Love My Country, Loathe My Government

President Obama's State Of The Union Speech - More Bad Math, More Deception

2012-01-27T04:16:00.001-05:00

It is pretty obvious from the President's actions leading up to the state of the union speech, and his assertions within the speech, that rather than run on his record in office, which is a disaster in so many ways,

(http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/01/88-reasons-why-president-obama-is.html)

he would rather devolve into class warfare, rich vs. poor, as a campaign strategy. I personally find this brand of Chicago politics despicable, but given his failure in office, it may be the only way he can get reelected, set one group of Americans after another.

If the President and his supporters would do some simple math, it would become very clear that his numbers and strategy of taxing the rich will do nothing to solve the major economic and other issues facing this country. In fact, from my perspective, I am still struggling trying to figure out if the President is lying, ignorant, or just plan bad at math.

The following analyses try to decide whether it is lying, ignorant, or bad math skills that the President is guilty of. All of the following numbers and simple math calculations are based on official U.S. Federal government data from the official IRS website. The data is not from the Republicans, Fox News, Tea Party, social conservatives, neo conservatives, etc.

Let's start with the country's 2009 IRS tax data (2009 is the latest year this data is available for) and with following graph (double click on the graph to get a better, clearer view):

The graph plots the percentage of income taxes paid by income

bands taken from all of the country's 2009 IRS tax returns. What becomes very obvious is that as a tax filer makes more money/has higher income, the percentage of that income that is taken by the IRS grows substantially.

In fact, by the time a tax payer gets to $200,000 in adjusted gross income on the IRS tables, that payer is paying almost 20% of their income to the Federal government. As Americans make more than $200,000, the percentage paid to the Feds continues to go up, on average, so that most people making over $500,000 are paying about 25% of their income to the Federal government.

By using Warren Buffet and his secretary as props in his politics, he tries to infer that all Americans making a lot of money in this country pay less as a percentage of their income than middle class and poorer Americans. As this graph shows, on average, this is ignorance, lying, or bad math skills. While there may be a few cases where rich Americans pay a low percentage in taxes, they are definitely exceptions, as the graph shows. To imply otherwise, is nothing more than deception.

If you look at the lower end of the graph you find that about 58% of American tax filers pay less than 5% of their adjusted gross income in Federal income taxes. And about 90% pay less than 10% of their income in Federal income taxes. Thus, it is hard to believe the President when he portrays Buffet and his secretary as the rule rather than the exception when so many Americans pay so little in Federal income taxes.

But let's dive further into the IRS facts and you decide if the rich get such a free deal at the expense of the poor in this country:

Only .17% of tax filers in 2009 had adjusted gross income over a million dollars. Thus, it is hard to believe that taxing these few people more would alleviate the country's ills when there are so few of them (only about 237,000 out of 140,000,000 tax filers).
These .17% of earners account for 9.5% of the IRS adjusted gross income totals but pay 20.5% of all Federal income taxes listed on the 2009 IRS tables.
The Federal income tax rate of these earners in total is about 24.4%, compared to the 90% of filers who pay less than 10%.
If we redefine rich as those Americans with adjusted gross incomes of more than $200,000, we find that these earners account for only 2.8% of all American tax returns.
They also account for only 17.1% of the country's income but pay 50.2% of the country's Federal income taxes.

Thus, it is very obvious that Obama's tax the rich/fairness approach to politics is totally out of touch with reality. The vast number of people in this country that make a lot of money, also pay a lot of that money in Federal income taxes on both an absolute basis and a percentage basis. Warren Buffet and his secretary are misleading props, the IRS tax tables are the real thing.

But let's get a little crazy with the math. Let's assume that Obama was able to tax those earning over a million dollars at 100%, i.e. he could confiscate all of their earnings and redistribute the money to everyone else. That would result in all non-millionaire earners getting about $3,917. But he could only do that for a year or so since who would bother going to work and earning over a million dollars if Obama was just going to seize all of it?

If that happened, within a year or so every non-millionaire earner would have to pay additional Federal income taxes of $5,283 a year since those non-millionaire earners would now have to cover the taxes that used to be paid by millionaire taxes. Not a good deal.

Let's idle back the math. Rather than confiscating 100% of the millionaire earners income, let's assume Obama only confiscated 10% more of it. Thus, every non-millionaire earner would receive $392 a year if that 10% was equally distributed or about $1.80 a day. Hardly worth the effort.

The problem with this approach to taxing the rich class warfare is that it does not solve the major problem facing the country: the Federal government is spending and wasting far more money than taxing the rich can ever cover. The Federal deficit in 2011 was about $1.6 TRILLION.

If Obama confiscated all of the millionaire earnings, assuming that 2009 tax profiles were similar to 2011 tax profiles, the Federal government would have increased their revenue by about $549 billion. In other words, taking all of the earnings of Americans making more than a millions dollars a year in adjusted gross earnings would have covered only about a third of the spending deficit that Obama's administration runs up in one year.

Thus, taking less than 100% of millionaires' earning would cover even less than Obama's outrageous deficit spending. We have a spending issue and waste issue with the Federal government in this country, we do not have an under taxation problem.

Many times in this blog we have documented how the Federal government bureaucracy loses over $500 billion a year to incompetence, fraud, and criminal activity in the Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and tax evasion programs and areas of responsibility. Fixing these problems would go a lot further to solving the country's financial and other problems than raising taxes on .17% of the country's income earners.

But that would require the President to actually do some real work, to get into the detail's of governing, to do things that are impactful for the good of the country rather than trivial for the good of his political career. Governing should be more than ignorance, lying, and bad math skills which serve no real purpose other than class warfare for political gain.

One last fact to keep in mind. Consider the following graph based on the same IRS data:

This data graphs the number of millionaire earners from an

adjusted gross income perspective over the past several years. The vertical line shows when the Democrats took over control of Congress after the November, 2006 midterm elections.

Since then, the number of American millionaire earners has decreased considerably through 2009. From just under 400,000 millionaire tax filers in 2007, within just two years that number had dropped to 237,000 under a Democratic Congress and first year of a Democratic Presidency (about a 40% drop). Since millionaire earners accounted for 20.5% of taxes paid in 2009, as the number of millionaire earners decreases, non-millionaires will have to pay more and more to cover the deficit and government expenses.

At his rate, a 40% drop in millionaire earners in just two years, this argument of ignorance lying and bad math skills might be moot soon since it looks like this Presidency is in the business of depopulating the millionaire tax bracket altogether.

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All of the above data, analyses, and conclusions are based on facts and figures provided by the Federal government itself. For another view of the President's state of the union speech, consider the following link top the Heritage Foundation for their views on the misleading statements and statistics and other deceptions from the state of the union speech:

http://blog.heritage.org/2012/01/25/fact-check-10-dubious-claims-from-obamas-state-of-the-union/

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

Checking In With Our Lost War On Drugs - January, 2012 Edition

2012-01-26T04:36:00.000-05:00

On a semi-regular basis we check in with our lost war on drugs to see how bad it has gotten. Despite decades of trying to stem the illegal flow of drugs from Mexico and beyond, probably spending hundreds of billions of dollars in the process, nothing has really changed except for the fact that Mexico is on the verge of turning into an out of control narco state.

To illustrate, consider the latest news reports on the subject:

- According to an Associated Press report from December 31, 2011, the powerful Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel is expanding its reach from Mexico into Guatemala in the illegal methamphetamine market. Consider the numbers behind the drive to expand drug cartel meth production to labs in Guatemala:

Mexican authorities seized 675 tons of a key chemical used in meth production just in December alone. While the 675 tons sounds like a lot, imagine how much of the chemical was not seized and how many meth hits could be produced by what is probably much more than 675 tons.
All of the 675 tons was heading towards the cartel's labs in Guatemala where that government seized over 7,800 barrels of other meth chemical precursors throughout all of 2011. This is the equivalent of about 1,600 tons.
In all of 2011, the Mexican authorities seized 1,200 tons of meth chemicals.
Thus, according to the article, the total amount of chemicals seized within or heading to Guatemala could theoretically produce more than a billion one-gram doses of pure meth, and billions more if cut to street-level purity.

40 years after going to war against illegal drugs, law enforcement authorities have seized enough meth precursor chemicals that would have created at least a billion hits of the final drug. A safe assumption is that the chemicals that were not seized are being used to create billions and billions of meth hits. Not really successful warfare.

- A January 8, 2012 Associated Press article reported that a Mexican city worker had been gunned down by suspected drug cartel gunmen. The worker was also a part time journalist who wrote articles for the local newspaper. This comes on the heels of nine other Mexican journalists who had been assassinated in 2011.

Imagine the outrage that would have occurred if nine American journalists had been killed by drug cartel gunmen just for doing their job. Democracy suffers considerably when a free press fears for its life from criminal and drug cartel elements, which apparently is the current situation in Mexico.

- Moving on to another large Mexican drug cartel, in a January 8, 2012 Associated Press article, Mexican police reportedly captured an alleged member of the Zetas drug cartel who is considered the planner behind a casino fire that killed 52 people in the northern city of Monterrey last August. The theory behind the arson crime is that the owner of the casino had refused to pay protection money to the Zeta cartel.

Just another way for ordinary Mexican citizens to worry about whether or not they will get killed by cartel activity going about their daily lives. Over 50 citizens died in the fire for just having a good time at the local casino that the Zetas decided needed to be destroyed. They had nothing to do with drug cartels, they were just relaxing. Imagine the outrage if a Vegas casino or the local bowling alley in your home town had been torched and 50 Americans killed for doing nothing.

- The same article reported that since the Mexican Federal government launched a focused effort to wipe out the cartels several years ago, probably 45,000 Mexicans had died as a result of the conflict between the government and the cartels and between the cartels themselves.

What if all of the residents of Coral Cables. Florida had been murdered? What if all of the residents of Binghamton, New York had been murdered? What if all the residents in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the state capital, had been murdered? What if the same thing happened in the state capitals of Missouri, New Hampshire, and Washington state, all of the residents of their state capitals had been murdered?

All of these U.S. towns and cities have about 45,000 residents. Imagine the reaction and horror we would have had if the Americans in these towns had been wiped out as a result of our lost war on drugs like what had happened in Mexico. We would be demanding the Federal government take immediate action. The fact that the drug problem in this country causes 45,000 Mexicans to die, and not Americans, results in hardly a a rise.

Looks like nothing has improved since the last time we reviewed this situation. The cartels are extending their reach into other countries. They have gotten so large and powerful that they are transporting thousands of tons of chemicals around the world as if they were a multinational corporation. The cartels' violence has threatened democracy through the intimidation of journalists. Ordinary citizens go about their lives newer knowing when their paths will tragically cross the violence of the cartels. The equivalent of well known American towns and cities are wiped out for no reason.

And let's face it. A lot of this chaos is a result of the cartels feeding a huge demand for illegal drugs in the United States. And that demand for drugs that are produced from far away is the result of our decades long failure of the war on drugs. And that situation is unlikely to change at least for another year. In an election year, no politician, from Obama on down, is going to take any risks on re-examining our approach to illegal drugs. Thus, at least another year will go by where democracy declines, innocents are killed, and the drug cartels' reach and power expand.

Which is sad because Step 26 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" suggests a process to take a totally new, ground zero approach to examining all facets of the drug plague and deciding what to do about this dire situation. All it requires is a little leadership and courage from our political class to move us off of this obviously losing strategy.

Consider what is at stake: loss of democracy via the intimidation of journalists, loss of national sovereignty when criminal enterprises threaten legitimate governments, innocents being killed, Americans suffering the consequences of addiction. Sounds like a worthy cause for our leaders to undertake. Unfortunately, there are U.S. elections to be won which means freedom, sovereignty, killings and addictions will need to wait at least another year, given the selfish history of our politicians.

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/

Who Is To Blame For Our Economic Crisis? An Analysis In Pictures

2012-01-25T08:06:00.000-05:00

One of President Obama's major faults is his inability to take responsibility for anything that has happened during his time in office. He always looks backward to make sure others get the blame for things that go wrong rather than looking forward to deal with the present situation and develop the solutions needed to resolve the issues. I truly believe that his ego is incapable of believing anything he did, any program he implemented, or any strategy he approved went wrong.

It is always other factors that cause his administration's failures. It is the fault of the Bush administration, it is the fault of the Japanese tsunami, it is the fault of Congress, it is the fault of the Republicans, it is the fault of the Tea Party, it is the fault of ATM machines (that eliminate jobs), it is the fault of the Constitution, etc. A true leader would deal with the reality of the present situation and look to move forward with solutions rather than wasting time and energy looking backwards for blame.

But who is really to blame for our country's economic situation of high unemployment, high national debt, out of control government spending, etc.? Are all of our nation's woes directly attributable to one man and only one man, namely George W. Bush as the Democrats claim? Did Democrats Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama have nothing to do with our economic plight? Is the Obama administration dong anything positive to get us out of the economic malaise?

One way to analyze these questions is to look at reality. In other words, let's look at the data. Rather than deal with opinions, politics, and biases, the reality is in the numbers. Most of the numbers and graphs that follow are from official U.S. government sources. The data does not come from Fox News, tea party organizations, or the Republican party. You can argue politics and opinions, you cannot argue the historical numbers.

Disclaimer #1: up until the November, 2010 midterm elections, I had never voted for a Republican for national office in my life, I am 58 years old. I was nowhere close to being a fan of George W. Bush. His Presidency and associated antics were the main drivers and inspiration behind my writing, "Love my Country, Loathe My Government."

Disclaimer #2 - The following graphs of data and reality are in different forms since many times I could not get my hands on the original data and had to lift the graphs in the format they were in. Thus, I apologize for the inconsistency of the look of the graphs but the data and the reality they portray are accurate.

You can double click on any picture to blow it up for a better view.

The above graph displays the amount of absolute dollars the Federal government spent beyond the amount of money it collected in taxes and fees since the 1990s. One of the constant accusations this administration throws at the Bush administration is that the so-called Bush tax cuts caused massive budget deficits and caused the economy to crash.

However, based on the reality of these numbers in this graph, that is an apparently erroneous accusation to make. While the Bush tax cuts did reduce tax rates substantially, it apparently did not result in ballooning Federal deficits. In fact, as you can see from the graph, the annual deficits were actually decreasing during the middle of the Bush Presidency and were usually in line with the deficits early in Democrat Bill Clinton's Presidency.

This is a true statement until the November, 2006 midterm elections take place and the Democrats take control of Congress. They did not take office until January of 2007 and could not significantly impact government spending in 2007 since that 2007 budget was already set in 2006 when the Republicans controlled the White House and Congress.

However, look what happens after 2007 when the Democrats control Congress and the Federal budget (as illustrated by the vertical line in the graph) and then add the White House to their control in 2009. Deficits skyrocket on the Democrat's and Obama's watch, reaching heights that are multiple times higher than any Bush administration deficit. Thus, if deficits are bad, most of our deficit damage has been done when the Democrats and Obama controlled most parts of the government.

Bush can be faulted in the last two years of his time in office for not reigning in 2008 and 2009 budget deficits coming out of a Democratic Congress. But under the Constitution, Congress finalizes the budget for the government and that was under the control of Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

This graph is a slightly different way of looking at the Federal government's deficit spending. Rather than just looking at absolute dollars, this graph looks at annual budget deficits as a percentage of our GDP. The reason to look at this ratio rather than the absolute dollar view is to see if the nation's economy is big enough to handle the actual dollars being overspent.

For example, if your household budget is $10,000 and you overspend it by $5,000, you have a 50% budget deficit, not a good thing. However, if you have a $100,000 household budget and you overspend it by $5,000, it is only a 5% budget deficit and is much more manageable.

At the Federal government level, this ratio graph shows us basically the same story we discussed above. The budget deficit situation was improving through the middle of the Bush administration and was in line with the historical deficit to GDP ratio performance. In fact, this measure of deficit spending was actually better than Clinton's performance early in his administration.

However, once the Democrats take control of Congress in 2007 and the Presidency in 2009, the government's deficit ratio skyrockets to orders of magnitude larger than those run up during the Bush administration. Tough to blame Bush when he did not control much of the the Federal government over the past five years of budget deficits.

This graph does not look at deficits but calculates a ratio of government spending as a percentage of our GDP. The theory behind this graph is that government spending is a relative measure. You can safely spend more if the economy is large and growing.

Historically, this ratio of Federal government spending to GDP has stayed around 35% both during the Clinton and Bush administrations and administrations prior to them. However, once the Democrats take control of Congress and the White House, this ratio goes haywire in the wrong direction with government spending growing significantly as a percentage of GDP.

Again, Bush can be claimed for not keeping a Democratic Congress's spending under control but it was the Democrats in Congress, and later the white House, that have allowed the reckless spending to grow unabated.

President Obama made the now infamous claim that if the country did not spend $800 billion in economic stimulus, the nation's unemployment rate could soar as high as 8%; He did get to spend and waste that $800 billion and the unemployment rate soared well past his 8% ceiling and has stayed well above 8% for a very long time. Is that the fault of the Bush administration?

This graph would indicate probably not. The unemployment rate was actually coming down throughout the middle of the Bush administration and for several years was actually lower than the unemployment rate during the Clinton years.

However, the same phenomenon occurs once the Democrats take control of Congress in 2007. Within a year, the unemployment rate is rising, once the Democrats in Congress can start implementing their agenda and budgets and skyrockets once the Democrats take control of the White House. If Bush is to blame for today's high unemployment, as Obama would have us believe, than Obama, Pelosi, and Reid also have to take a lot of the blame since Bush has been gone for over three years, the Democrats have not.

This graph tracks the average monthly housing prices in the U.S., from the early 1970s to now. The green line is the actual average price and the red line is that same series of data adjusted for inflation. Thus, the red line is really the more accurate depiction of average housing prices over time.

As the graph shows for almost thirty years, the average price for a house in the U.S. was pretty steady at about $150,000 with maybe a small upward trend inherent in the data. However, towards the end of the Clinton administration, housing prices begin to move off of that historical position and start trending dramatically and dangerously upward, resulting in a housing price bubble that bursts in the 2007 - 2008 time frame as the country's economy implodes.

Given that Bush was President for most of this bubble it is difficult to blame anyone else but his administration and the Congressional people at that time. It amazes me that no one in the Bush administration, the Treasury Department, The Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Housing and Urban Development, Senate housing and banking committees, House of Representatives housing and banking committees or anyone in the massive Federal bureaucracy did not look at a chart like this in the 2004 - 2005 time frame and say, "We have a problem." Didn't the Bush administration or some part of Congress have at least one smart economist on staff that could have recognized what now looks like a classic economic bubble and raised some red flags?

The Democrats, however, do not get off scot free on this major scree up. The Bush administration tried dozens of times to get strong regulatory oversight of the two Federal housing giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, significantly strengthened. However, Congressional Democrats always blocked that necessary move, mainly because Fannie and Freddie's executives made sure that large campaign money donations constantly flowed to Democratic politicians. One has to wonder if the Great Recession might have been less severe if Bush had not failed in getting his regulatory request instituted.

This graph depicts the number of Americans employed in non-farm jobs as a percentage of the total population. If you look at the Bush years, you can see the big drop in employment as a result of the 9-11 attacks and the resulting recession early in his Presidency. However, by the middle of his time in office, employment is improving steadily until the Democrats take control of Congress in 2007 and start enforcing their agenda and plans.

Before you know it, by 2008 or so the employment rate is in free fall and has continued since then, during a time when the Democrats controlled both parts of Congress and then the White House. Got to put most of the blame on this one on Pelosi, Reid, and Obama.

This graph is just another view of unemployment over time, this one based on monthly data. Things are improving steadily, year over year, month over month, under Bush until the Republicans lose control of Congress in November, 2006, the vertical line. Within a year of the Democrats taking over Congress, the monthly unemployment rates starts to climb steadily and only recently has started to nudge slight downward. Are we seeing a trend year, three years after Bush left office and five years after the Republicans lost Congress?

This graph depicts the Labor Department's Series monthly U6 tracking of underemployment in the U.S. Most of the time, the press and the political class only report the regular unemployment rate which is the ratio of people actively looking for work divided by those that are looking for work and those that have the work they want.

However, this usual tracking of unemployment does not include those Americans that are working part time but want full time work (the underemployed) and those people that have grown so frustrated looking for a new job that they have given up the search. This U6 series gives a far better and more complete picture of the bad employment situation int he country.

However, the trend is the same. The more robust U6 unemployment rate is trending downward significantly during the middle of the Bush administration, things are looking good. However, as soon as the Democrats start to assert themselves in Congress and then the White House, this measure of unemployment soars up towards 18% and has come down only sightly. It now stands at around 15%, almost double what the more commonly used, but less accurate, measure of unemployment is. This dubious level of 15% has been reached three years after Bush left office.

Hang in there,we are almost done. This graph appeared in a post from last week and it measures something called the Index of Economic Freedom. This chart tracks the economic freedom ranking in the world of the U.S, over the past three Presidential administrations. The lower the number the better the rank of a country relative to others in the world when it comes to economic freedom. Economic freedom is highly related in a positive way to wealth of a country's citizens which is a good thing.

But even though this is not a government data series, it comes from an independent private organization, the results are the same. Our Index Of Economic Freedom is improving, on average, as we move from the Clinton administration through the Bush administration and then takes a pretty dramatic and negative turn up once the Democrats take over Congress and the White House.

Our economic freedom then begins to weaken vs. the rest of the world. This may explain some of the economic malaise we are living through today.

One last chart and this may be the only one you need to know. Consider the five years from 2007 through 2011. During those five years, the Senate was run and controlled by the Democrats all five years. During those five years, the Democrats ran and controlled the House of Representatives four years. During those five years, the Democrats controlled the White House for three years.

Thus, in fifteen years worth of governing (five years for the Senate, five for the House, five for the Presidency), the Democrats were in charge in twelve of those years or 80% of the time. That is what is depicted in the above pie chart in blue. The Republicans, in red, were in control of only 20% of the Federal government from 2007 to 2011.

Thus, Obama's constant harping that the Republicans and Bush are the reason the country is in a ditch today really has no justification in reality. The Republicans have controlled only 20% of the Federal government since 2007, the Democrats 80% so logically, who really is to blame? All of the deficit measures, unemployment measures, employment measures, and government spending under the Bush administration were consistent with historical norms and improving until the Democrats took over Congress. Our Index of Economic Freedom ranking was improving until the Democrats took over Congress and then the White House.

The reality is both parties have screwed up the country but the data strongly suggests that the Democrats and their leaders, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid, have to take the majority of the blame. The numbers and data do not lie.

However, I could forgive the President for blaming everyone else if he would just do two things: stop the whining and start the process of fixing what he and the Democrats are mostly responsible for breaking. Looking backward accomplishes nothing. Looking forward for progress is a greater measure of what a leader does rather than looking backward for blame.

Thus far, based on the President's blame game, he is not a leader. He has shown himself to be just another ordinary Chicago politician who never apparently heard the old saying: "Don't tell me how rocky the seas was, just bring the darn ship in." In other words, "Don't tell me how bad things are and who is to blame, just fix the problems as they exist today."

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 State Of The Union - Take The Quiz To Find Out

2012-01-24T07:48:00.001-05:00

Tonight the President will deliver the annual state of the union message. I am sure it will be a typical political speech, full of bluster signifying nothing. Thus, as a public service, we provide the following short quiz and so that you can determine for yourself what the true state of the union is:

Is our nation’s economy better or worse than in 2008? Remember that out national economic growth rate has been only in the 2% range or so for the past few years, consistently below the historical average.
Is our nation’s unemployment situation better or worse than in 2008? Remember that there are about 14 million unemployed Americans and millions more of underemployed Americans.
Is your job security and job satisfaction any better or worse than in 2008? Remember the 14 million.
Is our nation’s foreign affairs position better or worse than in 2008? Remember that Iran and North Korea are three years closer to having nuclear weapons, our relations with Pakistan have never been worse, our State Department never foresaw the "Arab Spring," and China is still kicking our economic butts.
Is our national unity and civility better or worse than in 2008? Remember that our politicians have recently and continuously called Americans terrorists, barbarians, and racists for simply having a difference of opinion from them.
Are gasoline prices better or worse than 2008? Remember that gas prices are about double what they were when Obama took office.
Is our level of freedom better or worse than 2008? Remember that the freedom destroying Patriot Act was renewed under the Obama administration and Attorney General Eric Holder has continued many of the liberty killing policies of the Bush administration including warrantless searches, unwarranted electronic communications access, etc.
Is the influence in our politics from the obscene amount of union, corporate, and PAC money better or worse than 2008? Remember that spending records are being set at every election.
Is Social Security fiscal solvency better or worse than in 2008? Remember that thousands of Baby Boomers are retiring every day, leaving less workers making Social Security payments to support them with no viable solutions to the problem being put forth by the political class.
Is Medicare and Medicaid’s’ fiscal solvency better or worse than in 2008? Remember that the two programs still waste upwards of $100 billion a year through fraud and waste.
Is the fairness and effectiveness of our nation’s tax system better or worse than in 2008? Remember that some rich Americans pay a lower percentage of their income in income taxes than middle class Americans and about 45% of Americans pay nothing at all in federal income taxes.
Is the nation’s national debt situation better or worse than in 2008? Remember that the national debt is now over $15 TRILLION a year and this administration is on track to incur more national debt than what was incurred by every previous President COMBINED.
Are college costs better or worse than in 2008?
Is government incompetence and waste better or worse than in 2008? Remember that the incompetent Federal government performance and reaction in the Gulf oil spill disaster was comparable to the incompetent Federal government performance and reaction in the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
Is your home worth more or less since 2008? Remember that there are probably several more million homes likely to into foreclosure this year, putting a further damper on housing prices.
Is the country any closer to solving the major issues of our times such as failing public schools, a lost war on drugs, the lack of a nation energy strategy, leaky borders, and ever escalating health care costs than in 2008? Remember that our kids' test scores still trail test scores of kids in many other countries, our lost war on drugs is turning Mexico into a lawless narco state, we still have no national energy strategy or program, and Obama Care deficiencies are being uncovered every week. Despite this situation, the current administration has no plans, and no clue, to address any of these issues.
Is the nation’s leadership any better or worse than in 2008? Remember that this is the same leadership that gave us all of the "remember" facts listed above, from $15 TRILLION in national debt to the slandering and demeaning of Americans for having an opinion to the failures to resolve even minor issues facing Americans today.

There is no need to view the broadcast of the state of the union message. By taking the above quiz, you probably now know how bad the state of the union is, regardless of what bluster the politicians tell us. If you do decide to watch, have a copy of this post with you so that you can check off all of the issues the President addresses with real plans, not rhetoric. I bet you do not make a lot of check marks.

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 our 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

It Is Not Just American Politicians That Are Corruptable And Contemptible

2012-01-23T07:43:00.000-05:00

We have reviewed many, many contemptible acts and actions that our political class has perpetrated on us and the nation over the past few years. Just a few of their antics include the following:

When national unemployment was soaring over 10% and major issues facing Americans were going on unsolved, the politicians in Washington worked at getting legislation passed that allowed the Federal government to control the sound volume on television commercials, displaying a very bad sense of screwed up priorities.
When the Gulf oil spill was it its sickening height and people were losing their jobs and livelihoods and the environment was taking a beating, President Obama was taking multiple vacations, enjoying multiple rounds of golf and made at least two cross country trips to raise campaign money for fellow Democrats.
With most Americans no longer able to get a traditional defined benefits pension from where they work, members of Congress get a generous pay check, a generous defined benefits pension, a generous 401k-like retirement account, and participate in Social Security.
With the Federal government spending 70% more money than it was collecting in taxes and fees in 2011, running up well over a TRILLION dollars in additional debt and endangering the financial viability of the nation Congress decided to take a five week vacation, with pay, last August.
The political class has slandered and demeaned tens of millions of Americans for simply expressing a difference of opinion with the politicians by calling them racists, smelly, un-American, terrorists, barbarians and a host of other slurs instead of celebrating the nation's diversity of opinion and the freedom that should come with it.
Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was sent to jail for felonies while former Congressman Anthony Weiner went into retirement for pompous, sexist stupidity.
This administration and the Federal government ran a ridiculously inept gun running sting operation called "Fast and Furious" that resulted in military grade weapons ending up in the hands of the violent Mexican drug cartels and which have been used to kill a U.S. government agent and many Mexican citizens.
Congress has rigged the process of Congressional salary increases so that they happen automatically and with little fanfare every year, regardless of how incompetently members of Congress performed during the year.

You get the idea. I could go on for a very long while to further verify that our politicians, for the most part, are contemptible. They waste taxpayer money, they focus on very minor issues and never resolve any major issues facing the country, they care more about their vacations and political careers while citizens suffer, and generally do a lousy job of governing the nation, solving problems, and protecting our democracy.

But, misery loves company. Consider how contemptible politicians around the world can also be, as documented in two articles in the January 20, 2012 of The Week magazine:

Although the Italian federal government has driven the country's financial status to the brink of national bankruptcy, the average legislator in the Italian government earns $20,700 per month. This comes out to almost a quarter million dollars a year. Imagine how much money they would have gotten if they had actually done a good job managing the Italian economy.
Italian politicians also get free travel anywhere they want within Italy, they get tax free housing allowances, $5,000 a month allowance for secretaries even if they do not have any, and subsidized gourmet dining.
But the French politicians are not too far behind, on average, making about $217,000 a year.
If these legislators made the same salaries in the U.S. they would be in the top 1-2% of earners in the country. Imagine how far up the income chain they are in their home countries.
The Chinese government spends millions and millions of dollars every year by providing luxury cars for thousands of government officials.
According to the article, Communist Party officials drive $100,000 Audis, police drive Porsche SUVs, and military officials drive half million dollar Bentleys.
This auto and spending extravagance for the Chinese political ruling class is contrasted with a recent tragic accident where a bus that was supposed carry only nine people crashed with 62 kindergarten-aged children on board because the school could not afford to buy regular school buses. 21 kids died in the accident.

And finally, an article in the January 23, 2012 issue of Business Week that described the basket case that is Iraq, we find that a central government politician can earn up to $22,000 a month while in office. The typical Iraqi is lucky to earn a couple of hundred dollars a month, assuming they can get a job in their wreck of an economy.

An old saying that goes, "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." However, I think a better old saying is "power attracts the corruptible." And the contemptible. Seems no matter where you are in the world, it is probably a safe bet that the political class will be more concerned with their personal enrichment and perpetuating their time in office than serving their country's people.

But at one point in our history's past we probably believed, falsely or truly, that our political system, our political class, and our politicians were better, more virtuous than the typical corrupt banana republic. But it is probably a good assumption that this belief is not valid today.

We have allowed our political processes to be hijacked by the political class for their own benefit and not the good of our democracy. Thus, the only way to return to a place where citizens run for office to serve the country and not themselves is to implement some of the steps put forth in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government,"

Step 6 - allow only citizens to contribute to election campaigns, banning donations from unions, corporations, PACs, lobbyists' groups, etc.
Step 7 - allow citizens to contribute only to election campaigns that affect them, e.g. people in Kansas cannot direct campaign contributions to New Jersey political candidates.
Step 8 - strengthen FEC enforcement capabilities so that politicians finally obey all campaign finance laws.
Step 14- stop gerrymandering Congressional districts that greatly benefit incumbent politicians.
Step 37 - base annual Congressional raises on an annual customer satisfaction rating given by American citizens.
Step 38 - require every sitting Federal politicians to sign off on a annual shared values pledge that would hopefully guide politicians' behavior and would include such traits as integrity, trust, respect, commitment, and teamwork.
Step 39 - implement firm term limits for all politicians, "one and done."

Just because our politicians are like the rest of the world's, generally corruptible and contemptible, does not mean we cannot change it. Wouldn't it be nice to finally respect those that are in office rather than tolerating them because they were the lesser of two evils?

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 our 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

Even The Washington Post Is Starting To Wonder If President Obama Is Unworthy Of A Second Term

2012-01-20T04:20:00.000-05:00

Last week we ran a three part series on why we felt President Obama was unworthy of a second term in office. We came up with 88 reasons that covered a wide range of areas including economic failures, foreign policy failures, blaming everyone else in the word for his failures except himself, sitting silent while his Democratic Party partners slandered and demeaned Americans for simply having an honest difference of opinion with the administration's views and policies, and several other broad areas. I suggest you read the detailed three part series for the detailed reasons and the logic and data behind our conclusions.

Earlier this week, we had to publish five additional reasons why President Obama is unworthy of a second term, reasons that we missed within the listing of the original 88. Fellow citizens were quick to point out these additional reasons, which were as valid as our original 88.

Now, it seems that at least one writer for the Washington Post has independently come up with his own set of reasons why the President is unworthy of a second term. While his reasons are not as detailed or quantitative as ours, he does cover many of the same broad areas of disappointment and dismay that we have been subjected to by this Presidential administration over the past three years.

The reasons this editorial piece is so critical and surprising, is that I have found the Washington Post to generally have a small but distinct bias in their reporting and writing towards favoring the Democrats within the American political class. It is my opinion that I usually have seen their writers to take a favorable and go easy approach when reviewing the Obama administration's record.

To have one of their writers come out and accurately summarize the failures of this Presidency is frankly, quite shocking and surprising. I would have expected such a piece out of Fox News, not the Washington Post.

I have included his words and thoughts below for your review and analysis:

**********

The Washington Post

Obama: The Affirmative Action President by Matt Patterson (columnist - Washington Post, New York Post, San Francisco Examiner)

Years from now, historians may regard the 2008 election of Barack Obama as an inscrutable and disturbing phenomenon, a baffling breed of mass hysteria akin perhaps to the witch craze of the Middle Ages. How, they will wonder, did a man so devoid of professional accomplishment beguile so many into thinking he could manage the world's largest economy, direct the world's most powerful military, execute the world's most consequential job?

Imagine a future historian examining Obama's pre-presidential life: ushered into and through the Ivy League despite unremarkable grades and test scores along the way; a cushy non-job as a "community organizer"; a brief career as a state legislator devoid of legislative achievement (and in fact nearly devoid of his attention, so often did he vote "present") ; and finally an unaccomplished single term in the United States Senate, the entirety of which was devoted to his presidential ambitions. He left no academic legacy in academia, authored no signature legislation as a legislator.

And then there is the matter of his troubling associations: the white-hating, America-loathing preacher who for decades served as Obama's "spiritual mentor"; a real-life, actual terrorist who served as Obama's colleague and political sponsor. It is easy to imagine a future historian looking at it all and asking: how on Earth was such a man elected president?

Not content to wait for history, the incomparable Norman Podhoretz addressed the question recently in the Wall Street Journal:

"To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers, would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberaldom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were a bit extreme, he was given a pass."

Let that sink in: Obama was given a pass -- held to a lower standard -- because of the color of his skin. Podhoretz continues:

"And in any case, what did such ancient history matter when he was also so articulate and elegant and (as he himself had said) "non-threatening," all of which gave him a fighting chance to become the first black president and thereby to lay the curse of racism to rest?"

Podhoretz puts his finger, I think, on the animating pulse of the Obama phenomenon -- affirmative action. Not in the legal sense, of course. But certainly in the motivating sentiment behind all affirmative action laws and regulations, which are designed primarily to make white people, and especially white liberals, feel good about themselves.

Unfortunately, minorities often suffer so that whites can pat themselves on the back. Liberals routinely admit minorities to schools for which they are not qualified, yet take no responsibility for the inevitable poor performance and high drop-out rates which follow. Liberals don't care if these minority students fail; liberals aren't around to witness the emotional devastation and deflated self esteem resulting from the racist policy that is affirmative action. Yes, racist.

Holding someone to a separate standard merely because of the color of his skin -- that's affirmative action in a nutshell, and if that isn't racism, then nothing is. And that is what America did to Obama.

True, Obama himself was never troubled by his lack of achievements, but why would he be? As many have noted, Obama was told he was good enough for Columbia despite undistinguished grades at Occidental; he was told he was good enough for the US Senate despite a mediocre record in Illinois; he was told he was good enough to be president despite no record at all in the Senate. All his life, every step of the way, Obama was told he was good enough for the next step, in spite of ample evidence to the contrary. What could this breed if not the sort of empty narcissism on display every time Obama speaks?

In 2008, many who agreed that he lacked executive qualifications nonetheless raved about Obama's oratory skills, intellect, and cool character. Those people -- conservatives included -- ought now to be deeply embarrassed. The man thinks and speaks in the hoariest of cliches, and that's when he has his teleprompter in front of him; when the prompter is absent he can barely think or speak at all. Not one original idea has ever issued from his mouth -- it's all warmed-over Marxism of the kind that has failed over and over again for 100 years.

And what about his character? Obama is constantly blaming anything and everything else for his troubles. Bush did it; it was bad luck; I inherited this mess. It is embarrassing to see a president so willing to advertise his own powerlessness, so comfortable with his own incompetence. But really, what were we to expect? The man has never been responsible for anything, so how do we expect him to act responsibly?

In short: our president is a small and small-minded man, with neither the temperament nor the intellect to handle his job. When you understand that, and only when you understand that, will the current erosion of liberty and prosperity make sense. It could not have gone otherwise with such a man in the Oval Office.

*****
Sounds familiar. It is never his fault. No discernible accomplishments, either prior to the White House or while in the White House. Standing by when others within his domain denigrate America and those in it. Refusing to take responsibility and leadership. Instead, "so confident in his own impotence."

We called it a condescending attitude towards all who disagree with him since he seems to think he is smarter than everyone else. However, I like the use of "the sort of empty narcissism on display every time Obama speaks" as a better description of how this man approaches life.

88 reasons last week, five more reasons this week plus the above essay today. Time to look for some real change (and actual plans) this fall which can be found at www.unitedstatesofpurple.com. Check it out, no narcissism allowed.

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 Magnitude Of Our National Debt Made Real And Understandable

2012-01-19T04:12:00.000-05:00

We have talked about our skyrocketing national debt many times in this blog. For those that may have missed some of our graphical representations of the crisis, take a look at the following graphs (all of the graphed data are from official U.S. Federal government sources):

You can double click on each graph to get a larger and better view of each graph. As you can see, no matter how you measure our national debt, in absolute dollars, in dollars as a percentage of GDP, government spending as a percentage of GDP, etc., our Federal government spending is out of control and getting worse. It has been particularly devastating and out of control ever since the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress after the midterm elections of 2006.

Another way to look at our $15 TRILLION national debt is to actually see it written out:

$15,000,000,000,000

That's a lot of zeros. Since it is our national debt and all Americans are going to have to pay it off at some point in the future, the personal household share of $15 TRILLION comes out to about $132,000 for each household. Think about how you are going to work that new expense into your household budget this year.

And remember, the $15 TRILLION is not a fixed amount. Under the long term, 10 year budget Obama proposed back in the spring, a budget that was unanimously rejected by the Senate, under the most optimistic assumptions Obama's proposed budget would add another $9 TRILLION on top of the $15 TRILLION.

But, we are getting crazy, the numbers are almost too large to understand. So let's make it simple. The late 2011 Federal budget disaster looked like the following:

* 2011 U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000

* 2011 Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000

* New debt in 2011: $ 1,650,000,000,000

* National debt as of late 2011: $14,271,000,000,000

* Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000

Let's now remove 8 zeros and pretend it's a reasonable but low income household budget:

* Annual family income: $21,700

* Money the family spent: $38,200

* New debt on the credit card: $16,500

* Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710

* Total budget cuts: $385

Thus, if the U.S. Federal national debt was scaled to a reasonable low income, U.S. household budget, that household would never again get any credit since no one and no company, short of a loan shark, would ever extend credit to a household in this financial situation. This household would never get a mortgage to own a house, would never get a car loan for a new car, or be able to attend a reputable college since they would not get any kind of student loan. Nice life.

Another way to view the national debt scaled down to a reasonable household level is to imagine that the household did not eat, did not drive a car, did not shop for clothes, Christmas gifts, or anything else, or pay taxes or utility bills for seven years. If it did this abstaining for seven years, then and only then would it be able to pay off its $142,710 credit card debt, given their current household income stream.

And that is assuming a credit card interest rate of 0%. Not very realistic, which makes the debt situation even more distressing since a household cannot go seven years without eating, driving, etc.

Once we scale the problem down to a household level, you can begin to imagine and comprehend the dire straits the nation's financial situation is in. In fact, it will likely take decades and generations of Americans, acting frugally, to tame the wild spending of the American political class over the past decades and especially over the past five years of Democratic Party rule.

And that assumes the current politicians we are stuck with finally grow a backbone and begin to honestly level with Americans on how bad they have made the problem and the painful steps that will have to be taken to remedy the situation. That is asking a lot and that is why we need to start implementing some steps from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government:"

Step 1 would reduce Federal government spending by 10% a year for the next five years by reducing Federal government employee headcount, stop deploying American troops all over the world for no good reasons, eliminating government agency and department redundancies, eliminating obsolete or dysfunctional government functions, reforming Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and eliminating fraud and criminal activity in Federal Government programs..

We have talked about all of these steps in previous posts. There is no rational reason for us to still have well over 100,000 troops deployed in Europe, South Korea, and Japan. The need for these deployments went away long ago.

We need to clean up the fraud in government social programs and tax evasion which wastes up to half a TRILLION dollars a year.

We need to have our politicians do a lot of the boring, government efficiency things and not be so concerned about their own political careers and only dealing with big issues, that never get resolved anyway.

And the really scary part of this whole plan is that even if the Federal government had reduced its 2011 spending of $3.820 TRILLION by 10% a year for five years, it still would not get to a balanced budget in which expenses had been reduced enough to equal of be less than the 2011 revenue stream of $2.170 TRILLION.

It would be close, within about 4% or so, but expenses would still exceed revenue in this hypothetical case. That is how bad the deficit spending situation has become just in the two years since "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" was published. Five years of 10% reductions a year might still not be enough to get a balanced budget. And it certainly will not be enough to start paying down the $15 TRILLION national debt.

- Step 39 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" would impose term limits on all Federal politicians, "one and done." The current set of people in Washington got us into this mess. I doubt they know how to get us out of the mess they created or even have the will to do so. We need to start generating a new class of politicians who will do the hard job of governing efficiently rather than the bad job of politicking inefficiently.

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/

American Economic Freedom - Slowly Ebbing Away

2012-01-18T06:07:00.000-05:00

Every year, the Heritage Foundation, in conjunction with the Wall Street Journal, conducts a very, very extensive analysis of economic freedom around the world along ten different factors of measurement. The analysis is country specific and factor specific within each country. All of their analyses result in a rank ordering of many countries via what they call the Index Of Economic Freedom. The higher the index, the more economic freedom exists within that nation, as measured by the ten factors.

The ten factors include the following measurements and results:

Under Rule of Law, there are the two factors, Property Rights and Freedom From Corruption.
Under Regulatory Efficiency, there are three factors, Business Freedom, Labor Freedom, and Monetary Freedom.
Under Limited Government, there are two factors, Government Spending and Fiscal Freedom.
Under Open Markets, there are three factors, Trade Freedom, Investment Freedom, and Financial Freedom.

The detailed findings for their 2012 report can be accessed and the the data reviewed at http://www.heritage.org/index/. You will see that they are comprehensive, thorough, and quantitatively impressive in their detailed work and analyses.

Their final output for each country consists of index calculations for each of the ten factors along with an overall index that statistically and soundly combines the nation's ten individual indices into one total national index measure. They also determine where each measure falls along a separate measure of freedom that contains five levels, ranging from Free to Moderately Free down to Repressive.

Why is this study important? The analysts who put this annual study together have found that if you graph a nation's per capita wealth on the vertical axis of a graph vs. a nation's Index of Economic Freedom on the horizontal axis, you find that there is an almost 70% positive correlation between citizens' wealth and economic freedom within the country, i.e. richer countries with richer citizens tend to also have higher Indices Economic Freedom.

Obviously, correlation does not necessarily mean causation. However, there probably is a strong causation link between free people operating in free markets, an environment that tends to optimize economic behavior and activity vs. unfree citizens living under repressive regimes where much economic decisions and activity are tightly controlled by either incompetent tyrants or bureaucrats. If you look at their findings year in and year out, you will probably not find a highly efficient, free, and productive economy that is also run by a repressive government.

In the 2012 report, there is bad news for the United States in several areas. First, why we may think of ourselves living in the freest country in the world, according to this analysis approach, that is a false assumption. Our Index of Economic Freedom has never been ranked number one and unfortunately, it has been slipping on a year over year basis for several years now. The following graph lays out what our total Index Of Economic Freedom has been over time (in this graph, the smaller the number the higher/better the ranking of the U.S. relative to other countries):

You can double click on the graph to get a better, larger view. The vertical line between 2006 and 2007 represents the 2006 midterm elections where the Democrats took over control of both parts of Congress.

What conclusions can we draw from these historical results:

Our economic freedom generally improved during the Bush administration, getting down to being fifth ranked for a couple of years vs. being generally in the seventh to eighth position during the Clinton years.
Our ranking has mostly gotten worse since the Democrats took over Congress in late 2006.
The last three years illustrate a disturbing trend with our Index Of Economic Freedom overall index steadily trending negatively since 2008's report.
In fact, our Index of Economic Freedom has never been worse, as measured by our ninth place rating in the 2011 report and our tenth place rating in the 2012 report.
Furthermore, for the first time ever, an African country actually has a higher Index of Economic Freedom ranking higher than ours.

Not a good overall trend. Again, correlation does not necessarily mean causation. But given that the past three years have shown a deteriorating Index of Economic Freedom ranking performance at the same time that U.S. unemployment remains stubbornly high, household average incomes have fallen steadily over the past few years, and economic growth is weak vs. historical performance, it does appear there is some substantial causation at work.

Thus, not only is our overall economic freedom definitely getting worse, and possibly impacting the negative economic world we live in today in this country, some of the ten underlying economic freedom factors are not that great either and are also trending negatively. For the U.S., our ten underlying factors look like the following in the 2012 report:

Business Freedom - Steady results, above the world average, and in the "Free" category. (Note- the "Free" category is the best category you can fall into)
Trade Freedom - Steady results, above the world average, and in the "Free" category.
Labor Freedom - Steady results, above the world average, and in the "Free" category.

Not bad. However, things do not look as rosy for the U.S. in the remaining seven categories:

Fiscal Freedom - Steady results, below the world average, and in the "Mostly Free" category. (Note - the "Mostly Free" category is a step down in freedom from the "Free" category)
Monetary Freedom - Worsening results, about at the world average, and in the "Mostly Free" category.
Investment Freedom - Worsening results, above the world average, and in the "Mostly Free" category.
Financial Freedom - Worsening results, above the world average, and in the "Mostly Free" category.
Property Rights - Worsening results, above the world average, and in the "Moderately Free" category. (Note - the "Moderately Free is a negative step down from "Mostly Free")

Not good. We are either below or only at the world average, results are trending negatively, or we have dropped out of the top freedom category already in these important category/factors of freedom.

But we are in very horrible shape in the remaining two categories:

Freedom From Corruption - Worsening quickly, above the world average, and only "Moderately Free."
Government Spending - Worsening quickly, below the world average, and already in the Repressive category (Note - the "Repressive" category is the worst freedom category a nation can fall into relative to economic freedom)

Really, really not good. Our performances in these two categories are almost in free fall and who would have ever thought that someone could analytically and accurately describe any facet of the United States government and democracy being in the "Repressive" state?

In the Freedom From Corruption factor, in only ten years our nation's situation has dropped over 13%, taking us from the Free to the Mostly Free category. If you look at the detailed national ratings, there are twenty one nations that outperform us from a Freedom From Corruption perspective. The going forward concern is that the trend is not good, in a few years we could easily fall further down the freedom scale and trail more countries who have less government corruption than us.

Here is what the report says about U.S. corruption: "Corruption is a growing concern as the cronyism and economic rent-seeking associated with the growth of government have undermined institutional integrity." Given the high level of annual wasteful Federal government earmarks and the growing government cronyism under the Obama administration (e.g. Solyndra, Beacon, Fisker, Tesla, General Electric, etc.), it is not surprising that we should now be embarrassed by our Federal political class. Now the whole world knows how bad we are.

Where we are really bad is in the area of Government Spending. We are officially in the "Repressive" area of the freedom scale, a very dangerous area. We are so bad as a nation that there are many more countries in the study who are in better shape than us.

At least six Third World countries (Turkmenistan, Uganda, Madagascar, Guatemala, Burma, and Bangladesh) are not only in better shape than the U.S. but their index scores are DOUBLE what our score is. The top two overall countries in the study, Hong Kong and Singapore, have overall index scores that are also double our nation's score in this area. Pathetic performance no matter how you look at it.

Remember what we have stressed many times in this blog: you cannot have political freedom and freedom of choice without economic freedom. If your economic freedom gets worse, than you have less freedom of choice to send your kids to the best schools, less freedom of choice to live in the type of house and neighborhood you would prefer to live in, less freedom of choice to contribute to the charities of your choice, etc. This is why economic freedom is so important.

This study should be viewed as a leading indicator of where we are going from both a democracy and an economic perspective. Our political class through the decades, both Republicans and Democrats, have allowed both to deteriorate to such an extent that we now have a substantial and growing government corruption problem and our government spending situation is so bad that it is orders of magnitude worse than such economic powerhouses as Burma and Bangladesh.

Now is it any surprise that our economic growth is horrible, our unemployment and underemployment rates are stubbornly high, we are susceptible to economic problems elsewhere in he world, consumer confidence in our nation's future and our leaders are at all time lows, and our political class have no intention, will, or ability to resolve our nation's issues?

That is why two steps from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" are critical to fix what ails our country, if the results from this study are to be believed:

- Step 1 - this step would reduce Federal government spending by 10% a year for five years if we are to have any chance of getting our Federal government spending under control and start to reduce our onerous national debt. Many times we have shown how to reduce government spending by TRILLIONS of dollars, based on the work of many fine American organizations, including Obama's own deficit reduction commission. To say Step 1 cannot be done is a reflection on the incompetence of our politicians, not the reality that we have described for finding the solution.

- Step 39 - this step would impose firm term limits on all current and future Federal politicians. It is obvious from this study that we can no longer afford to allow the current set of politicians to continue in power. Their results are putrid and corrupt, the direction they have set the country on is disastrous.

Prior to implementing Step 39, we can begin the purging process by voting out all incumbents in the November elections. This includes President Obama and every single member of Congress and the House of Representatives who are up for reelection. Not a single one of them have come up with a plan, particularly President Obama, to address our rotting Index Of Economic Freedom. They do not deserve the privilege of serving the nation.

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/

Five More Reasons Why President Obama Is Unworthy Of A Second Term

2012-01-17T07:21:00.000-05:00

A little while ago we put together the 88 top reasons why President Obama was not worthy of a second term as President of The United States. These reasons included the many times President Obama remained silent while his political allies demeaned and slandered ordinary Americans for simply having an honest difference of opinion, his many failed economic problems, his failed foreign relations programs, etc.

However, it appears that the list of 88 was not all inclusive, as we have been reminded from readers and as we find out from these additional reasons why he should not be reelected:

- When interviewed about immigration reform on a Latino radio station just prior to the 2010 midterm elections, President Obama stated:

"We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us."

So, in the world of Obama, those Americans that have a difference of opinion are "enemies." They are not citizens exercising their freedom of choice, they are the "enemy." They are not citizens expressing a different and honest opinion, they are the "enemy." So much for this President's promise prior to his election to be a uniter of the country. He would rather divide us along the lines of enemy vs. friend.

- News reports from early in the week of January 9, 2012 reported that the Department of Homeland Security now has Federal government permission to collect and keep on file personal information on "journalists, news anchors, reporters or anyone who uses traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed."

In other words, the Federal government, through its agents within the Department of Homeland Security, is now going to be tracking what Americans and what American journalists are broadcasting, blogging, Facebooking, and tweeting about. It is assumed in the news reports that this broadening of unfettered government power includes both famous TV newscasters down to independent bloggers who blog their views on the Internet.

Previously, employees of Homeland Security had to do some serious homework and paperwork to get permission before they could start collecting personal information on anyone, an American citizen or not. However, now according to new Department Of Homeland Security guidelines, it is now much easier to start collecting and tracking personal information and the reports and opinions they express. RT.com summarized the recent changes, quite nicely:

"Previously established guidelines within the administration say that data could only be collected under authorization set forth by written code, but the new provisions in the NOC’s write-up means that any reporter, whether someone along the lines of Walter Cronkite or a budding blogger, can be victimized by the agency."

Since the freedom of press is a major, major tenet under which we maintain our democracy and the freedom of speech that comes with that democracy, the Obama administration's initiative to start tracking what we say about our country and our political class and how and where we say it is a very chilling development relative to our liberties.

When a Presidential administration evokes images of George Orwell's "1984" more than it evokes images of liberty, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, it is time for that administration to end.

- Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. Last week she joined the club of fellow Democrats who have slandered and demeaned Americans who are concerned about the loss of freedom in this country and the impending, political class fiscal disaster that they are driving the country towards.

Namely, she took an unprovoked and unwarranted pot shot at members of the Tea Party, concluding that the Tea Party was responsible for the horrible shootings in Tucson, Arizona in early 2011 that severely wounded a Congresswoman and others and killed several others.

Her exact words are as follows:

"I'll tell you. I hesitate to place blame, but I have noticed it take a very precipitous turn towards edginess and lack of civility with the growth of the Tea Party movement."

There are three things despicably wrong with this statement:

First, not a year ago and not now has there ever been any concrete, direct, or indirect connection between the shooter and the Tea Party. The shooter was a nut case with a gun, he had no association with any facet of the Tea Party movement. To imply he did is a total falsehood and slanderous accusation.
Maybe Ms. Wasserman Schultz should take a look at those that support her political party, namely the labor unions when it comes to lack of civility (or outright violence incitement). She should especially consider the words of union leader James Hoffa when he said that his followers were ready to go to "war" with Republicans and Tea Party members, all of whom "need to be taken out." This type of "lack of civility" is a given fact, true quotes from Hoffa himself as opposed to fantasy connections between the Tuscon shooter and the Tea party.
And finally, as always, the President comes up very small in this situation, allowing another of his political allies to demean and debase ordinary Americans for taking an interest in their democracy and caring about what happens to the country no matter how untrue and outrageous the false accusations are.

But this is not a surprise. When other political allies of this President called ordinary, caring Americans barbarians, terrorists, a__h___s, Neanderthals, etc., he was silent and complicit in their slurs. Disgraceful leadership behavior.

- Last week, the Today Show on NBC celebrated its 60th anniversary of being on television. Something certainly to be proud of to have such a long run when most television shows of all types are lucky to be around for a few years at most.

However, in the big scheme of things, the major issues facing this country, it is a nit. High unemployment, foreign affair issues with Iran, failing public schools, a lost war on drugs, a severely flawed health care reform law, high energy costs, etc. are much more worthy of limited Presidential focus than the anniversary of a TV show, at least in my opinion.

However, our President seems to have a different view, having taken time out of his schedule to appear with his wife on this anniversary broadcast. A continued set of bad priorities. The whole country is suffering and this President thinks doing a photo op on the Today Show is a worthwhile use of his time.

Just like he thought appearing on The View, appearing on various late night talk shows, filming a TV advertisement for the George Lopez TV show, appearing on Oprah, appearing on MTV, etc. is being Presidential. As stated previously, this President is more concerned with the pomp of the Presidency than the work of the Presidency.

- An Associated Press article from December 31, 2011 reported that President Obama has basically decided to tell Congress to go pound sand in 2012 and that he will ignore dealing with them and try to rule by fiat, also known as executive order:

"Now that he's sort of free from having to put out these fires, the president will have a larger playing field. If that includes Congress, all the better," said Josh Earnest, White House deputy press secretary. But, he added, "that's no longer a requirement."

"If that includes Congress, all the better." What an obnoxious position to take as the President of the United States. According to the governing rules of the land, the President is required to deal with Congress, it is a part of the Constitution that the President cannot unilaterally ignore. That is how we operate our democracy.

But we all know why he is doing this. It is purely for his personal, selfish political purposes. As laid out in the article, he is willing to forego making any progress on the issues facing the country in order to paint Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, as the reason why his administration has been such a failure. He is back to his old "blame game," they (Congress) are the deadbeats, the obstructionists, the do-nothing people.

Blame and divide. Two of the negative hallmarks of this Presidency, hallmark characteristics that have gotten us deeper and deeper into the mess we are in now as a nation. Better to sacrifice a year of deteriorating issues than to risk not getting reelected, hardly a leadership attitude.

I believe that this is a President with such a large ego that he finds it personally impossible to compromise or to seriously consider the opinions and views of others since he considers himself smarter than the rest of us. He does not have the patience to lead since how could anyone do better or be smarter than him.

As a result, we are stuck with an ego driven President who blames others, has no patience for others, is condescending to others, and is willing to sacrifice and subordinate the Constitution and the good of the country to the political fulfillment of his reelection. Hardly a leader, hardly worth of another term in office.

We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, The United States Of Purple, at 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 vs.personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just the United States 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/

Despair In The United States, But There Is Hope Relative To The Rest Of The World

2012-01-16T06:56:00.000-05:00

It is been a pretty rough past few years in the United States:

Unemployment has left about 14 million Americans unemployed and many millions more underemployed.
Overall economic growth has been less than robust.
The Federal political class is steering the country over a financial cliff with runaway national debt that may never get repaid.
The same political class is dysfunctional relative to every issue they touch.
Every economic program launched out of Washington in the past three years has been a failure.
Millions of American homeowners are either in default or will be in default soon and many more are severely underwater relative to their mortgages.
We have a President who is more interested in playing President rather than actually being President.
We have a President who has set records for world travel and finds many vacations, dozens of rounds of golf, and hosting numerous athletic teams more important than the dire affairs of state.
We have a President you obeys or ignores the Constitution and the laws of the land as he sees fit.
And finally we have a President who remains silent while his political allies call ordinary Americans a whole slew of derogatory names including un-American, racists, Ku Klux Klan members, gerbils, Neanderthals, a__h___s, and terrorists, leaving the country more divided as ever.

Yes, it has not been a good few years to be an American. The above events, and the many more that have been documented in this blog, sometimes make it depressing even writing about our situation.

But all is not lost. We still have a window of opportunity to regain our strong economic footing since, let's face it, the rest of the world is not in great shape either. [Note: much of the following statistics and observations come from an article in the latest edition of Business Week Magazine].

The mass media has led us to believe that the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are in such great economic shape and are growing their economies so quickly that they are leaving us in the dust, eventually relegating the U.S. to a second tier economic power. However, the Business Week article says not so quick:

Brazil:

The country's GDP grew 0% in the third quarter of 2011. The U.S. economy is expected to continue to grow a little over 2% in 2012.
There was a 19% increase in consumer defaults in Brazil in October vs. October, 2010.
There was a 99% decrease in the amount of cash put into Brazilian savings accounts in November, 2011.

China:

European orders for Chinese goods decreased 22% in October, 2011 compared to September, 2011.
60% of Chinese millionaires have considered leaving China or have already done so, possibly leaving China with a shortage of brain power and capital going forward.
China is actually expected to run a $28 billion trade deficit this quarter, having seen its trade surplus peak at $300 billion in 2008.
Given China's one child per family law, the Chinese society is aging rapidly with older citizens comprising a larger and larger portion of the population which places heavy societal pressures on the nation.
There may be a large real estate bubble in China whose bursting would have a large negative impact on their country.

India

Production in Indian factories, utilities, and mines dropped 5.1% in October compared to October, 2010.
Sales of India's low cost, highly touted mini-car, the Nano, dropped 67% from July to October.
150,000 Indians took to the streets in early 2011 to protest increasing food prices and high unemployment.
India has one of the most corrupt government operations and political structures in the world.
India still has a large swath of its population living in severe poverty.

Russia

The average life expectancy for Russian men is 61.8 years, nearly the same as it was forty years ago.
An estimated $80 billion worth of capital has left Russia for better investment options outside the country due to corruption, stagflation, and political upheaval.
Tens of thousands of Russians have staged street demonstration to protest the allegedly rigged Russian elections last fall.
The likely long term trend of the Russian population is severe constriction, making it less and less of an economic power going forward.

Consider other countries and economies in the world that are under difficult strains:

Japan has been in an economic funk for over a decade which is likely to continue as the country tries to recover from the after effects of the tsunami. The country also has an aging population profile and the related problems.
Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy - the only question is how many of them will end up defaulting on their sovereign debt and be booted out of the Euro club.
The rest of the Euro club - how much more money will it take to boost the Euro club's laggards before the reality of default hits some of the laggards.
When will the European recession start and how long will it last.
How bad will the German economy get hit if a huge source of their exports, the rest of Europe, goes into a recession.
Mexico - just trying to stay a coherent sovereign country in the face of unmitigated drug cartel corruption influences and violence.
South Korea - continued worries and diversion of resources to deal with North Korea

Yes, things are bad in the U.S. but they are also bad all over. The conditions in the rest of the world could allow the U.S. to regain its strong economic position and restart its way down the road of strong economic growth because:

We still have a vast amounts of untapped energy resources.
We still rank among some of the more innovative countries in the world.
We still rank among some of the freest countries in the world although our breadth and depth of freedom and liberty is lessened everyday by our political class.
We have a wide and extensive transportation infrastructure of road, rail, and air resources.
Our financial well being is not directly tied to the financial fate of other nations like the Euro nations are.
While our population is also aging, it is not as bad as the situations in China, Japan, and elsewhere.
Our life expectancies are at least ten years higher than Russia's and our population is not constricting.

So all is not lost, a window of economic opportunity is definitely still available to us. However, consider the wise words of Albert Einstein: "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." In other words, we cannot expect to solve our problems with the same politicians we used when they created the same problems we all face today.

If our current set of politicians had the smarts, the ability, and intention of solving the problems we listed above that afflict our country, I am assuming they would have done so already.

That is why it is critical in November to dump every incumbent out of office that is up for reelection. That starts with President Obama and continues down to any Congressman or Senator that is trying to get reelected. They have not solved any of the problems this nation faces, indicating that they are now part of the problem

I have seen no indications from Obama or anyone else in Washington that they know how to fix the country's issues. I am not willing to give them another opportunity, especially when we have a window of opportunity to regain the economic advantage, given the challenges facing every other country in the world.

Does anyone really think Obama is ready to dramatically cut government spending, given his track record over the past three years?
Does anyone really think Obama will stop being a part time President and finally focus on resolving the issues facing this country, given his track record over the past three years?
Does anyone really think Obama will stop being silent and stop his political allies from dividing the country with their slurs and slander, given his track record over the past three years?
Does anyone really think Obama has a clue to solving our economic crises, given his history of failed economic programs (e.g. failed Cash For Clunkers, failed mortgage relief program, failed small business incentive program, etc.) over the past three years?

Now repeat the above four questions and substitute any sitting politician who is up for reelection in the fall and I bet you will also answer "no" to every question.

The opportunity is there but it is an opportunity that will only be fulfilled once President Obama and the rest of the current incumbents are no longer in office creating crises and not creating opportunities.

We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, The United States Of Purple, at 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 vs.personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just the United States 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/

88 Reasons Why President Obama Is Unworthy Of A Second Term - Part 3

2012-01-13T04:19:00.000-05:00

Today is the third part of a three part series that lays out a comprehensive, researched set of 88 reasons why President Obama is unworthy of a second term as President of the United States. Previous posts covered the many instances where he was silent as he political allies slandered and demeaned ordinary Americans for having an honest difference of opinion, the growing number of times where he has ignored the tenets of the Constitution and the rule of law, his many failed economic programs and policies, his catastrophic health care reform law and more. Today's post will cover reasons 66 through 88 why he is not fit to continue being President beyond this fourth year in office

The “It’s the Dealer’s Fault, Not My Fault” Syndrome

True leaders, and good poker players, are focused on solving the problems facing them and the country and not focused on blaming others for putting them in the situation they inherit. In other words, good poker players and good leaders make the best of what cards are dealt to them. Bad poker players and bad leaders focus on griping about the cards they were dealt, constantly blaming the dealer, and not focusing on how to maximize the hand they are holding.

Nobody forced Barack Obama to become President. He chose to run for President. No matter how bad things were in the country when he was sworn in. it was his job to take control and move forward and not look back. Unfortunately, he has spent most of the first three years in office blaming everyone but himself for the shortcomings and failures of his Presidency. As a result of constantly looking back for blame, he has not moved us forward for gain:

66) It was the fault of the Bush administration.

67) It was the fault of the Bush administration.

68) It was the fault of the Bush administration.

69) It was the fault of the Tea Party.

70) It was the fault of the Republicans.

71) It was the fault of Congress.

72) It was the fault of the Japanese tsunami.

73) It was the fault of the Euro crisis.

74) It was the fault of wealthy Americans who do not pay enough in taxes.

75) It was the fault of ATM machines that help cause high unemployment.

76) It was the fault of ordinary Americans who have grown “ a little soft” and who “have lost their ambition” over the years.

77) It was the fault of the Chinese.

Maybe if the President had spent less time blaming and more time accepting responsibility for putting effective plans in place, his administration actually have some actual accomplishments to talk about.

The “Promises, Promises” Syndrome

Senator and Candidate Obama made many bold promises in the past but the fulfillment of the hope he provided has not materialized when he had the opportunity as President to fulfill those promises:

78) Candidate Obama promised to shut down the terrorist detention camp at Guantanamo since he found it an embarrassment to the world. As of today, Guantanamo is no where close to being shuttered.

79) In 2005, Senator Obama said Bush’s recess appointments were “the wrong thing to do,” to appoint people who “couldn’t get through a Senate nomination.” He promised that this behavior would not happen if he was President. Seems that this Constitutionally correct viewpoint went out the window when Senator Obama became President Obama.

80) Candidate Obama promised to implement the most transparent Presidential administration in our nation’s history. However, when the President was to receive an award for transparency, it was done in secret with no press present and no official press release, Even worse, his Justice Department is contemplating regulations that would allow the Department to legally deny the existence of government documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) even if the Department’s personnel knew they existed and should be released under the FOIA. Does not seem very transparent.

81) The President promised that the nation’s unemployment rate would go as high as 8% unless his $800 billion economic stimulus program was passed. The ill fated failure of a stimulus program was passed and unemployment did not go to 8%. It went well past the President’s promise and has not been anywhere close to 8% for what seems forever.

The “Being Prince Of The United States Is Better Than Being President” Syndrome

When I look at President Obama’s behavior while in office these past three years, I come away with the constant impression that he is more interesting in the pomp and pageantry of being President than actually doing the work as President. Consider the following style over substance behavior:

82) President Obama could have been one of the most impactful Presidents of all time. He came into office with sky high popularity and approval ratings. His party had a sizable majority in the House Of Representatives. He had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The country was ready to turn away from the Republican party.

He could have implemented any amount of hope and change he wanted. But he blew it when he spent most of his first year establishing the all time record for Presidential international travel, jetting around the world as the country’s economy continued to deflate.

83) As the economy and the unemployment situation worsened, he found the time to film a television commercial for the George Lopez show, he appeared on The View television show, he appeared on Oprah’s show, he jetted off to Europe to lobby for his home town of Chicago to get a Summer Olympics (an effort that failed miserably), etc. He was always, charming, always beaming, always wasting time that could have been far better spent resolving the many issues facing America.

84) For months, the BP oil spill spewed crude oil into the Gulf Of Mexico, having far ranging pollution and economic impacts across numerous states. Small businesses went out of business. Fishermen lost their means of supporting their families. Ecological damage grew as this administration fumbled for a solution. During this time of turmoil and distress, this President found the time to take two vacations, make three cross country trips for campaign events, and played numerous rounds of golf. All Princely activities but certainly not Presidential behavior in the face of the Gulf calamity and the resultant suffering of Americans impacted by the spill.

85) Although similar to previous Presidents, President Obama seemed to take the “athletic team photo op” function/responsibility to unheard of new heights. Not only did he seem to entertain every major professional sports team at the White House, he seemed to always be having his photo taken some sort of team or another at the White House, including the Texas Christian University rifle team. No disrespect to the TCU rifle team, but I am sure that there are many other, better Presidential work items that President Obama could have spent his time on then a rifle team and every other imaginable athletic team that visited the White House.

The “Class Warfare Is Good Politics” Syndrome

86) Rather than unite America and heal the wounds, this President has poured gas on the fire from a class warfare perspective, especially his continued, vile attacks on the wealthy in this country. The wealthy in this country pay far more in taxes on both a gross dollar value and a percentage of income level, facts that Obama purposely hides and obfuscates for political gain.

87) By using Warren Buffet as a prop for showing how the wealthy pay less as a percentage of their income than middle class earners, the President deceptively implies that this is how it is for all wealthy Americans, The truth of the matter is that Mr. Buffet is the exception, not the rule, just check out the official IRS tax return website.

People in this country that earn over a million dollars a year, and there are not that many of them, pay a far higher percentage of their income to the Federal government than those that make less than a million dollars. Deception of this sort is not a way a President for all Americans should behave.

88) The President is again deceptive in his rich vs. poor class warfare antics when he continues to hide the reality of the wealth numbers in this country. Even if you took ALL of the income that American millionaires make in a typical year, you could not cover half of the budget deficits in a year that the Obama administration typically runs up. Even if you confiscated ALL of the wealth, not income, of the wealthiest Americans, you could not cover the budget deficits that this administration has wrung up in three short years. This is the reality of the situation, A President who deliberately alienates segments of Americans by using props and concealing the true situation.

In three short years, President Obama somehow managed to accumulate 88 reasons why he should not be reelected. Impressive. Much like the 88 keys on a piano. Like a piano, each of these reasons are distinctive and noisy. Unlike a piano, they cannot be arranged and played in any form that is pleasant enough to make it worthwhile to give this administration four more years.

So let’s review. We have a President who sits silent and allows ordinary Americans with intelligent, informed contrary opinions to be slandered and demeaned by his political allies.

He uses deception as he tries to incite different segments of America against each other for his political gain.

Every one of his economic polices have been failures.

He tramples on the principles laid out in the Constitution, ignoring the rule of law as he sees as convenient.

His foreign policy activities have mostly been failures, failures that are dwarfed by the impending disaster known as Obama Care.

He has not resolved, or even come close to presenting coherent plans, the major issues (“The Big Things”) of our times and the faulty operational aspects of the Federal government (“The Small Things“), continue to be redundant, wasteful, inefficient, and ineffective.

But the biggest reason why he should not be given another term is his lack of personal responsibility. It is never his fault. Someone else always ruins his plans. This lack of humility means a person never looks inward to see how he or she could improve. And without the ability to self evaluate and improve, the country will not improve. We need someone who deals with reality, not someone who blames reality.

There it is, 88 reasons why this Presidency needs to end as soon ass possible. Please let me know if I left any reasons out and please let me know if there are any good reasons why he should be reelected. Mature, adult debate on both sides of this issue is welcomed and critical if we are fix what ails this country, repair our democracy, and return civility to our political discussion.

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

88 Reasons Why President Obama Is Unworthy Of A Second Term - Part 2

2012-01-12T04:22:00.000-05:00

This is the second in a three post series where we lay out a comprehensive set of 88 reasons why President Obama is unworthy of a second term in office. Today: Reasons 32 to 65

Yesterday we reviewed the first 31 reasons why President Obama is unworthy of a second term. Some of yesterday's 31 reasons covered the many times when he was silent while his political allies vilified, slandered, and demeaned ordinary Americans for simply having an intelligent and honest difference of opinion with his administration's programs and views.

Yesterday's other reasons covered this administration's failed economic policies and increasingly frequent disregard for the tenets of the Constitution and the rule of law in this country. This first set of reasons is enough evidence of President Obama's unworthiness for a second term. However, more than 50 more reasons will be covered today and tomorrow.

The “Foreign Affairs Are Foreign To Me” Syndrome

Many of the foreign affairs issues we face as a nation are difficult and challenging. I am not sure that President John McCain could have done a better job than Obama, However, as the old sports saying goes, “you are only as good as your record,” and this administration’s foreign affairs record is not good, and given its track record to date, is not likely to improve in the next four years:

32) Iran is three years closer to having nuclear weapons capability.

33)North Korea is three years closer to having nuclear weapons capability.

34) The Israelis and Palestinians are no closer to peaceful coexistence than they were three years ago.

35) Our Afghanistan situation is just as hopeless and lost as it was three years ago.

36) The latest public opinion polls of Arab citizens indicate our standing with the “Arab Street” is as low as it has ever been, ranking behind Iran and its tyrannical leaders on many dimensions.

37) The Obama administration was caught totally unaware and unprepared when one of the biggest freedom movements of all time came to be, the Arab Spring, indicating a massive contingency planning failure of State Department.

38) Although the Obama administration has theoretically gotten us militarily out of Iraq, it was done much later than we were led to believe would happen during the 2008 Presidential campaign. In fact, Obama withdrew our troops from Iraq on the original George W. Bush withdrawal schedule, a fact that was not mentioned during Obama's campaigning.

39) All of which is a moot point since rather than stationing actual U.S. military troops in the country, we will pay anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 mercenaries to do our military bidding going forward. Thus, we will still have armed forces in the country, regardless of what you call them, in direct opposition to Obama’s vow to get us all the way out of Iraq.

Overall, from a foreign affairs perspective, we are no better off, best case, than we were three years ago and in many cases, especially the growth in the nuclear arms club, we are likely worse off.

The “How To Screw It Up For The 90% When Trying To Fix It For The 10%” Syndrome - Obama Care

When the debate over health care reform started, it was viewed as a national tragedy that about 30 million Americans, or about 10% of the population, did not have health care insurance coverage. Rather than come up with a solution that addressed the needs of the 10%, the Obama administration constructed an immense, unwieldy, and doomed to failure piece of legislation that is likely to not fix the 10% problem but will cause havoc for many in the 90% of the people that already had, and were mostly happy with, their current health care insurance.

At no time in our history can I remember a piece of legislation that was so poorly thought out, so poorly written, and will have such catastrophic impacts on so many Americans:

40) Tens of millions of Americans are likely to lose their health care insurance from their employers since under Obama Care it is less expensive for them to terminate their health care insurance programs and pay a fine than to continue them.

41) Obama Care will impose more than 1,950 new Federal government rules and regulations on Americans and American businesses, reducing economic growth and contributing to high unemployment for years besides severely restricting the freedom of all Americans.

42) The CLASS component of Obama Care, that program which was supposed to provide long term care and was one of the main and few reasons for the initial financial analysis of Obama Care being positive, has already been shut down because it provided fewer benefits at higher cost than existing long term care programs in the private sector. Thus, the financial viability of the entire Obama Care program is now in great doubt.

43) The head actuary for Medicare and Medicaid recently completed his own in-depth analysis of Obama Care and concluded that it will add more than $300 billion to the national debt in the first ten years vs. if Obama Care had not been passed, shattering the Obama administration’s claim that Obama Care would reduce our skyrocketing national debt.

44) About 1,500 exemptions to the law’s requirements have already been granted by the Obama administration, strongly indicating that if you have to make over 1,500 exemptions before the full force of any legislation is in effect, it is not going to be a good piece of legislation.

45) The law is so poorly written that it will likely influence whether Americans get married, take a promotion, or retire since there are seriously financial ramifications for all of these decisions under Obama Care. Government laws and actions should make citizens’ lives easier, not seriously impact and influence the major personal decisions in their lives.

46) The legislation was passed through the barely legal but highly unethical process called reconciliation. Legislation of this magnitude and this importance needed to be passed with full disclosure and in the right, ethical way since it will impact every American. Reconciliation is the wrong way, it is the coward’s way.

47) Numerous opinion polls of business owners show that the magnitude, penalties, and uncertainty of the Obama Care legislation is causing business owners to hunker down and curtail business expansion and hiring, contributing to continued high unemployment and anemic economic growth.

48) The legislation will fail miserably because of the poor problem solving skills of those who wrote it. The root causes of our skyrocketing health care costs and resultant high insurance costs are the following, mostly public health reasons:

Americans eat too much.
Americans eat too much of the wrong types of food.
Americans do not exercise enough.
Americans smoke too much.
Americans are getting older on average.

Obama Care took a public health crisis and tried to solve it with massive increases in inefficient government regulations, taxation, and bureaucratic intervention into our lives. Rather than addressing and focusing these pubic health issues (along with medical industry tort reform and cross state line insurance competition), Obama Care created 1,950 rules and regulations that will do little to fix these pressing public health care issues

49) And most importantly, Obama either lied or was totally oblivious to what Obama Care would do to most Americans. The President said we could all keep our current health care plans but that will not happen since many companies will opt to pay Obama Care’s small fines than continue to carry health insurance for their employees. The President said that Obama Care will not add to the national debt but that is no where close to being a true statement according to many nonpartisan experts.

The “I Hope The Big Issues of Our Time Get Resolved Since I Have Other Things To Do” Syndrome

For decades, no one in the White House or in Congress has come up with effective, compassionate, and efficient solutions to the major issues of our times. These include Republicans and Democrats, today and forty years ago. Thus, although candidate Obama campaigned on the promise of hope and change, his ability and come with actual plans to implement that hope and change has failed just as miserably as those that came before him, causing that “hope and change” theme to ring very hollow three years into his term:

50) Forty years or so after Nixon declared “war on drugs,” we are no closer as a nation form having a sane and effective illicit drug program. In fact, if anything, the growth of the violent drug cartels that threaten the sovereignty of Mexico and other Central and South American countries has grown exponentially during Obama’s first three years as resolution of our war on drugs is nowhere in sight.

51) Decades after Congress ordered the military to seal the Mexican/U.S. border within 45 days to prevent illegal immigration, our border still leaks drugs and illegal immigrant crossings as much as ever with no sane, compassionate, comprehensive immigration policy at hand.

52) Almost thirty years after the Reagan administration systematically identified the major and many flaws in our public education processes, our kids are still getting undereducated relative to kids in many, many other countries, with this administration proposing nothing worthwhile to change that situation. President Obama's education efforts are just as feeble as the Bush administration's efforts.

53) More than thirty five years after the oil Arab embargoes from the 1970s, we are no closer to having a coherent, clean, and comprehensive energy program for our country. Ordering the EPA to overstep its bounds and legal mandate as Obama is trying to do is not a coherent, clean, and comprehensive energy program.

No other Congress or President seriously tried to solve these problems prior to the Obama Presidency a club he has now joined.

The “And Don’t Bother Me With The Little Details Of Government Either Since I Have Other Things To Do” Syndrome

Not only has this administration not made any progress on the big issues facing Americans today, government operations have never seemed so hapless, inefficient, and wasteful as we have seen over the past three years:

54) The Medicare program still wastes/loses $60-90 billion a year due to fraud, criminal syndicates, and inefficiency, with no apparent plan in place to fix the problem three years into this Presidency.

55) The Medicaid program still wastes/loses $30-40 billion year due to fraud, criminal syndicates, and inefficiency, with no apparent plan in place to fix the problem three years into this Presidency.

56) The Social Security program still wastes/loses about $70 billion a year due to fraud, criminal syndicates, and inefficiency, with no apparent plan in place to fix the problem three years into this Presidency.

57) Just one of the Federal government’s unemployment program loses about $19 billion a year due to fraud, criminal syndicates, and inefficiency, with no apparent plan in place to fix the problem three years into this Presidency.

58) The IRS fails to collect over $300 billion a year due to tax evasion with no apparent plan in place to fix the problem three years into this Presidency, a failure that forces honest Americans to pay more in their tax bills.

59) The Federal government’s food stamp program wastes/loses at least $3 billion a year due to fraud, criminal syndicates, and inefficiency, with no apparent plan in place to fix the problem three years into this Presidency.

60) The waste and redundancy of government programs is mind boggling with the Federal government having 15 different agencies overseeing food safety laws, more than 20 independent programs helping the homeless, 80 different programs to help economic development, 82 different government agencies working on improving teacher quality, 47 different government agencies working on job training, and 18 different programs working on food and nutrition assistance. These overlapping, redundant, inefficient, and different agencies and departments waste tens of billions of dollars every year with no apparent plans in place to fix the waste.

61) The Federal government and Obama administration was completely unprepared to handle the Gulf oil spill, taking months to develop a plan to stop and contain the situation, a plan that should have been ready for deployment within hours of the disaster.

62) Although Congress passed legislation in 2008 to curtail fraud in the food stamp program, three years later the Obama administration has still not written the regulations mandated in the law, allowing food stamp waste to continue unabated even though legislation is in place to address the situation.

63) As of late 2011, the Obama administration had failed to write 75% of the regulations that were scheduled to have been completed as mandated under the Dodd-Frank Financial Industry Reform legislation, a failure that may have led to the bankruptcy of MF Global and the loss of over $1 billion in client wealth.

64) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Federal government’s large housing industry entities that were major culprits in behind the Great Recession, continue to devour billions of taxpayer dollars every month in subsidies with no apparent plan in place to stop the need for subsidies

65) Despite hemorrhaging billions of tax payer dollars every month, the Obama administration has made no plans to curb outsized executive compensation at Fannie and Freddie.

Government is more than having tea with the queen and signing grandiose pieces of legislation. It is about respecting taxpayers and the taxes they pay for mundane, every day government services and operations. Allowing those services and operations to waste hundreds of billions of dollars every year is a disgrace, is disrespectful of those citizens and grounds for defeat at the polls.

We will continue with the final of the 88 reasons tomorrow. If I have missed any reason for making President a one term President, please let me know. Conversely, if there are any major reasons why President Obama should be reelected, let me know that also. Both views would contribute to a mature, adult conversation in order to find a way to fix our democracy, our economy, and our political processes before it is too late.

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/

88 Reasons Why President Obama Is Unworthy Of A Second Term - Part 1 of 3

2012-01-11T09:28:00.000-05:00

This is the first in a three post series where we lay out a comprehensive set of 88 reasons why President Obama is unworthy of a second term in office. Today: Reasons 1 to 31

After observing and analyzing the first three years of President Obama’s time in office, I have come to the conclusion that the country cannot endure, heal, or grow if he is allowed to serve a second term. His behavior and results, as viewed from many different perspectives, have come up short relative to facing, addressing, and resolving the major issues facing America today. On each of those issues, America is not better, and on many cases is worse off, then we were three short years ago.

In fact, I have easily identified 88 reasons why the Presidency of Barack Obama needs to end after one term. Those 88 reasons are listed below in broad categories or syndromes. These syndromes capture his way of thinking, his approach to his duties in office.

It is unlikely that these failed approaches will change any time soon. If they were to change, we would have seen those changes already. Thus, not only his first three years been a failure, there is no indication he will break out of these syndromes and somehow miraculously change his approaches to problems and challenges in the future.

Before reading these 88 reasons, consider the following facts that underlie these conclusions.

Prior to the midterm elections in 2010, I had never voted for a Republican for national office in my life (I am 57 years old). Thus, I am not a Tea Party member, a Republican, a social conservative, a neo conservative, or a regular viewer of Fox News.
All of my assertions and facts laid out in these 88 reasons come from the most nonpartisan news sources I could find. These sources include the Associated Press, CNN, Washington Post, Reuters, and others and do not include Fox News.
My educational and professional background is in quantitative analysis (including a Masters of Science in Statistics) so I am well grounded in problem solving techniques and quantitative analysis. This has allowed me to look at the past three years from the viewpoint of failed problem solving skills and the misuse or non use of quantitative analysis to solve any problem worthwhile.
I am not asserting that John McCain could have done any better than Barack Obama over the past three years. I am not asserting that Barack Obama’s predecessor was a great President. If George Bush or John McCain had this same record as this President, I would still be writing down these same 88 reasons.
I am not a racist and I come to these conclusions as a result of observation, analysis, and logic and not bigotry.

The “Silence Is Golden” Syndrome

Barack Obama came into office promising to unite the country, to overcome divisions. Consider an excerpt from his acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention back in 2008:

“But what I will not do is suggest that the Senator (his Presidential opponent, John McCain) takes his positions for political purposes, because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other's character and each other's patriotism. The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party.”

Nice words that have meant nothing to this President during his term. He has remained silent as other Democrats have slandered, demonized, and verbally abused any American citizen who dared to express a contrary opinion to any of this administration’s positions and views. Silence is not golden in this case, it is divisive:

1) When Democrat Nancy Pelosi questioned the patriotism of Americans who honestly and intelligently opposed the tenets of Obama Care by calling them un-American, Obama was silent.

2) When Democrat Charles Rangel likened citizens who honestly and intelligently opposed the tenets of Obama Care to the racists who opposed the civil rights movement back in the 1960s, Obama was silent.

3) When Democrat Shelia Jackson Lee stated that all Tea Party members, nearly all of whom are sincerely, honestly, and deeply concerned about out of control government spending, our loss of freedom, and our skyrocketing national debt, used to wear Ku Klux Klan sheets, Obama was silent.

4) When Democrat Nancy Pelosi said that all Americans who honestly and intelligently opposed the building of a mosque at Ground Zero needed to be investigated, Obama was silent.

5) When Democrat Alan Grayson said that all Republicans were knuckle dragging Neanderthals, Obama was silent.

6) When his own green jobs czar, Van Jones, stated Republicans were a__h___s, Obama was silent.

7) When Democrat Harry Reid insulted all Americans when he asserted that all Americans sightseeing in our nation’s capital in the summer physically smell, Obama was silent.

8) When several Democrats, allegedly including Vice President Joe Biden, likened Republicans to terrorists, the same type of people that attack and kill innocent people, during the debt ceiling debate last summer, Obama was personally silent.

9) When Rep. Steve Cohen likened Republican critics of Obamacare to the Nazis and their propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Obama was silent.

10) When labor leader Jimmy Hoffa threatened violence against Tea Party members and Republicans, threatening “war” and threatening to “take theses sons of bitches out,” Obama was silent.

11) When Americans expressed outrage and concern about our skyrocketing national debt and were called barbarians by several Democrats for having this legitimate opposing opinion, Obama was silent.

Looks like the President came up short in his promise when he said “one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other's character and each other's patriotism.” Standing passively aside and allowing your political allies to call ordinary American citizens terrorists, racists, and other slanderous names and questioning their patriotism is certainly not Presidential. The President should be the President of all Americans, not just the one who voted for him. Silence is not golden, in these cases it is divisive and bigoted.

The “Constitution is Merely A Set Of Suggestions, Not Hard and Fast Rules” Syndrome

As President of the United States, President Obama took an oath to uphold the tenets of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and to enforce the laws of the land. However, he seems to have misinterpreted these responsibilities, treating the Constitution and the rule of law as mere suggestions:

12) He inserted the United States armed forces into the Libyan civil war and into danger in violation of the war making powers given to Congress by the Constitution and in violation of the War Powers Act. While his war strategy may have been the right thing to do, his disdain for the rule of law does not make the means justify the ends. If he had been doing his job, he would have had enough time to do the Libyan warfare action in the right, lawful manner.

13) When his Gulf of Mexico oil drilling moratorium was deemed illegal and a Federal judge told the administration to rescind the moratorium, the administration did just that and, in defiance, replaced it with a second moratorium that was almost identical to the one that the judge ordered to be halted. Consider what Judge Feldman, the presiding judge had to say about this blatant disregard for the rule of law:

“Each step the government took following the court’s imposition of a preliminary injunction showcases its defiance, Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the re-imposition of a second blanket and substantively identical moratorium, and in light of the national importance of this case, provide this court with clear and convincing evidence of the government’s contempt.”

The Constitution set up three branches of government to keep each other branch in check. Ignoring a ruling from the judicial branch is the same as ignoring the Constitution, it is the same as holding the Constitution in contempt.

14) The Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) was signed into law by a Democratic President, Bill Clinton, and it legislated that the Federal government recognizes that marriage is a union between one man and one woman, not two gay or lesbian individuals. It is a repugnant law and should be terminated, the Federal government and politicians should not be in the business of regulating and defining what is proper personal behavior. However, it is the law of the land and President Obama, as he was sworn to do, is responsible for upholding the law of the land.

However, he violated this Constitutional responsibility when he unilaterally decided not to defend the law in any court cases. The Constitution provides an orderly process for terminating bad laws through legislation. He should have terminated this law within the first year of his term, within the rules and boundaries of the Constitution, when the Democrats controlled the White House and both parts of Congress. Unilaterally ignoring the law of the land now is a blatant violation of the Constitution and the oath he took.

15) Obama is the first President to set up a “shadow government” within the White House. His system of “czars” sets a dangerous precedent by establishing a potential ruling junta that bypasses the checks and balances of Congressional review established by the Constitution.

16) His recent illegal “recess appointments” of someone to head the newly formed consumer protection agency, that came out of the Dodd-Frank legislation, and three people to the National Labor Relations Board are a continued symptom of his desire to bypass Constitutionally mandated Congressional review and approval when it comes to appointing people into high ranking government positions.

The excuse and flawed rationale that Bush did the same type of appointments does not make it okay. No matter who executes this type of behavior, it is a violation of the Constitution‘s spirit and intent.

17) The disastrous “Fast and Furious” DEA gun running operation that allowed thousands of military grade weapons to easily cross the U.S. border into Mexico and into the hands of Mexico’s violent drug cartels is a gross violation of domestic laws and international treaties. As President, Obama was sworn to uphold the laws of this country which also includes enforcing the valid treaties we have with other countries. Allowing his Justice Department to haphazardly operate “Fast and Furious” is a clear violation of that responsibility.

18) Earlier this year, the California solar panel company Solyndra went bankrupt and endangered the $530 million taxpayer investment that the Obama administration had granted the company. The only hope that the American taxpayer had of recovering even a fraction of the half of billion dollars was to exercise its legal right to be first in line when the bankruptcy proceedings sold off the remaining Solyndra assets. That was a legal condition of the loan guarantee: in the event of a Solyndra default, the Federal government lawfully got first crack at recovering money.

However, Obama's Energy Department illegally moved the Kaiser Foundation, another Solyndra investor, ahead of the American taxpayer in the bankruptcy proceedings. This action was done without the knowledge of the Justice Department who is supposedly responsible for enforcing the laws of the land like this one. As a result of this leapfrog move, any assets and money from the sale of Solyndra assets were illegally used up before it was the American taxpayers' turn to receive anything. However, the Kaiser Foundation did recover much of its investment.

Oh, and by the way, the Kaiser Foundation has strong family links to a gentleman called George Kaiser. George Kaiser has been a very important, successful and prolific fund raiser for Obama's past political campaigns. A law ignored, a political ally satisfied.

19) President Obama signed off on the extensions of the Patriot Act, the worst legislation regarding the destruction of personal liberty and freedom and growing the Orwellian power of the Federal government. He did not even bother to try and staff a panel of people to review and control government abuses that might occur under the Patriot Act, a panel that is mandated by the law.

The “I Did Not Major In Economics Bit I Did Stay At A Holiday Inn Express" Syndrome

It is no secret that the economy has been in a bad funk for many years now. High unemployment and higher underemployment, anemic economic growth, skyrocketing national debt, a stagnant stock market, a housing market in a ditch, etc. Now, most Democrats would blame Bush for the entire economic mess. However, this argument is a crock for two reasons.

First, if we look at the last five years of government, the years 2007 through 2011, the Democratic Party has controlled 80% of the Federal government’s functions. They have controlled the Senate for all five years (2007 to 2011), they had controlled the House of Representatives for four years out of five (2007 to 2010) and they controlled the Presidency for three years out of five (2008 to 2011). Republicans were in charge of a Federal government function for only three years, Bush was President for two years and the Republicans controlled the House for one year.

Thus, while Bush may be responsible for a lot of the economic problems we face today, the Democrats have at least as much culpability and possibly quite more, given their 80% control of government from 2007 to 2011.

Second, if you look at the actual economic data and not believe the economic Democratic Party hype, the domestic economy was doing quite well until the Democrats took over Congress, starting in 2007.

Consider the following graph:

As you can see, using official government data, Bush budget deficits are not to blame for our current economic malaise. The deficit picture was actually improving under Bush, up until the November 2006 midterm elections (the vertical line). It is only when the Democrats take over Congress in 2007 does the deficit problem deteriorate significantly. The horizontal line is the average annual budget deficit that was incurred during the Clinton Presidency.

No matter what data you graph, e.g. unemployment rate, deficits as a percentage of GDP, deficits as a percentage of budget, etc., the U.S. economy was in pretty good shape until the Democrats took over Congress. Thus, blaming Bush does nothing to let the Obama administration off the hook for the following economic disasters:

20) Cash For Clunkers - Failure

21) Cash For Caulkers - Failure

22) Cash For Appliances - Failure

23) Small Business Tax Incentives - Failure

24) HAMP Mortgage Relief Program - Failure

25) $800 Billion Economic Stimulus Program - Failure

26) Unnecessary Auto Company Bailouts Costing the Taxpayers Billions Of Dollars - Failure

27) Unnecessary Bank and Financial Institution Bailouts

28) Persistently high unemployment three years after Bush left office and three years into the Obama administration.

29) Gas prices that have consistently been about double what they were since the Obama administration began.

30) Average household income levels have fallen in the three years after Bush left office and all three years into the Obama administration.

31) Several years ago, Senator Obama decried the Bush administration when it requested a debt ceiling raising from Congress, correctly categorizing it as “failure in leadership.” As President, the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress have added almost as much to our national debt than all Presidential administrations prior to the Obama administration COMBINED, certainly a failure in leadership.

This is enough for one day, 31 unique reasons why President Obama does not merit, deserve, or is worthy of a second term. We will cover the remaining 57 reasons in the next two days. If anyone has any additional reasons, please share them. If anyone has any reason why President Obama should be reelected, please share them also. It is a worthy and adult conversation and discussion we all need to have before it is too late and our freedom and liberties are lost forever.

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/

Political Class Insanity - January, 2012 Edition, Part 2

2012-01-10T07:56:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we covered the first half of the political class insanity we came across over the past month. Unfortunately, it was so much that we had to split the insanity across two days worth of posts. Thus, the second half of the insanity is not so proudly presented below:

- According to a Washington Post article that was written by Robert Samuelson and summarized in the December 30, 2011 issue of The Week magazine, in 2012 America's budget deficit is expected to be about 8% of the country's GDP, assuming that the current set of optimistic economic assumptions actually come true. U.S. Federal government borrowing to cover its expenses will be 24% of its expenditures, i.e. the U.S. Federal government will have to borrow one dollar for every three dollars it expends.

However, even though these numbers are very scary, consider other numbers from the article as it relates to two economic basket cases in Europe. Italy's budget deficit will be 2.4% compared to our 8%. Greece's government borrowing will be 24% of its spending, compared to our 27%. Thus, if Greece and Italy are tottering close to financial insolvency, what does our expected/best case, economic situation in 2012 mean for us?

- The November 25, 2011 issue of The Week magazine reviewed how Jefferson County, Alabama had filed the largest government bankruptcy in U.S. history in mid-November. The county had tried to restructure its $4 billion worth of debt with its creditors but could not come to an agreement.

The reason for the financial mess? Not surprisingly, the article identifies poor accounting and political corruption, two functions under the full control of the political class. I would bet that Jefferson County and Detroit (see yesterday's insanity) will not be the last government entities that we will see go belly up, with most of them being caused by incompetent and corrupt politicians. We will cover more on this as the bankruptcies unfold going forward into 2012. This would have been unheard just ten years ago, governments going bankrupt.

- A New York Times article that was summarized in the November 11, 2011 issue of The Week magazine reported the United States spends more on health care than what the French spend on everything: education, defense, housing, health care, and more. Thus, our unhealthy health care industry is bigger than the fifth largest economy in the world. And given that we know that Obama Care is likely to add hundreds of billions of dollars to our health care tab, we are likely to move up further in this dubious comparison to the rest of the world's economies.

- Reason magazine is always a great source of political class insanity and their February, 2012 issue did not disappoint. When a technology entrepreneur Amit Gupta found out he had acute leukemia he also found out that he had two good friends. Both friends offered $10,000 of their own money for a donation of genetically compatible bone marrow that could be given to Gupta in his fight against leukemia.

It must be great to have friends like this, ones who would offer $20,000 to incent a stranger to come forward to test if they could help their friend. Unfortunately, their generosity is against the law and exposed themselves to fines and up to five years in prison. The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 makes it a felony to give or accept "valuable consideration" for any "transplantable organ or tissue."

But bone marrow is not a transplantable organ or tissue, it is like giving a blood transfusion, totally replaceable by the donor. Nevertheless, it is still illegal under the 1984 law. Good friends trying to help out a friend in need and the government makes it illegal. Insanity.

- U.S. News and World Report, reported on December 12, 2011 that "President Barack Obama is pressing his request that Iran return the U.S. surveillance drone captured by the country's armed forces." Talk about insanity. The United States illegally sends a surveillance aircraft over Iran, illegally violating their airspace, which crashes into Iranian territory and the President has the nerve to ask the Iranians to return the craft? And has the irrational expectation that they actually will return it?

If the Iranians had done the same thing to us, illegally violated our airspace with a spy drone, do we think we would return it to them? No chance. We violated international law so for the Iranians, it is "finders keepers, losers weepers." The President looks just plain silly and insane publicly putting forth such a request.

The second part of this insanity is why don't our illegal drones have a self destruct mechanism on board? If the remote controllers of this craft knew it went down in Iranian territory, wouldn't it have made sense to have some kind of way to destroy the craft? We fly them remotely, it should not be a problem to destroy them remotely so that the sensitive technology on board does not fall into unfriendly hands.

Seems crazy not to have that simple self destruct function on these aircraft. If that had happened, the President would not have looked so silly on the international stage asking for the return of the craft.

- On November 16, 2011, the U.S. Treasury officially announced what the final taxpayer cost would likely be for the bailout of General Motors, a bailout that was completely unnecessary. Recall that the government intervened in the GM bankruptcy proceedings, screwing up a business process that should have been an easy, non-taxpayer affecting bankruptcy court action.

As a result of the political class sticking their political noses and the taxpayers' wallets into the proceedings, right now the bailout is likely to cost the American taxpayer about $38.6 billion. This $38.6 billions includes $23.6 billion loss that the Federal government incurred on its $60 billion investment and an additional $15 billion in tax liability that the Federal government "forgave" for GM. This bailout cost every American household about $330 each.

The losses could get better or worse depending on what the government eventually sells its remaining GM stock for but given the stock prices has gone from the mid $30s range in early 2011 to about $20 today, optimism should not be the assumption going forward.

- The following insanity escaped my observation back in the summer but it is still worthwhile to cover for two reasons. First, recall the Obama administration forced through an $800 billion economic stimulus plan a few years ago to try and get the economy rolling. It was not successful since we still have anemic economic growth, high unemployment, and higher underemployment.

Maybe one reason for the failure was what the money was spent on, according to a Senate report called "The Summertime Blues:"

A half million dollars for new windows at the Mt. St. Helens visitors center in Amboy, Washington. The building has been closed since 2007 and there are no immediate plans to reopen it.
$6.9 million dollars for repairs to an 1846 brick fort marooned on Dry Tortuga at the end the Florida Keys. Few people can visit this remote national park unless they hire a seaplane or take a four-hour round-trip boat ride.
Creating a museum in an abandoned train station in Glassboro, NJ, at the cost of $1.2 million.
$2 million dollars to send researchers from the California Academy of Sciences to islands in the Indian Ocean to study exotic ants.
A study of dog domestication at Cornell University with a price tag of $296-thousand dollars.
$141-thousand dollars to send students from Montana State University to China to study dinosaur eggs.
$762-thousand dollars to create interactive choreography programs at the University of North Carolina. Dancers would wear electronic monitors to analyze their movements.
$89-thousand dollars to replace sidewalks in Boynton, Oklahoma that were just replaced five years ago. One of them goes nowhere near any houses or businesses and leads directly into a ditch.

Why the Federal government would send money on any of these projects at any time is beyond me. They were certainly not worthy ways to help intelligently mend and grow the economy and all probably represent nothing more than wasteful earmarks to make politicians look good. What fool would think that these were worthy economic programs that would help the majority of Americans suffering through bad economic times?

Oh yes. Vice President Joe Biden, who was in charge of the stimulus program had this reaction to the "Summertime Blues" report: "The economic initiatives that we took, they are working."

- One last bit of insanity. We have often discussed the fact that the U.S. has hundreds of thousands of military troops unnecessarily deployed all over the world for no purpose except to needlessly burn up taxpayer wealth. And President Obama has recently decided to station 2,500 U.S. troops in the remote reaches of Australia, again for no reason.

North Korea has 1.2 million men in its army so 2,500 Marines, no matter how good they are, are no match for 1.2 million. The Chinese have several million people in their military so our 2,500 will serve no military purpose against them, half way around the world. Japan is highly unlikely to attack us and Australia is an ally. This insanity is totally unnecessary but will cost us more than half a billion dollars a year for this deployment.

Unfortunately, political class insanity comes in many forms and in many costs, all of which is borne by the American taxpayer.

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/

Political Class Insanity - January, 2012 Edition, Part 1

2012-01-09T06:47:00.000-05:00

Early in every month we review the actions, antics, and stupidity that our political class continuously springs on the American public. One would have hoped after doing this every month for two years that we would have finally documented all of the insanity.

Unfortunately, that is not the case as the American political class at every level of government continues to come forth with behavior that is wasteful, embarrassing, and non-effective in addressing and resolving the major issues facing American today. In fact, the past month has been so bad that we are splitting this month's insanity across two days, today and tomorrow, in order to adequately cover all of the antics and embarrassing actions of the political class.

Thus, without further delay, the political class insanity we have come across just in the past month or so:

- The following insanity comes from articles summarized in the December 16, 2011 issue of The Week magazine:

Michele Bachman, who just dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination for President, apparently boasted that she would close down the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran if elected President. Unfortunately, our embassy in Iran has been shut down since the 1980 Iranian hostage crisis, 31 years ago.
The Drug Enforcement Agency, that U.S. government agency that brought you the failed Fast and Furious program, a program that provided military grade weapons to Mexican drug cartels, weaponry that was used to kill a U.S. agent and more than a dozen Mexican civilians while simultaneously breaking U.S. laws and international treaties, has been forced to defend the fact that it has consciously been breaking U.S. money laundering laws in a vain attempt to learn how the drug cartels move their money. According to the New York Times article that broke the story, DEA agents have regularly transported illegal cash illegally across the border and illegally deposited the cash into drug traffickers' bank accounts. How this is a good idea completely eludes me.
According to MotherJones.com, President Obama has attended 69 fund raisers in 2011 alone.That's an average of one fund raiser every five days, a rate that is far more than either Bush or Clinton incurred in their third years as President. When you add in Obama's many golf outings and his many vacations (including his recent 17 day Hawaiian vacation), it makes you wonder if he ever does any work. Given the lousy economy, the skyrocketing debt, our high unemployment and underemployment, the divisiveness within the country, etc., the answer to that question is quite likely very little work.
The Democratic controlled Senate recently passed a piece of legislation that allowed anyone, regardless of whether they are a U.S. citizen or not, suspected, not convicted, of being a plotter of terrorism attacks on the U.S. to be detained indefinitely, without trial by our military. Forget the Constitution, forget the Bill of Rights, forget freedom and due process, just lock the suspects up forever, if needed, without any trial or justice. The Republican controlled House has already passed a similar piece of disgraceful legislation. Obama claims he will veto it but if he does not, welcome to the incarnation of the Soviet gulag system, American style.
In mid-December, the U.S. State Department ordered an "extensive and thorough review" of whether or not one of its main student visa programs was actually being used to support the sex slave industry in this country. Although the so-called J-1 Summer Work Travel program was supposed to allow foreign students to work summer jobs in this country, a Federal indictment charges that criminals have used it to staff New York City strip clubs and other sex jobs. Your tax dollars at work.

- The December 2, 2011 issue of The Week magazine contained the following insanity:

Antoin Rezko was sentenced to 10 and a half years in prison in early December for his conviction on bribery and extortion charges. He has already served three and a half years for a 2008 conviction on 16 counts of fraud, money laundering, extortion, and kickbacks from companies that wanted to do business with the state government of Illinois when convicted politician Rod Blagojevich was governor. He also raised tens of thousands of dollars for Obama's Presidential run in 2008. Do we think that the Obama political machine will do the right thing and return that money that was raised by a now convicted fund raiser? I doubt it.
Mayor Dave Bing of Detroit announced in early December that the city of Detroit could run out of cash for city operations by April, 2012. Bing has laid out a plan to lay off 1,000 city employees (9% of the work force), raise corporate taxes (assuming there are still corporations in the city limits), and outsource city services such as public lighting and city buses. If you check the history of Detroit city political leaders, you will find that many of them were less than savory when it came to corruption and now the city is unlikely to survive as a viable government entity. Coincidence? I think not. I believe that Detroit will be the first major city to default on its financial obligations in 2012 or 2013 and the ramifications of that default will be felt nationwide.
Many times we have covered the instances when Obama's Democratic Party members have disparaged ordinary Americans for simply having an honest difference of opinion with this administration. Words like racists, un-American, gerbils, Ku Klux Klan members, a__h___s, terrorists, knuckle dragging Neanderthals, etc. while the President was remained silent and allowed the slurs to continue to divide the country. However, late last year the President finally stepped up and started calling Americans names for no reason. He stated that Americans had gotten "a little soft" and followed up that slur with another statement at a fundraiser where he said "we (namely everyone but Obama) have lost our ambition." Just another way for this President to avoid taking responsibility for the sad state of the country. It is not his fault, it is the fault of the Republicans, the Japanese tsunami, the European crisis, his political "enemies" (including people who simply disagree with his policies), and those "bitter" Americans "who cling to guns and religion." Obama's words, not mine. Never his fault, it is amazing and insane. High unemployment, a divided country, anemic economic growth, trillion dollar debt every year, etc. Never his fault.

Corrupt political fund raisers, corrupt politicians, bankrupt cities, divisive language against ordinary Americans, stunted politicians, diplomatically deficient politicians, politicians that act like leisure princes, the Federal government illegally laundering money across national borders, and so much more. I cannot wait what we find out tomorrow that will continue to makes us so unproud of our political class.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment/

Beyond Insanity - The Atrocities Of The American Political Class, Philadelphia Style

2012-01-06T04:14:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we reviewed the latest atrocities of governing from the American political class. These examples of bad politicians acting atrociously badly included sending U.S. taxpayer wealth to our main economic competitor, China, overpaying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives for continued under performance in the housing and mortgage markets, and politicians enriching themselves and their political financial supporters.

We thought we had all the recent atrocities covered but within a day of publishing yesterday's atrocities, another one came to our attention that needs to be exposed. Remember, in these difficult economic times, unemployment is high, tax revenue is low, and state and local governments are struggling to stay financially solvent and still provide basic government services.

Thus, city government's like Philadelphia should be trying everything possible to protect its taxpayers and its declining revenue stream. However, in Philadelphia that is not the case, at least with regards to one city councilwoman.

But first some background, as I understand it. Philadelphia implemented a city pension program option a little while ago called DROP, Deferred Retirement Option Plan. In 1999, the city government was worried that the city's baby boomer employees would retire in one large movement, leaving the city short of trained employees, firefighters, and police officers. The DROP program was designed to keep current employees on the job, for up to four years, while they trained their replacements.

Those that sign up for DROP keep getting their regular salary, but also get a pension payment while they continue to work. The city puts the pension payment in an account that earns 4.5 percent interest. When the employee finally retires for real, he or she gets their pension money in one big lump. Most of that is money the employee would have gotten from a normal retirement anyway, but there is that extra from the interest as well. And remember that the employee has been getting a regular salary all that time too.

The theory of the program is that seasoned, expensive city employees would hang around, with the above financial incentive, to train lower priced inexpensive replacement employees. The net financial impact should have been expense neutral, pay expensive employees a little bit more now to train less expensive new employees for the long term.

However, that is not how the program worked out. According to recent news reports, the program has paid out more than EXTRA quarter billion dollars since its inception and costs the city $22 million more a year than if the program did not exist. This is just another burden on a city having dire financial problems, a city which had to raise taxes last year to cope with the budget woes.

But I digress. The real atrocity is related to a Ms. Marion B. Tasco. The DROP program became so attractive that the Philly political class made it possible for the council members to participate in DROP even though the program was originally targeted only towards regular, ordinary city employees and not elected officials.

The politicians are not hired by the city, they have no need to stay on the job longer to train their replacements since they are elected by the citizens. However, this did not stop the council members from voting themselves into the benefits of the DROP program, a program that was never intended for politicians.

And the bad part of the program is that these politicians can serve in their elected positions, retire for one day and one day only under the DROP program, collect an enhanced lump sum pension payout, and then go right back to being in office, assuming they were reelected in the previous election. Understand the sequence: get elected, serve in elected office, sign up for DROP, get reelected, retire for one day, collect a really large lump sum pension payment, and the next day start serving in office again.

Which is exactly what Ms. Tasco did. On the last day of serving her sixth term as a Philly councilwoman she retired, collected a lump sum pension payment of $478,057, and then went right back to work the next day to serve her seventh term, with half a million dollars in her bank account. And she is not the only politician to avail themselves of the program. Numerous other council members also have managed the same maneuver, each receiving payouts of over $100,000. However, the majority of them did exactly what the program was intended for, they actually retired and are no longer drawing city pay checks.

But Ms. Tasco seems to be unique in a number of ways. First, it appears from Philly news reports that she received one of the highest payouts, just under half a million dollars. Second, while some of her peers actually did permanently retire after getting their DROP-related lump sums, she went right back to work to serve her seventh term and did not retire. Third, she sponsored a bill that would continue the program that was vetoed by the mayor but whose veto was overturned by the same people that benefit most from the program, the city council members.

Atrocities at every level of government now seems to be the norm. At least in Philly, the mayor is trying to do away with an expensive, unneeded government expense that has been tailored to give politicians an unwanted and out of proportion enrichment. The same cannot be said for most other political "leaders," whether it is the politicians in Illinois that allowed their lobbyist friends to get into the teachers' pension system after teaching for exactly one day or the political class in Washington that refuse to police themselves, allowing political cronies like the ones in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to continue to receive over sized bonuses or the exemptions they grant themselves from insider trading laws, whistle blower laws, etc.

We truly have devolved into a society where an elitist, pampered set of politicians have managed to hijack our political processes and place themselves above the law, below integrity, and in the midst of corruption. Only by forcing a change in those hijacked political processes can we finally move out of atrocious and into integrity in the city halls, state capitals, and streets of Washington D.C.

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/

Beyond Insanity - The Atrocities Of The American Political Class

2012-01-05T04:20:00.001-05:00

Every month we review the latest political class insanity that we have come across since the last insanity report. These instances of political class insanity are often silly, stupid, and baffling. They usually involve ridiculous wastes of taxpayer wealth in areas that affect very few Americans. They often would be humorous if they were not so idiotic and wasteful.

However, we just as often come across political class behavior that exceeds the ridiculous, inane level of insanity and enters the truly atrocious realm. This realm involves blatant disrespect for the letter and spirit of our nation's laws and regulations and the unfettered selfishness of those that we have entrusted our government responsibilities. The latest atrocities include the following:

- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the two government organizations that had more to do with the Great Recession and collapse of the U.S. mortgage and housing market than any two entities in the world. As a result of their incompetence and corruption, they were central players in the financial collapse that has led to unheard of levels and lengths of high unemployment, the decimation of the U.S. housing industry, and the near collapse of the U.S. banking industry.

Worst of all, these two government organizations have already required the U.S. taxpayer to fork well over $100 billion worth of bailout money to keep both entities solvent. These two companies received more TARP bailout money than any other bailed out bank or financial institution.

It is highly likely another $100 billion worth of taxpayer wealth will eventually be expended to keep them out of bankruptcy. This bailout could eventually come out to about $1,800 for every American household.

When U.S. banks received bailout money from the taxpayers via TARP, they were required to impose salary limits on their top executives. That was viewed as a penalty for screwing up their companies so badly that the government and U.S. taxpayer had to bail them out.

We review all this in order to appreciate the atrocity outlined in a CNN/Money online article from November 15, 2011. According to the article, the top five executives at Fannie Mae received $33.3 million in 2009 and 2010 and the top five at Freddie Mac received $28.1 million. These numbers do not include potentially more in deferred compensation. Each company has set pay targets of as much as $17 million for its top managers for 2011.

Makes you wonder why the Occupy Wall Street people are not protesting at Fannie and Freddie's headquarters. While the TARP requirements stipulated that financial organizations that were still receiving taxpayer bailout money limit their executives' pay levels, this apparently does not apply to government organizations. While many banks have already returned their TARP money, with interest, Fannie and Freddie continue to suck bailout money out of the American taxpayer. While the housing industry continues to limp along, Fannie and Freddie executives have had no success, or possibly no desire, to fix what ails the mortgage and housing industry.

And the worst atrocity of all, the Obama administration and Congress have shown no desire, ability, or interest in fixing Fannie and Freddie, allowing billions of taxpayer dollars to disappear every month.

- Although the amount of taxpayer money being wasted is relatively small in this second atrocity, the reason for the waste certainly crosses the line into an atrocity. It is no secret that China is a strong and rising economic and political power. It holds upwards of a TRILLION dollars of our national debt, putting it in a position to leverage that debt over us to its advantage.

China has grown its manufacturing base at the expense of our domestic manufacturing base, contributing to our high level of sustained unemployment. China has been growing its economy by incredible levels year over year for quite a while while U.S. economic growth has been anemic for the past three years, growth that is unlikely to get much better in the foreseeable future.

Given the current situation between us and China, why in the world is the U.S. government giving China four million dollars a year in one of its foreign aid programs? Makes no sense, given the power and growth of the Chinese economy. Since the Chinese have enough money to continually buy our Federal bonds and debt, why are we sending them millions of dollars? Makes no sense, since our political class adds a at least a TRILLION dollars worth of debt to our national debt every year.

A government bureaucrat, Nisha Biswal, the assistant administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development, tried to justify the $4 million program by stating in the article that the aid supports U.S. values and interests. What might be a better use of the money, vs. what Nisha Biswal wants to do with it, is to go out and hire 40 or 50 teachers for use inside this country. What might be better use might be to help some U.S. homeowners who are having mortgage issues to keep their homes. What might be a better use would be to feed some of our own homeless that go hungry everyday.

The money, $4 million, is not a lot relative to the big government spending picture. However, $4 million could do a lot more for a small sample of U.S. citizens than what very little use it has by giving it to one of our biggest and richest economic competitors for the wishy-washy objective of "support U.S. values and interests." China could not care less about those values and interests. Continuing to execute this program is truly an atrocity.

However, one area has avoided most of this malice, namely the Federal government work force. According to a recent MSNBC report, drawing on Bureau of Labor statistics:

The number of people working for the Federal government has grown 12% since the Great Recession in 2007. In other words, despite the worst economic downturn since the Depression, the Federal government grew by a double digit increase.
At the same time, employment in the rest of the country and economy has dropped 5%.
But it gets worse. While the rest of America suffers with high unemployment and higher underemployment, the number of higher salaried Federal employees has increased even faster, 14.8% since 2007.
These statistics have lead to unemployment rates that are more than 30% lower in the greater Washington D.C. area vs. the rest of the country.

Thus, the Americans that actually fund government employees' salaries and benefits are suffering far more than the employees that actually work for the Federal government. Something is atrociously wrong with this equation.

- The next atrocity was uncovered in an October 22, 2011 article in the Chicago Tribune. Recall that the state government of Illinois, home state of the Tribune, is facing a large, ongoing financial crisis caused by its revenue tax stream not being close to covering its expense and cost obligations. Earlier in 2011, the state legislation significantly raised both business and personal income taxes in a failed attempt to close that budget gap.

Well, one reason they may be having financial problems is because of situations like the one described in the Tribune article:

Two Illinois teacher union lobbyists, both of whom had no prior teaching experience, were allowed to count their years as Illinois teacher union employees toward a state teacher pension once they served a single day of substitute teaching in 2007.
Steven Preckwinkle, the political director for the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and fellow union lobbyist David Piccioli were the only people who took advantage of a small, temporary window opened by the Illinois legislature and governor a few months prior to their day of substitute teaching.
The legislation enabled union lobbyists to get into the state teachers pension fund and count their previous years as union lobbyists, not teachers.
Preckwinkle's single day in the classroom allowed him to pick up 16 years of previous union lobbyists work, not classroom teaching, to count towards a teachers pension. He's 59, and at age 60 he'll be eligible for a state pension based on the four-highest consecutive years of his last 10 years of work. Based on his lobbyists salary history so far, he could earn a pension of about $108,000 a year, more than double what the average teacher receives, despite being in the classroom for only one day. This does not include the $93 he made for his one day of substitute teaching.
Over the course of their lifetimes, both men stand to receive more than a million dollars each from a state pension fund that has less than half of the assets it needs to cover promises made to tens of thousands of public school teachers.

These are the highlights but the details in the article are extensive and equally atrocious. They include a summary of how the teachers' union lobby made significant political contributions to the Democrats that control Illinois state government. How this loophole was temporary and most people were not aware of it, except for those few that took advantage of it. The conclusion being that the loopholes were a quid pro quo for the campaign contributions.

Atrocious political class behavior and a total disrespect for the heavily taxed citizens and businesses of Illinois. A state government rapidly heading towards insolvency and the politicians in Illinois still take time to cater to their own selfish interests and those of their financial supporters.

The details of the atrocity can be found at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-pensions-teacher-perk-20111023,0,6972290,full.story

- And finally we come across another Federal government program that is rife with waste, fraud, and criminal activity. The Washington Examiner, in a November 30, 2011, examined the food stamp programs in Virginia, Maryland, and D.C. using official government statistics and findings. Not unexpectedly, much like the vast amount of fraud, waste, and criminal activity found in the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs, the Federal food stamp program apparently also wastes billions of taxpayer dollars every year.

The article found that when the Maryland authorities looked at a sample of food stamp recipients, they found evidence of fraud in 25% of the cases in 2011. Virgina found evidence of fraud in 16% of their sample cases, and D.C. found a whopping 38% evidence of fraud in the sample they examined.

The article points out that these three government entities appear to be some of the worst in the country from a waste perspective. However, even if the rest of the country is only half as bad, it is not a stretch to estimate that 10-15% of all taxpayer dollars spent on food stamps in this country is lost to criminal activity and waste.

Despite this atrocity of fraud and waste, prosecution of the offenders appear to be almost nonexistent. According to the article, Maryland had over 645,000 people receiving food stamp support in 2011. However, despite finding evidence of fraud in 25% of those cases in sampled, only seven people were prosecuted in court in 2011 and only 113 other cases were settled out of court. These 120 cases account for only .07% of the estimated total number of fraud cases in the Maryland food stamp program (25% of 645,000 divided into 120). Atrocious.

The details of the fraud and waste can be found at http://washingtonexaminer.com/local/dc/2011/11/maryland-virginia-top-nation-food-stamp-fraud/1962111

It is this kind of atrocious incompetence by the political class and the government programs it operates that infuriates the American taxpayer. Wasteful spending, out of integrity behavior to help out political friends and lobbyists, sending taxpayer money overseas to our economic competitors while Americans suffer at home, taking care of their own government bureaucracy friends at government operations like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and allowing the government bureaucracy to needlessly grow on the backs of struggling taxpayers.

As stated in our opening paragraph, political class insanity is one thing. Political class atrocity is a whole new animal, one that we should not have to tolerate. Step 39 from "Love my Country, Loathe My Government" would be a good first step to eliminating government atrocities in our lives.

Step 39 would impose strict term limits on all Federally elected positions. Our current political class establishment tolerates its own atrocities, time to get a new establishment put in place with the mandate to stop both the insanity and atrocities that came before it.

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/

A Nation Should Have A Tax System That Looks Like Someone Designed It On Purpose

2012-01-04T06:25:00.000-05:00

The title for today's post comes from William Simon who long ago served as the U.S. Treasury Secretary, from 1974 to 1977 under both Nixon and Ford. He was being sarcastic when he coined the phrase, realizing that even decades ago, the United States did not have a tax system that looked like an intelligent being designed it on purpose. Such a system would be easy to comply with, easy to understand, and not a burden on the economy.

Over time, the political class has continuously used the tax system to reward both constituents and reelection campaign donors and tried to manage social and political changes by manipulating the tax code to advantage those changes. As a result, we have ended up with a tax system that is anything but fair, easy to understand, efficient, and easy to comply with.

Consider the following factoids about our nation's tax system:

- I first started out trying to find out a basic fact: how many pages are in the Title 26 Federal Tax Code? The answers I found were never exactly the same but were pretty consistent, most around 70,000 pages. However, most of the estimates were prior to 2011, they probably did not take into account the additional Federal tax changes that Obama Care seeks to put into place so at least 70,000 pages seems like a solid number

How long is 70,000 pages? If you were reading my three volume edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord Of The Rings" tome, which measure about 5 inches across, you would have to read it about 70 times. If you bought the King James version of the Bible that is currently available on Amazon, you would have to read it about 46 times. And both of these examples are probably much easier reads than 70,000 pages of tax code.

- An online article from U.S. News and World Report in April, 2010 also estimated 70,000 pages but provided some additional, fascinating, and depressing statistics:

Americans spend about 7.6 billion hours a year just preparing their tax returns.
This is the equivalent of placing 3.8 million Americans into full time jobs.
Using this criteria, the tax preparation effort in this country is six times larger than the auto making industry in this country.
The original Federal tax code published in 1913 was 400 pages long, making it about .6% the size of what we deal with today.

- According to a Business Week article from its Insider report for Spring, 2011, there is a $345 billion gap between what U.S. taxpayers are supposed to pay in Federal taxes and what they actually pay. This gap theoretically places an additional tax burden of about $3,000 on each U.S. household, all because the political class and the government it runs does not know how operate an efficient tax collection system. The size and complexity of our 70,000 page tax code probably has a lot do to with tax evaders being so proficient at hiding the taxes the owe.

- According to a short article in the December 12, 2011 issue of Business Week, 51 Federal tax breaks were expected to expire at the end of 2010. A sampling of these 51 tax breaks give a good indication of how convoluted and needlessly complex our tax system has become (remember these are the tax components that went away, there are probably thousands and thousands of other similar ones that did not go away and which take up the 70,000 pages):

Special expensing rules for certain film and television productions.
Mine rescue team training credit.
Temporary increase in limit on cover over of rum excise tax revenues to Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands.
Credit for electric-drive motorcycles, three-wheeled vehicles, and low speed vehicles.
Seven year recovery period for motor-sports entertainment complexes.
Look through treatment of payments between related controlled foreign corporations under the foreign personal holding company rules.
American Samoa economic development credit.
Tax credit for first time DC home buyers.

These were some of the 51 tax components that I understood. Many of the other ones are complicated and apparently narrowly focused. Few, if any of these 51, apply to the vast number of ordinary Americans. They were likely developed and inserted into the tax code at the behest of Washington politicians to support a narrow geographic, personal, or business interest.

Did any politicians personally make use of that tax credit to buy DC home and real estate? Did Hollywood interests kick in some political campaign donations for those special expensing rules? How many Americans qualify for the mine training credit? Special rules for special political people all of which add to the complexity of our tax code, favor special interests, and cost ordinary Americans more in their own tax bill.

- A March 21, 2011 article in Business Week magazine reported how American corporations are holding $1 TRILLION worth of profits and cash overseas since it is a better business, financial, and economic decision to do so than to bring that wealth back to the United States and have it heavily taxed.

$1 TRILLION is about 25% more than what the Obama administration spent on its economic stimulus program. Dumping $1 TRILLION back into the U.S. economy, would have to have a positive economic on our unemployment situation. Wouldn't it be nice if we had a tax code that encouraged American companies to bring money and wealth back into America for investment in America which would generate jobs for Amercians?

- A recent Wall Street Journal article, that was summarized in the April 29, 2011 issue of The Week magazine, estimated that U.S. taxpayers expend about $431 billion a year to comply with the complexity of the U.S. tax code. This money could be so much better spent on productive expansion of the economy and employment rather than tax paperwork.

- Another Busines Week article in the Spring, 2011 issue had some interesting facts regarding corporate tax realities. According to the article, although the top U.S. corporate tax rate is 35%, that rate is applied haphazardly and grossly unfairly against different companies and different industries:

For the business quarter that ended on December 31, 2010, Proctor and Gamble had an effective tax rate of 17.9%.
Other the past three years, Walmart has had an effective tax rate of 33.6%, about twice the tax rate of Proctor and Gamble.
But wait! Over that same time frame, General Electric had an effective U.S. tax rate of 3.6% even though it had billions in revenue and profits, about one ninth the rate of poor Walmart.

Looks like Walmart needs to significantly improve its Washington lobbying effort, given how poorly the tax code treats it vs. how well the same tax code treats General Electric. You cannot say you have a fair and balanced tax code when different sections of the economy are treated radically different from each other.

- Let's stay with General Electric for a while to show how ridiculous our 70,000 page tax code is. According to November news reports, the latest General Federal tax filing, if it had been printed out rather than submitted electronically, would have been about 57,000 pages in length.

In other words, just one company's one year tax filing would have been about 80% the length of the entire tax code. To make it more tangible, these 57,000 pages, if stacked one on top of another, would be about 19 feet tall.

Think about how many GE resources went into compiling a 57,000 page, one year tax return. Think about how much more productively GE could have used those resources to create new products and expand the economy.

Think about how many government resources will have to be expended to go through one 57,000 page tax return. Think about how easy it is for GE to cheat on its 57,000 page tax return, which I am definitely not saying it did, since I doubt even the Federal government has the resources to thoroughly go through all 57,000 pages to determine if the filing was accurate.

Think about how much better those government resources could be used if we had a simpler tax system, possibly diverting those resources to go after the criminals and fraudsters that rip off Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid of hundreds of billions of dollars every year.

Details of the GE 57,000 page, 19 feet tax filing can be found at http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/ge-filed-57000-page-tax-return-paid-no-taxes-14-billion-profits_609137.html

The details of how unproductive a 70,000 page tax code be is now pretty obvious. It creates an incredibly complex process that makes tax cheating and tax evasion so easy. It allows politicians to use the tax code to reward their financial backers or to personally enrich themselves.

It wastes time, resources, and wealth, all of which could be used for far more productive purposes, either reducing government fraud and waste or allowing individuals and companies to focus on expanding their businesses and lives. Replacing non-productive tax activities with productive economic activities would certainly go a long way to reducing unemployment in this country.

How do we get to this new view that taxes should be simple, fair, compassionate and not a drain on the economy? Believe it or not, the first step has to be installing term limits (Step 39 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government) into our political processes. Our current set of politicians, in both parties, are not interested in simplifying the tax code. If they did, they would lose a primary source of political and financial power. They need to be replaced and the only way to do that is via a Constitutional amendment that imposes a "one and done" term limit restriction on all Federal politicians.

In the mean time, we will propose a simplified tax code approach within the next week that is fair, easy, effective, and efficient. It is not hard to do if you use reason, logic, and a little math, three attributes that constantly appear to elude most of Washington's political class. Until then, consider two paragraphs about GE that we reported on in our July 6, 2011 post:

"Let's look at General Electric for a business example. They recently announced they had 2010 profits of $5.1 billion on their U.S. operations. [Note: GE also had about $9 billion worth of overseas earnings] Very impressive. However, more impressive is that they paid no Federal income tax on those profits. Even more impressive, they were able to legally work the complexity of the tax code so that they actually received a $3.2 billion tax credit from the United States government.

This is really nice work if you can get it. Earn billions of dollars, pay no taxes on those billions, and the government will give you billions more."

If this is not the poster child for fair and efficient tax reform, I do not know what is. More on our plan next week.

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 Folly Of Obama's Trillions - He Already Spent The $1 TRILLION We Gave Him In August

2012-01-03T08:01:00.001-05:00

In a little publicized news item this past holiday week, President Obama let it be known that he soon wants to raise the nation's debt limit another $1.2 TRILLION. This comes on the heels of raising the debt limit $1 TRILLION back in August, only about five months ago. Unfortunately, since then, neither Obama or anyone in Congress has come up with a plan to rein in out of control government spending, preferring to blame each other for the failure and the impending financial disaster and destruction that will occur shortly unless we get our debt under control.

To illustrate how inept both the executive and Congressional branches of our government are, even the formulation of a Congressional Super Committee, whose only job was to come up with some reasonable expense cuts for the Federal budget, walked away with nothing after four months of trying.

This failure is all the more telling when just in this blog, we have identified TRILLIONS of dollars worth of necessary and sane spending cuts that would have minimal impact on the average America. However, these cuts would have substantial impact on defense contractors and lobbyists, the size of the all-all-to large Federal workforce, and the criminal elements that defraud the Federal governments' programs (e.g. Social Security, Medicare, etc.) of hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

For a solitary blog writer like myself to research the fine work of many different American organizations, who have already done the legwork and analysis on how to efficiently and compassionately cut spending, including Obama's own deficit reduction commission, and identify more cuts than twelve members of Congress could do with their extensive staffs over a four month period, is a sad commentary on our political processes, members, and situation.

And President Obama does not get off scot free in this calamity either. He has chosen to stay in the background of this whole crisis, lest it cost him some votes for his precious reelection, hardly a leadership position. He ignored his own deficit reduction commission's findings and recommendations. The long term, ten year budget he proposed back in the spring was so ridiculously expensive that the Senate UNANIMOUSLY rejected it.

But let's get back to his request for another $1.2 TRILLION worth of debt ceiling relief and try to make sense of it at the household level. If his administration has already burned through the $1 TRILLION relief that was granted to his administration just five months ago, I think is safe to assume that he will conservatively require at least another $1 TRILLION worth of relief, in addition to the $1.2 TRILLION, by the end of 2012, a total 2012 debt relief ceiling number of $2.2 TRILLION.

If his $1 TRILLION from last August only got him five months or so of breathing room, the $1.2 TRILLION is not going to get him through the rest of 2012. It is also a good bet that given his traditional lack of leadership, he will not propose any budget reduction initiatives in 2012, no matter how necessary, in order to not risk losing any votes prior to the November elections.

Some simple math shows that if he does need another $2.2 TRILLION worth of debt ceiling relief in 2012 added on to our national debt and there are about 113 million households in the U.S. today, then this $2.2 TRILLION would burden every American household with an additional $1,600 worth of debt expense every month in order to pay for his $2.2 TRILLION debt increase.

How does this additional debt load compare to what U.S. households pay every month today in order to just operate their own lives? The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks household spending on an annual basis in their Consumer Expenditure Survey. According to their 2010 report, the average American household earned about $62,000 a year and had average monthly expenditures of the following:

Monthly housing expense = $1417
Monthly transportation expense = $633
Monthly food expense = $500
Monthly health care expense = $258
Monthly entertainment expense = $217
Monthly clothing expense = $142

Thus, the theoretical $1,600 monthly expense that Obama's 2012 requests for debt relief will impose on every U.S. household is larger than what the average American family pays for ANY other typical expense. It is equivalent to about what an average household spends on food, transportation, health care, and entertainment COMBINED. This onerous household burden does not include the TRILLIONS of debt the Obama administration has already run up in the first three years of this administration.

As you can see, the above list does not include what an average American family pays every year on income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, social program taxes (e.g. Social Security), excise taxes, gas taxes, etc. Putting all of this information together, it becomes obvious that we are quickly losing our freedom since you cannot be living in a free society where the biggest expense and burden in your life is the burden of keeping an ever growing, wasteful government functioning.

You cannot have political freedom if you do not have economic freedom. By continuing to increase the debt load of the country, a load that has to be paid by every American via increased taxes, we each have less freedom to send our kids to the schools we want, less freedom to contribute to our favorite charities, less freedom to own the home we want, less freedom to enjoy life.

To Obama, it is just another TRILLION or two. To us, it is a loss of freedom today and for many future generations who will have to pay for the folly of Obama's TRILLIONS.

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/

No Politics Today, Just Some Worthy Thoughts And Deeds For 2012

2012-01-02T05:34:00.000-05:00

This week starts, what is hopefully, a better year than what most Americans struggled through in 2011. Many of the things that affected us and our families in 2011 were out of our control.

Unfortunately, those people in the country that had some control and power to positively affect our lives, failed miserably again to do so in 2011. From botched economic policies and programs to sky high national debt to an inconsistent and ineffective foreign policy to selfish and corruptible politicians, our political class continued to under perform but over enrich themselves in 2011.

But there are some positive things that each of us can do in our own, local lives, in 2012 independent of the corruption and incompetency in Washington and the state capitals around the country. These actions would likely make 2012 a better year and improve the lives of people around us. I realized this was possible when I read an article from the December 9, 2011 issue of The Week magazine.

The article highlighted excerpts from a book by Joseph Galliano, "Dear Me - A Letter To My 16 Year Old Self." The author asked famous people to write a letter that would be addressed to themselves at the age of 16. Interesting concept and very interesting reading. The article contained the letters written by Stephen King, Suze Orman, Alice Cooper, and others.

However, the best advice was in a letter actor James Woods wrote to his 16 year old self. I present it here and ask you to imagine how much better 2012 can be if we all took his advice:

Treat everyone with respect and demand it of them as well. If someone abuses you more than once, you deserve it.

Call someone in your family every day of your life. You may think it is tedious to do so, but a time will come when you would give your life to make that call one more time.

Hug your mother often and tell her how much you love her.

Do good work and do it because it is a gift to the world. No matter how inconsequential others may feel about the value of your contribution, it is the giving that matters. The surprise here will be that the beneficiary who gains the most when you give is you.

Be proud but humble. Be strong but caring. Listen more than you may be inclined to do. Talk less.

It is okay to fall, but not okay to stay on the ground.

Cherish the dead you once loved so carelessly. They still live in your heart.

Make the world a better place for those around you in 2012. Be tolerant of those around you that have a different opinion, they have a right to their opinion regardless of what our politicians tell you. If we all you do these few simple things, listen, be tolerant, shut up, be caring, hug our moms, work hard, fight through adversity, we all win in 2012 in spite of the politicians.

The U.S. War On Drugs - Still Losing Because Of Our Do Nothing Political Class

2011-12-30T04:17:00.000-05:00

Between government waste, criminal fraud in the government's major social programs, our debilitating national debt levels, the failure that is Obama Care, ineffective politicians, and general political class insanity, we have not reported much on our nation's failed war on drugs lately. That does not mean the war has ended, it has just gotten more intense and dangerous, as outlined in the following, recent news articles:

- The Associated Press (AP) reported on December 21, 2011 that the entire police force of Veracruz was fired for having too many illegal connections to the drug cartels. This action resulted in 800 police officers and 300 administrative personnel losing their jobs. The firings are the result of the Federal Mexican government trying to eradicate drug cartel financed corruption in the ranks of local police forces.

Makes it difficult for citizens to trust and believe in their local government when the members serving within that government are as corrupt and as dangerous as the drug cartels members they are supposed to be fighting. When you have to fire everyone responsible for law enforcement and start over from scratch, you really have a serious problem.

But this is not an isolated incident. It has happened in other Mexican cities previously and the Federal Mexican government is in the process of examining every single policeman in the country, all 460,000 of them in over 200 Mexican cities, to see which are okay to continue serving and which need to be terminated because of their association with drug gangs and criminals. Pitiful.

- An Associated Press article from December 26, 2011 described how the Mexican drug cartels have build relatively sophisticated communications networks all over Mexico that enable them to more privately conduct their illegal drug and criminal activities. These private networks stretch from the border with Texas all the way down to Central America.

These networks allow the cartels to avoid being wire tapped and followed by Mexican law enforcement authorities. The network is so widespread that local cartel employees can radio ahead to cartel components when they see police and armed forces moving out of their barracks and buildings, provided advanced information on intelligence to cartel locations before the Mexican authorities arrive.

The communications system has been so effective that it has been specifically targeted by the Mexican government and law enforcement. However, even if the government is successful in disrupting the networks, the equipment is replaced almost immediately, given that the components are relatively simple and the cartels have more than enough illicit funds to easily replace whatever equipment that is is seized and destroyed by the police and armed forces.

- A December 25, 2011 Associated Press article did a recap of the recent drug cartel violence that affects Mexico on a daily basis:

Three U.S. citizens, a mother and her two daughters who were in Mexico to visit relatives for the holidays, were killed when gunmen attacked three buses, killing a total of seven passengers.
The five gunmen were eventually killed by Mexican soldiers but not before the same gunmen had shot and killed four people from a nearby town.
Mexican soldiers had recently discovered 13 dead bodies in an abandoned truck along with a message that they were killed as a result of a drug cartel rivalry. Ten of the bodies had been decapitated.
In the same area, several days before, another ten dead bodies were found, also presumed to be victims of drug cartel violence.
The article also reviewed how the director of security of the Sinaloa drug cartel had recently been arrested. He worked for Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, one of the most wanted drug cartel leaders int he world. The amazing thing from the article relative to Guzman is that his personal net worth is over $1 BILLION, a result of illegal drug and other criminal activities.

Billionaire criminals, unspeakable violence that kills American and Mexican civilians alike, criminal cartels that are large enough and rich enough to install their own nation wide communications networks, and official, government, and police corruption everywhere. All because the biggest market for these illegal drug cartels, the United States, has not had a compassionate, effective, or comprehensive strategy for addressing the drug addiction plague that has been with us here in this country for decades.

And that strategy is nowhere close to be formulated or addressed, never mind being implemented. In the mean time, drug cartels grow more powerful, more sophisticated and richer. The additional danger of the cartels partnering with foreign enemies of the U.S. becomes more and more possible. We already know of the Iranian-linked conspiracy to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States in D.C., a conspiracy which had ties to Mexican drug cartel components. Univision recently ran news reports indicating that it had proof of Iranian terrorism ties to South American countries and their efforts to expand into Mexico. Very scary stuff.

In the meantime, Obama is continuing his 17 day vacation in Hawaii while his opponents, the Republican Party, are preoccupied with its Presidential primary process. But that is to be expected. No President, Congressional session, or political figure has paid much attention to the lost war on drugs since Nixon announced the initiative about forty years ago. As a result, we are faced with the never ending rise in drug cartel-related corruption and violence because our political class has failed to adequately address the problem.

Step 26 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" would certainly be a good starting point for them. It proposes a systematic problem solving process of addressing this growing crisis in order to develop a plan to actually confront and resolve it. When you consider what the political class has not done relative to this lost war on drugs, what do we have to lose by implementing Step 26? Anything is now better than the political class solution, which is "do nothing."

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 Continuing Disaster That Is Obama Care - Latest Poll Shows Doctors Also Think It Is Rdiculous, Ineffective, and Has No Chance Of Succeeding

2011-12-29T04:17:00.000-05:00

Today's discussion will focus on the results of a recent opinion poll that was conducted by the highly respected consulting company Deloitte. The detailed results of the research can be viewed in the Forbes article from December 26, 2011 that summarized the findings. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/sallypipes/2011/12/26/doctors-say-obamacare-is-no-remedy-for-u-s-health-woes/ ). The poll surveyed a statistically valid sample of U.S. doctors, the set of health care professionals that are most likely to be significantly affected by the legislation so they have a direct, insightful, and first hand knowledge of what is about to happen to our health care system.

The findings were extremely pessimistic about how well Obama Care will solve the issue of ever escalating health care costs in this country. Since those doctors in the survey know more about our health care processes than any politician, one would hope that our political class would pay close attention to their evaluation of Obama Care and find a way to radically alter or totally repeal this disastrous law, based upon the poll findings.

Highlights of the poll include the following results:

Two thirds of the doctors surveyed expect health care costs to rise as a result of Obama Care, the exact opposite result the legislation was supposed to cause.
Only 27% expect health care costs to go down under Obama Care.
About 70% of those surveyed expect Obama Care to discourage the best and brightest of America's youth to go into medicine. This finding has serious ramifications for the quality of health care ten, twenty, or more years down the road. If the doctors are to be believed, we will have less intelligent and likely less competent doctors in the future delivering higher cost medicine.
Nine out of ten doctors surveyed believe that Obama Care will raise health care premiums for businesses and American citizens, the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen.
The article claims that Congressional Budget Office's latest analysis of Obama Care indicates that annual health care insurance premiums for the average American family will actually go up about $2,100, the exact opposite of what the law was supposed to do. This is not surprising since we already have discussed findings from the Kaiser Foundation which showed health care costs went up 9% in 2010 whereas they only went up 3% in 2008 and 2009, prior to the passage of Obama Care. This is the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen.
Almost 70% of those surveyed expect emergency wait times to increase as a result of Obama Care, the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen.
83% expect the waiting time to see your primary doctor will also increase.
Half of the doctors surveyed expect access to health care will get worse on average due to hospital closures that come about as a result of the legislation.
Less than 25% of those surveyed expect their paperwork load to decrease as a result of Obama Care.
According to the article, an analysis published in April 2010 by the head actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), concluded that the nation will spend $311 billion more on health care needs by 2019 then it would have spent if Obama Care had not been passed.

Scary, scary stuff. But this information gets truly horrific when it is combined with other Obama Care information that we have previously reported on in this blog or which is newly available:

Tens of millions of Americans are likely to lose their existing health care coverage since Obama Care idiotically makes it less expensive for companies to terminate their existing employee health care plans then to continue them under this law. This simple reality is because the fines for not offering health care insurance to employees are less than the expense of continuing to offer the existing plans.
Major companies including AT&T, John Deer, Caterpillar, McDonalds, and others have already made public their potential for shutting down their current employee and retiree health care insurance plans in order to save money as a result of the meager fines in Obama Care.
These newly uninsured millions of Americans will look to the health care exchanges set up by Obama Care for insurance and the government subsidies they provide, significantly adding to the national debt.
However, people who lose their company health care insurance coverage, coverage that covers their entire family, can only get individual insurance coverage and subsidies under Obama Care; this condition will require these families to pay for additional health care insurance without any subsidy support in order to now cover everyone in the family.
Obama Care administrators have already had to approve well over 1,500 waivers to the law. Any piece of legislation that allows over 1,500 waivers to its tenets within two years or so of passage is a significantly flawed piece of legislation.
The law was written so poorly that it will allow middle class and upper class families with sufficient economic resources to get heavily subsidized health care insurance from the government's insurance exchanges even though they can afford to do without the subsidies. This foul up will cost the American taxpayer unanticipated billions of dollars a year.
The law may even affect the marriage rate, given how poorly it was written. If a single man qualifies for government health insurance subsidy support because his income is a little below the income threshold marries a single woman in the same situation, their newly formed family income total will definitely push them over the threshold, forcing them to either pay out significantly more for their health care insurance or stay single in order to still qualify for government subsidy support.
One likely reason that the nation's unemployment rate is staying so high is the business uncertainty generated by Obama Care. Companies are afraid to hire full time people since the potential for tax increases, increased health care bureaucracy, and increased health insurance expenses is so scary that companies would rather muddle through with the work force they currently have then take on additional risk and uncertainty.
Business Week reported in its November 28, 2011 issue that any American can now purchase a $400, ten foot by five foot chart (50 square feet!) that contains all of the 1,968 new and expanded powers and responsibilities granted to the Federal government as a result of Obama Care. You cannot be living in a free country when a single piece of government legislation gives the political class almost 2,000 more ways to control your life.
The legislation does not include significant medical industry tort reform, an effort that has successfully decreased health care costs when passed at the state government level.
The legislation does not include significant provisions and incentives to expand private health care insurance competition across state lines, increased competition that would help drive down health care costs.
The legislation will dramatically increase the medical spending costs paid out by the Federal government without first fixing the fraud, waste, and criminal activity in the current government medical payment programs, Medicare and Medicaid. Without first fixing the fraud problems that exist today which wastes $100 billion or so a year, by increasing the size of the government's role in health care insurance, the amount of fraud and waste is highly likely to rise as well.
The CLASS portion of the legislation had a two fold purpose. First, it was supposed to provide long term health care insurance for those Americans who wanted it. Second, it was to contribute a positive $80 billion cash flow financial impact in the first ten years of Obama Care. The CLASS effort has failed miserably since it has already been terminated because of an anemic enrollment rate caused by its poor provisions. The termination ends the theoretical positive financial impact on the overall Obama Care program, dealing a serious blow to the financial credibility of the entire legislation.
And finally, Americans' sentiment for Obama Care has never been lower. The latest Associated Press/Roper/GIK poll shows that the percentage of Americans that support the legislation is at its lowest point ever, only 29%. Within the 29%, only 13% strongly support the law's provisions. Additionally, the poll shows that an overwhelming 84% of those polled do not think that the Federal government should have the power to force every American to purchase health care insurance, as mandated in the legislation.

And most important of all, the legislation does not effectively or substantially impact the true root causes of our ever escalating health care costs:

Our population is getting older from an average age perspective, requiring significant research and creative approaches to deal with an aging population and its related aging diseases.
Americans smoke too much.
Americans eat too much.
Americans eat too much of the wrong types of food.
Americans do not exercise enough.

By virtually ignoring these root causes, the legislation will have virtually no chance of being successful at reining in our out of control health care costs. This problem has to be treated primarily as a public health crisis that is solved by changing bad behaviors and not as a public policy crisis that can be solved by more bureaucracy, more government, and more taxes.

The doctors know this Obama Care approach will not work. Businesses know it will not work. Any sane American that looks at the track record of failure of the program so far knows it cannot work. Smart Americans from various organizations and think tanks know it will not work.The only ones who are blind to reality are the Obamas, Reids, Pelosis, and others who see expanded government bureaucracy, taxation, and power as a fix for everything even though government has not resolved a major issue for decades.

Two steps are needed to get us out of this rut. First, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) needs to do a completely new analysis of the entire legislation to quantify how bad the financial and health care impact of this law now appear to be. Obama used the initial CBO analysis to show how the legislation would decrease the national debt. We now know that analysis is nothing more than a fantasy with no connection to the real world, a new CBO analysis is sorely needed.

Once we find out how damaging the Obama Care is, we need to execute the process outlined in Step 26 of "Love My Country, Loathe my Government," to terminate Obama Care and replace it with a cogent, effective, efficient, and financially viable alternative. This process includes the use of smart Americans from all walks of life and disciplines rather than the political class and their lobbyist friends in Washington.

Not implementing these two steps would change Obama Care from its current disaster status into a fatal fiasco status. A fiasco that bankrupts the country, increases the expense of health care, decreases the quality of health care, and decreases the access to health care while never solving the original problem.

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/

One State Poltician Making The Right Moves, Having The Right Priorities - Florida Governor Rick Scott

2011-12-28T07:10:00.000-05:00

As a current resident of Florida, I am acutely aware of the economic problems facing the entire country. Florida's economy had long been heavily dependent on the construction industry and when the Florida housing industry cratered several years ago, the construction industry, along with the subsidiary industries that serve that industry, real estate agents, title search companies, etc., also suffered a significant downturn. This resulted in anemic state economic growth and an unemployment rate that has been consistently higher than the rest of the country.

Thus, the economic situation facing members of the Florida political class is probably worse than the economic challenges facing most state and local governments and politicians across the nation. But all is not lost in Florida, which has taken a different path in managing their financial plight than the state of Illinois.

As you recall from our Illinois post last week, the Illinois state government has also been having dire financial problems and billion dollar shortfalls in their state budget. Their primary approach to trying to resolve their government budget problem was to significantly raise personal and business income taxes early in 2011 rather than aggressively reducing state government spending.

As 2011 winds down, it has become apparent that raising taxes on Illinois businesses was probably a big mistake. Large businesses such as Motorola, Sears, and other companies have threatened to leave the state of Illinois, taking thousands and thousands of jobs with them. This has resulted in the state government providing tax reduction deals to these corporations to keep the companies and their jobs within the state of Illinois.

Thus, a year after raising business taxes, the state has just turned around and given back the raised tax revenue to businesses, leaving the state government about in the same state it was in as 2011 began: continued out-of-control state government spending and budget deficits. A year lost and the budget in worse shape. Not a good strategy.

As a result of this muddled approach, the unemployment rate in Illinois has dropped about 11% in the past two years (from a high of 11.2% to 10.0%) but the national unemployment rate has dropped 15% (from a high of 10.1% to 8.6%) in the rest of the country. Thus, Illinois is not recovering as quickly from an economic perspective, as measured by the unemployment rate, than the rest of the country. One possible reason for this less than average economic improvement is that the state political class is trying to solve the budget problem by raising taxes and not reducing government spending.

The state of Florida has tried the opposite approach, keeping taxes and tax rates unchanged, cleaning up government waste and fraud, and reprioritizing state budget priorities to be more focused on serving citizens and not special interests. Consider two indicators of improving economic health, one global and one local:

Globally, the state unemployment rate is down 17% (from a high of 12.0% to 10.0%), beating out both the Illinois unemployment performance (11% drop) and the national performance (15% drop).
This improvement has occurred even though one of the state's main economic drivers, the construction industry, is still in a deep economic rut.
Locally, although the state economy has been lousy for the past three years, my home's property taxes have decreased every year since we moved to Florida in 2005, dropping about 37% over that time frame.
Thus, using my sample size of one, the state political class in Florida has reduced my property taxes in really tough economic times but has kept most state and local government services functioning. Teachers are still teaching, police and fire are still protecting, libraries are still open, roads are still viable and being fixed, etc.

Credit for this performance, globally and locally, has to go to the state political class, our former governor, Charlie Crist, and our current governor, Rick Scott. How Rick Scott is effectively addressing and improving the state's economic woes was summarized in an article from the Daytona Beach News Journal on December 12, 2011:

The governor's budget proposal next year intends to cut government spending significantly by reducing the state government staff by about 4,500 unneeded jobs.
He also has a plan to slash out-of-control Medicaid spending in a measured, fair, and intelligent manner.
The reason to boldly attack Medicaid spending is that the state of Florida is now spending 180% more on Medicaid today than it spent in 2000 while the state revenue has only gone up 30% in that same time frame, making Medicaid a larger and more unacceptable, and unsustainable, percentage of the overall state budget.
The article notes how this reduction needs to be done carefully in order to keep overall health care costs and spending down in the state without cutting health care coverage and concludes that Scott is approaching this problem in the right way.
But the governor is showing some courage, courage that is certainly lacking in Washington relative to runaway Medicare and Medicaid costs, a courageous stance that the article recognizes that is sorely needed: "Lawmakers may have different ideas about the program, but they all must face up to the budget challenge it poses. The education budget will be in constant peril if the state doesn't find ways to get Medicaid costs under control."
Scott has proposed ways to cut back prison costs in the state as another logical and smart way to save money since the state crime rate has been decreasing and with that decrease, the prison population has shrunk.
The governor has been praised by starting to demand detailed accountability for state spending by each state government department, requiring departmental "'fully accountable' budgets to show how money is spent, what service is provided and what is accomplished."
In the face of budget pressures and shortfalls, the governor's budget proposes over $1 billion more to the state budget for use in Florida public schools, an investment that will directly serve the vast majority of Florida families.
There are also no changes to state support for higher education funding despite an overall state budget crisis.
In the face of these changes, the governor is calling for no increases in taxes, a wise move given the disaster that happened when Illinois significantly raised taxes. This "no tax increase" position is also supported by the newspaper article's writer: "Now is not the time to raise taxes -- not when the economic recovery is fragile and growth still is relatively slow."

So let's reivew:

The Florida state economy seems to be improving quicker than the national economy and the economy of at least one state (Illinois), a state that incorrectly decided that raising taxes on state businesses and residents was a better way to close budget gaps caused by out-of-control polticial class and government than reducing spending.
The Florida governor is not raising taxes, taking the more effective and prudent approach of cleaning up waste and fraud in government spending by reducing prison system costs, shrinking the state payroll of unneeded jobs, and reining in excessive Medicaid costs.
The governor is showing tremdendous political courage by addressing a runaway Medicaid expense and cost stream that will eventually bankrupt the state if not boldy addressed now.
In the face of a short term Florida state government budget shortfalls, the governor is not sacrificing the long term eocnomic health of the state by increasing investment in Floirda public schools.
The governor is requiring state government functions to be fully responsible and accountable for the taxpayer money they spend, an effort sure to reduce unneeded and unwarranted government spending, both long term and short term.

As we have said many times in this blog, fixing the major issues that have faced this country for decades should not be this hard to resolve. All it requires of our political class is a little courage, a little unselfishness, a little hard work, and a little creativity. Govenor Rick Scott is being successful with these attributes. Too bad that the Washington polticial class has none of these same qualities.

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 Proposed Congressional Reform Act Of 2011 ....Or How To Fix A Dysfunctional Organization

2011-12-27T04:11:00.000-05:00

Today's post is based on an email that has been floating around the Net for a little while that supposedly is the brain child of Warren Buffet. It proposes the "Congressional Reform Act of 2011" and sets forth a series of steps that are needed to fix the dysfunctionality that has infected our political processes, with a focus on Congress.

Such an effort is sorely required if you consider the current state of Congress and the people that reside within it:

Public opinion polls show Congress with record low approval ratings, with many polls showing single digit (less than 10%) favorability results.
The major issues facing the country, e.g. failing public schools, lost war on drugs, lack of a national energy policy, high national debt, escalating health care costs, etc. have been with us for decades, through many different sessions of Congress, but are nowhere close to being resolved.
Our political class has run up $15 TRILLION worth of national debt with nothing to show for it, putting the nation's future financial solvency at risk.
Members of Congress often use insider government information to improve their personal financial status and wealth, a clear ethical problem, if not a legal problem.
Members of Congress often participate in company IPO offerings, offerings that are not available to ordinary Americans, to improve their financial status and wealth, a clear ethical problem if not a legal problem, and possibly using this access to IPOs to unduly influence legislation.
Members of Congress control their Congressional compensation and benefit packages, independent of the quality of their performance, which has been very low for years.
Once elected, Washington politicians leverage their Congressional office via earmarks, Congressional district gerrymandering, monetary and legislative favors to campaign donors, etc. to help ensure their reelection regardless of their performance.

What a disgraceful situation. Is it any surprise the nation is in such dire straits?

Which gets us to the Congressional reform Act of 2011 email. Obviously, with only a handful of days left in 2011, Congress will not get reformed in 2011. However, that does not mean we should not push forward to fix the malignancy that is Washington. The alternative, retaining the status quo, is not acceptable to our nation's financial solvency, our personal freedom, and the future of our kids and grandkids.

What is amazing about the proposed reformation of Congress is that all of the steps are totally consistent with the spirit and individual steps described in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." Thus, not only will we review the proposed Warren Buffet steps to reform Congress but we will overlay the steps from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" to get a slightly different and more detailed description of what is needed to finally fix Washington.

Congressional Reform Act of 2011/"Love My Country, Loathe My Government" Overlay

1. No Tenure / No Pension. A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they're out of office.

Step 9 (from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government) - All current and past members of Congress will immediately lose access to either their government pension or their government 401K-like government savings program, the choice being theirs.

2. Congressional members (past, present, and future) participate in Social Security.

There is no equivalent step in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" since Congressional members already participate in the Social Security program and have done so for decades. This oversight of the email would lend credence to the view that this list of reformation did not originate with Warren Buffet. I assume he is smart enough, or has advisors are smart enough, to realize that Congressional members are already in the Social Security System. If this had not been not the case, it certainly would have been a prominent step in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government."

3. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

This step would certainly help improve the lousy financial status of Social Security, an additional influx of funds. However, Steps 10, 11, and 12 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" would go much further to improving the financials of the system. These steps include raising the retirement age to 70 (with a hardship exemption), uncapping the amount of income that is subject to the Social Security tax while reducing the size of the tax percentage, and forbidding an American with total wealth of over $3 million of ever receiving a Social Security check.

4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

See Step 9 above.

5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

Step 37 - Base pay increases for Congressional members on an annual customer satisfaction rating, and repeal the current practice of automatically increasing Congressional pay without a vote.

Same idea but a slightly different with, the "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" taking a more aggressive stance on Congressional pay. In Step 37, there is no automatic pay raise of any type, Congressional members have to earn a raise.

Step 41 - Prohibit any Senator, President, or Congressman/woman, whose net worth, not income, is over $3 million from drawing a pay check during their term of office, for the good of the country. Not only does "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" want our Federal politicians to earn their raises under Step 37, it also forbids the many multimillionaires in office from even drawing a paycheck.

Those can afford to serve without being paid, e.g Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, should do so for the love of country, not for the salary that would be a very, very small piece of their overall wealth. With a $15 TRILLION national debt, the nation needs to conserve all the wealth it can.

6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

There is not explicit step in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" that lines up exactly with this reformation step. However, Step 26 outlines a process for addressing and fixing the problem of our ever escalating high health care costs, something that Obama Care will utterly fail to do. A part of such a process would be to make sure that any solution from Step 26 also applies equally to Congressional members, past, present, and future the same way it will apply to ordinary American citizens.

7. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

Step 45 - Hold the political class accountable to the same laws, regulations, penalties, fines, and principles required by the rest of America as it applies to sex/race affirmative action quotas and behavior.

Since the personal profile of Congress currently, and for a long time, has consisted mostly of older white men, Congress is obviously out of sync with the sexual, and racial profile of the rest of the country. This is inconsistent with the goals and objectives of Federal affirmative action laws, laws that Congress passed but from which it exempted itself.

However, there are other laws that should also have been included in Step 45. Congressional members should also not be exempt from insider trading laws, an exemption that they use to trade on insider government information and to participate in corporate IPOs, opportunities that are not available to most regular Americans.

Congressional members should also not be exempt from whistleblower laws, an exemption that protects potential shady and criminal activities of politicians. The word "exemption" and Congressional members/political class should never appear in the same sentences in any matter including affirmative action, insider trading, whistleblower, etc.

8. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen/women. Congressmen/women made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

All of the steps discussed above from "Love my Country, Loathe My Government" apply to this last reformation step. However, the Congressional Reformation Act of 2011 missed out on a few more important steps that are needed to finally get an effective, non-corrupt, and working political class and Congress:

Step 6 - Allow only individual citizens to contribute to political campaigns. This eliminates the contributions of PACs, unions, corporations, and lobbyists. The Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech for individual citizens, not groups of citizens.

Step 7 - Only allow individuals to contribute to Senate or Congressional candidates that represent them. For example, political contributions from Kansas citizens cannot be funneled/diverted to political activities in New Jersey.

Step 8 - Strengthen the FEC rules and penalties and staff the Commission with seasoned prosecutors, elected on a national basis, so that someone actually goes to jail once in a while for violating campaign finance laws.

Step 14 - Stop configuring Congressional districts to almost guarantee the reelection of incumbents, i.e. stop gerrymandering.

Step 34 - Hold Congressional committees and subcommittees accountable for their respective areas of responsibility and remove committee members from their committee posts if they do not meet minimal performance criteria.

Step 39 - Restrict all U.S.Senators to one six year term and House of representatives to one four year term or two two year terms.

The so-called "Congressional Reformation Act Of 2011" contains some good first steps. But additional steps, as listed above, from "Love My Country, Loathe my Government" are also needed to really take the "dys" out of dysfunctional. We cannot wait for the political class to reform Congress.

If our politicians wanted to reform the dysfunctional process, they would have done so already. Failure to do so on our part will make our nation's future a disaster, a disgrace, and an extreme disappointment to future generations.

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/

Government Waste Book 2011 Has Been Published - Billions More Of Wasted Taxpayer Wealth

2011-12-26T06:08:00.000-05:00

Just when you thought that the Federal government could not find any dumber ways to waste taxpayer money, Senator Tom Coburn publishes his annual "Wastebook" of government spending. As you go through the next few weeks paying your holiday bills, using money you probably worked hard to earn this past year just to celebrate a few holiday days with your family and friends, pause to recall that the Washington political class knows no shame when it comes to wasting those same earnings you worked so hard for.

The "Wastebook 2011" edition identified at least $6.5 billion of taxpayer waste which went towards what can only be described as idiotic expenditures. This equates out to about $60 for every American household, $60 that could have been spent on that family holiday meal, $60 that could have been spent on an extra gift for a loved one, $60 that could have been sent off to a worthy charity, etc. as opposed to the foolishness listed below.

And this edition of the "Wastebook" documents only a hundred or so wasteful government expenses. It is probably a pretty good assumption there are hundreds, if not thousands, more of the same types of Federal things and projects the government wastes money on. These additional projects would undoubtedly waste billions more of our tax payments.

Examples of wasteful spending highlighted in “Wastebook 2011” include:

$75,000 to promote awareness about the role Michigan plays in producing Christmas trees and poinsettias.
$15.3 million for one of the infamous Bridges to Nowhere in Alaska
$113,227 for video game preservation center in New York.
$550,000 for a documentary about how rock music contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
$48,700 for 2nd annual Hawaii Chocolate Festival, to promote Hawaii’s chocolate industry.
$350,000 to support an International Art Exhibition in Venice, Italy.
$10 million for a remake of “Sesame Street” for Pakistan.
$35 million allocated for political party conventions in 2012.
$765,828 to subsidize “pancakes for yuppies” in the nation’s capital. In this case, the Federal government gave a private company three quarters of a million dollars to open up an IHOP restaurant in an economically disadvantaged neighborhood in D.C. which ended up being built in a very economically well off spot in D.C.
The Federal government sent an average of $120 million in retirement and disability payments to deceased former federal employees every year for at least the past five years.
$764,825 to study how college students use mobile devices for social networking.
In 2009, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) undertook a four year, $90 million effort to spur hiring and sales among Pakistani businesses. Two years later, the USAID Inspector General found no measurable impact for the $90 million of U.S. taxpayer money.

I strongly suggest that all American taxpayers read the detailed report, assuming that they have the fortitude to stomach the wasteful spending. The full report can be read at http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public//index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=b69a6ebd-7ebe-41b7-bb03-c25a5e194365

But this should not surprise us. Last week we showed how the Federal government loses more than half a TRILLION dollars a year in taxpayer wealth through fraud, waste, and mismanagement of the Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Unemployment Benefits, IRS and other programs.

We reported how just one rich family in the Seattle area bilked the American taxpayer for over $100,000 by falsifying government application forms even though the family lived in a multi million dollar home, drove an expensive car, and the father had a successful chiropractic business.

The website that supports the sale of our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," (http://www.loathemygovernment.com/) has a website page that allows the site visitor to vote on whether four dozen or so past Federal government expenditures were worthwhile use of taxpayer money. Over the past two years, the majority of those wasteful projects have received 100% negative ratings, i.e. every site visitor who voted said these Federal programs were not worth the expense.

Of the remaining expenditures, all but one had negative ratings of at least 90%, i.e. more than nine out of ten of those who voted said the programs were not worthwhile. Only one Federal project had less than 90% negative ratings, it had an 87% negative rating.

That is why our three posts from last week, "Why Raising Taxes On Any American, Rich Or Poor, Is Still A Stupid Idea," are so important. As Coburn's report shows, no American of any economic status should pay a dime more in taxes until the political class stops wasting our money on failed programs in Pakistan, stupid academic studies to find out about useless social networking habits, etc.

We face some serious issues in this country including escalating health care costs, lack of a national energy strategy and program, failing public schools, a lost war on drugs, excessively high taxation, fraud, mismanagement, and waste in government programs, and high unemployment. All of the nation's available resources should be focused only on these large, global problems.

Once these problems are solved, we can go back and find out of rock music contributed to the fall of the Soviet Empire. Until then, no new taxes, no new wasteful spending.

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/