middle class so imagine how much worse off poorer Americans are if the middle class is under such financial assault.

Einstein once said that “the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” After fifty years and $19 TRILLION our politicians must truly be insane, doing the same things and programs over and over, since the war on poverty has been lost many times over.

3) We have already discussed some of the bigger wasteful spending follies that Senator Tom Coburn uncovered within the Federal budget earlier via his latest “Wastebook” research late last month at the following post:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/10/wastebook-2015-unrelenting-wasteful_27.html

But since then we have come up with a few more from the Senator that are just as absurdly wasteful of taxpayer wealth:

•  The Federal government spent $190,000 to study compost digested by worms.
• It spent $297 million for the purchase of an unused mega blimp.
• It spent $1 million on a Virginia bus stop where only 15 people can huddle under a small roof. 

Almost half a million dollars spent on stupidity. As we said when we first discussed the Senator’s research, how many drug addicts could have been treated for half a million dollars? How many meals for the homeless and hungry could have been provided for half a million dollars? A half a million dollars is a very, very small part of the Federal government’s budget but it would be a very large part of a homeless American’s day.

4) And while Americans are going hungry, homeless, and unemployed, how is the Washington political class treating themselves? It must be a nice feeling to know that you can control how much you get paid even with such a pitiful performance while in office:

• The Speaker of the House currently gets an annual salary of $223,500, and will receive a payment of roughly that amount, depending on the years of service, for the rest of his life. 
• He gets paid this amount regardless of how poorly Congress and the political class performs in serving the country and its citizens.
• This $223,500 is about five times what the median U.S. household earns in a year.
• But that is probably at the lower rung of Congressional retirement benefits according to Cato. For example, Nancy Pelosi will not receive annually $223,500 for life, but roughly double that amount since 1) she is a member of Congress, 2) she is currently the House of Representatives’ Minority Leader, and 3) she is a retired Speaker of the House. 

ŸAnd Lord knows she is certainly not worth anywhere near that much, given her pathetic track record while serving in Congress.

Several steps from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government,” would remedy this disgrace and wasteful spending:

1. Step 37 would subject Congressional pay to an annual “customer/voter satisfaction” survey with the results determining how much Congressional members are paid, based on selected performance criteria
2. Step 39 would impose term limits on all Federal politicians, preventing them from every accumulating so many nonproductive years in Congress and pumping up their retirement benefits at taxpayer expense.
3. Step 41 would prohibit any member of Congress with a net worth of over $3 million from drawing a salary or pension from their service in Congress simply because they can afford to go without such compensation, given their personal wealth. Serving the country should be a calling, not a career.

The political class should not control their pay treatment and pension levels, we should, based on their performance, not their greed.

Another day another set of insanity. Overpaid and unaccountable politicians overseeing useless government expenditures to a failed $19 TRILLION failed war on poverty to the rich getting richer via the political process not via investment and hard work. More insanity 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

June, 2014 Poltiical Class Insanity, Part 6: Bonus Post On Political Class Incompetence in DC and in....Swaziland

I know I promised that yesterday would be the last political class insanity post for this month but I have to break that promise. As quickly as I write up the latest lunacy, more crops up from what is turning out to be the worst set of Washington politicians this country has ever had to endure. However, I guarantee that this will absolutely be the last insanity post for this month no matter how much ineptness I come across in the coming days and weeks.

1) David Stockman is a well noted economist who served as Reagan’s main budget person during the Reagan administration. Recall that once Reagan, and to a great deal Stockman, worked through the economic and financial mess that Jimmy Cartyer left the country with, the U.S. economy took off on one of the greatest economic boom periods ever. Thus, Stockman has a proven track record and experience in the real world.

Which makes his latest analysis that much more depressing, given how accurate he has been in the past. This analysis reveals that

median household income in the United States peaked back in 1999 and has been decreasing at a steady clip over the past 15 years. 

Since 1999, when adjusted for price inflation, Stockman estimates that median household income is down by 9%. Thus, most Americans are worse off financially through both the Bush and Obama administrations, with the majority of the decline happening since the end of the Great Recession.

Over that time period, the Federal Reserve pumped in trillions of dollars into money with no sound basis in wealth or economics, the Obama administration spent well over $800 hundred billion dollars in a stimulus plan that was a financial disaster, and the U.S. government has run trillions of dollars in deficits. Stockman’s conclusion is simple: the political class has no clue what it is doing when it comes to economic analysis and policies, not if they have destroyed nine percent of Americans' wealth in just fifteen short years.

2) Stockman’s analysis was not just on a national level, it was on a state by state level so that we can see what states are losing the median household income game slower and faster. But you can probably already guess the answer to what part of the country saw the slowest deterioration in household income. 

Yes, the top “state” was Washington D.C. While the average U.S. household saw its median income slip 9% over the past fifteen years, the median household income in Washington did nine points better, i.e. it has not lost anything off of its median household income since 1999, better than every other state except for Wyoming, which also has not lost anything relative to income.

Again, as we have seen time and time again, those in the seat of power in Washington certainly take care of themselves before they take care of the rest of the country, if ever. The least impacted states from a loss of income perspective since 1999 were either in the D.C. metro area influence, (e.g. Virginia, Maryland, and D.C.) or were heavy into the energy industries (e.g. Wyoming, Texas, Oklahoma and North Dakota.) 

The rest of the country saw substantial loss of median income levels with some states such as Delaware, Ohio, Nevada, and Michigan seeing their household incomes drop over 21% at the same time that there was no drop in Washington. Thus, is you stayed in these states over the past decade and a half, you lost more than 20% of your buying power through no fault of your own while those in D.C. made sure they lost nothing in their buying power.

3) Two weeks ago, May 22, 2014, was the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Baines Johnson's much ballyhooed “War On Poverty,” according to a recent article put together by Rachel Sheffield. It was with that launch that the scope and expense of the Federal government expanded almost exponentially with the implementation of Head Start, Medicaid, public housing programs, and more.

What has happened in this “war” over the past fifty years is not pretty:

• $22 TRILLION has been spent over that timeframe according to the article but nary a dent has been made in poverty in this country.
• The percentage of Americans dependent on government has remained virtually unchanged since the 1960s.
• This $22 TRILLION has spawned about 80 Federal government welfare programs but has done little to eradicate poverty, as witnessed by the fact that almost 50 million Americans receive food assistance from the Federal government every month, an all time high no matter how you measure it.
• Head Start, according to Obama administration studies, has been turned into nothing more than a glorified Federal babysitting program with no educational or societal benefits beyond babysitting.
• Medicaid, along with its sister program Medicare, is likely to financially bankrupt the country unless something is done to fix the problems they face.

It continues to amaze me that the Washington political class can spend a mind boggling $22 TRILLION and get absolutely nothing in return. Trained seals working on a keyboard could probably do better since trained politicians in Washington got us nothing.

4) If you have been following the news, you know that a lot of our veterans have been suffering, and dying, as a result of incompetence and greed by those in Washington and this administration that operate the Veterans Administration. Although the budget to take care of our veterans has increase substantially over the past few years, that increased funding apparently has been wasted away and we are left with the latest Obama scandal of incompetence.

But although our veterans are dying, citizens in Swaziland are feeling healthier since the United States government is planning to spend $24.5 million to circumcise an estimated 150,000 to 250,000 male infants and males in Swaziland by 2018 to combat HIV. Let that bad priority sink in for a while. Rather than get our veterans the cancer treatments, the checkups, the medicines they need, we are worried about circumcision somewhere around the world in a country that I bet 99.9% of Americans could not find on a map.

Look, I do not consider myself a bad, heartless human being. It is my understanding that HIV is a major problem in countries like Swaziland, whereever in God’s creation it is located. But we have so much suffering and medical shortages right here in our own country in our own VA hospitals, we simply cannot afford to spend over $20 million outside the country in our own times of need.

Besides according to the grant, only “an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 males will be circumcised through this project contributing to a 65 percent coverage by 2018.” Thus, we are talking about a relatively small number of people that will get circumcised which means an even smaller number of people will get HIV in ….Swaziland, sometime in the distant future. In the meantime, many of our veterans are dying today in this country, a situation that might be made better with say the $20 million or so we are sending to…Swaziland.

5) The IRS has been around a long time. You would think and hope that they would have some semblance of competence by now. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has been around a long time. You would think and hope that the long time IRS would have a great handle on administrating the long time EITC.

Unfortunately, you would be wrong on both counts. According to a recent IRS Inspector General report, the IRS EITC program hands out billions in bad payments for earned income tax credit every year. Accordind to a recent Washington Examiner article by Kelly Cohen, the IRS gave out between $13.3 billion and $15.6 billion in improper payments last year. This fraud and inefficiency was accomplished despite the fact that there is a law that requires Federal agencies to crack down on fraudulent payments

Some of the $13.3 to $15.6 billion went to people who did not qualify for the credit. In other cases, an eligible person was paid the wrong amount. According to the Inspector General’s report, for the third year in a row, the IRS has failed to put together a corrective plan to reduce this improper payment rate and fraud nor has it provided all required information for the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act of 2010. 

The IRS acknowledged there is a problem with EITC payments and said it was working to resolve the issue. However, given that they have known of the problem and leakage of billions of dollars for three years, I bet we are not looking at a quick resolution of this embarrassment and disgrace.

Just as an aside: how many veterans could have received proper and deserved medical treatment if that $13.3 billion had not been lost to IRS incompetence and had instead been diverted to the Veterans Adminsitration? Just a thought.

So kids, what did we learn from the numbers today: potential and future problems in Swaziland are more important to our politicians than real problems our veterans face today, as always, DC politicians take care of their own financial needs before ours, the IRS still cannot do anything right, and much like the war on drugs, we have also lost LBJ’s Great Society’s “war on poverty,” spending and wasting $22 TRILLION in the process.

Given all of this insanity of these numbers, please consider joining our drive for term limits at the following website:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

Because really, how much worse could it get if we changed out every incumbent politician who cared more about our citizens than themselves or those in ….Swaziland.

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

February, 2014 Poltiical Class Insanity, Part 2: Our Failed War On Poverty, Too Many Millionaires In Congress, Our Kids Living In Poverty, and Other Political Class Failures

This is our second part of what could be a long series in our monthly review of political class insanity. Every month we have to spend days reviewing and discussing the myriad of ways that the political class wastes taxpayer wealth, passes ineffective legislation, screws up government operations, and adds to the mindset of political corruption and greed.

1) According to an article from The Atlantic, that was summarized in the December 27, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, while homelessness has fallen 4% nationwide over the past year, it has risen 13% in New York City and Los Angeles. In fact, one out of every five homeless persons in this country lives in either New York City or LA. 

Thus, it appears these two big city mayors, who have been traveling around the country preaching gun control, have failed to take care of the people they were elected to take care of, the citizens of their cities. Maybe a little more time in the office and a lot less time traveling for by these two mayors would have resulted in a little less suffering of their hometown homeless.

2) We have often reviewed the reality of how we have lost the war on drugs long ago. We spend an inordinate amount of taxpayer wealth locking up, feeding, and tending to low level dealers and recreational users of drugs, we have seen many lives destroyed by drugs since we spend much of our drug-related wealth on detention and law enforcement rather than treatment, we have seen our rights violated in the name of drug control, our idiotic drug policies have created wealthy and violent drug cartel crime syndicates around the world, etc.

But most of the political class at the Federal, state, and local levels of government continue to fight the losing battle against drugs, a losing battle that may be at odds with what most Americans want. According to a CNN report that was summarized in the January, 14, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, 55% of Americans now favor the legalization of marijuana, a level that is up from 18% in 1987. Only 35% of today’s Americans oppose legalization.

Thus, the majority want to legalize at least marijuana, a majority number that seems to be trending higher while the politicians in this country want to continue down the losing path of a war on drugs. Just another example of the major disconnect that today’s politicians have with reality and common sense.

3) One of the American political class’s most tragic screw ups over the past several decades is the recent news out of Iraq that al Qaeda terrorists have gained physical control of a 400 mile swath of land in western Iraq. This area includes the Iraqi city of Fallujah.

For those of you that do not remember Fallujah, it was the scene of major fighting for U.S. forces when they were in Iraq, fighting that accounted for about 1,500 U.S deaths out of the 4,400 U.S. deaths of the entire U.S. Iraqi military operation. It is impossible to calculate how much taxpayer wealth was spent to free that area of terror elements, but given that 1,500 U.S. service personnel lost their lives, you can bet the cost was in the tens of billions of dollars.

And now we can safely say that 1,500 lives and billions of dollars were spent for nothing, given that their sacrifices have left the area right where it was ten years ago, a hotbed of terrorist activity and control. We never should have gone into Iraq in the first place but once there, it would have been nice to have left behind some permanent good and change, a wish that the American political class has screwed up from day one.

4) According to a report from Slate.com that was reported in the January 24, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, for the first time ever, most members of Congress are millionaires. This finding comes from the Center for Responsive Politics.

At least 268 of the 534 members of Congress appear to have a net worth of over $1 million. Makes you wonder: 1) how many of them were not millionaires before they entered Congress but could then dip into the corruption treasure chest of Washington, 2) how many politicians are richer after they leave Congress than when they entered Congress, and 3) do we really think that rich politicians have any idea how regular Americans are suffering in these dire economic times and also have the compassion, drive, and intelligence to resolve the economic plight of ordinary Americans?

5) Fifty years ago, Lyndon Baines Johnson launched the “war on poverty,” a “war” that appears to be just as unsuccessful as the lost “war on drugs.” Since that day fifty years ago, the Federal government has spent $16 TRILLION, almost the equivalent of our current national debt, to try and get rid of poverty in America. How well have Washington politicians done in this drive:

• Today, almost 50 million Americans need Federal government food assistance every month, up almost 50% just in the past few years.
• There are over 20 million Americans who are unemployed or under employed as a result of faulty and idiotic economic policies coming out of Washington, policies and failures that contribute to poverty.
• About 15% of Americans are living below the government’s poverty line, a percentage that while it has varied over the years is still not to far away from what it was 50 years ago.
• Government anti-poverty programs are so bad that in 2012 alone, all levels of government threw about $1 TRILLION at the problem, or about $20,620 for every American living in poverty. 

Thus, theoretically, if that $1 TRILLION had just been sent as a check to every poor person in American, a family of four living in poverty would have received over $80,000, about 60% higher than the median household income in this country, a startling indication of how inefficient and corrupt current political class anti-poverty programs are today.

Thus, if the “war on poverty’s” goal was to substantially reduce or eliminate poverty in the richest country in the history of the world, it has been an unadulterated failure. As Robert Samuelson said on the subject in a recent Washington Post article, “Government is fairly good at handing out money, it’s less good at changing behavior.” I would paraphrase his quote to read: “Politicians are really good at spending money, they are less good in achieving a positive result when spending that money.”

Einstein once said: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” So it must be insane when the American political class does the same thing over a fifty year period, constantly expecting a different result but getting the same result: money constantly spent, poverty constantly remaining.

6) Speaking of U.S. poverty, consider a related article that was in a recent issue of Business Week magazine. Despite spending about a trillion dollars a year on all anti-poverty programs, the percentage of U.S children living in households with incomes below the 50% national median level of income is 23.1%. In Germany and France that percentage is 9.5%, in Canada that percentage is 14%, and in Britain that percentage is 10%. 

Something is terribly wrong in how we operate our country’s financials and tax streams when U.S. politicians can somehow take a trillion dollars and still have almost quarter of U.S. kids living in households earning less than the median income level while other countries can do so much better. I do not have the answer but I am smart enough to realize that we need to change what we are doing and better manage our money to get better results in the anti-poverty game. 

We somehow need to take Einstein’s advice and either force our existing politicians to get more creative and intelligent in this area or dump them out of office and find some smart people to do the job. How much worse could it get for a trillion dollars worth of wealth that today gets us via little the useless yet expensive programs the existing political class continue to operate?

That’s enough insanity for today, it can get very discouraging doing these reviews. There is so much suffering so much lost potential, so much waste that if someone, somehow had a stitch of intelligence, will, and leadership, I truly believe that the many problems facing this country cold be resolved. Unyielding poverty levels, high, chronic unemployment, under education of our kids are solvable problems. They are just not solvable by the current class of politicians running the country, most of whom do not have the intelligence, the will, and the leadership to do things differently as recommended by Einstein.

If you feel the same way, please consider joining our drive to impose term limits on current Washington politicians. Let’s get the long standing, long failing incumbents out of office because really, how much worse could it get if we replaced every member of Congress with new blood and new ideas:

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