More Government Ineptitude

                                                                 
Do some of you ever wonder why I write these posts? It’s really not to criticize liberals and progressives, although it may seem the way, at least since BHO got in office. It’s really about information and education that you won’t get from today’s media, and if you don’t care about that, it’s about showing you the ineptitude of big government.

Since the “savior” took over in 2008 the federal government has taken control of about ¼ of the national economy, and some of that has been given to labor unions. If Obamacare craters in 2014, as I think it will, the government will have to bail out the health insurance industry and will than control an additional 1/6 of the economy.

During this recession if you live in the Washington, D.C. area, Maryland, Virginia, and environs, there was no recession. Jobs, housing, and construction abound. So it’s hard for anyone working for the federal government to understand what’s going on in the rest of the country. This is why big government is so destructive, its sole purpose is to spend money and there is no accountability as to results or return. The only concern is whether you’ve spent your budget, and if not, someone else will get that money next year.

Because results are not important management is very poor, even at very high levels. People never worry about demotions or termination, therefore, this leads to complacency. Just look at the meetings and conferences at the General Services Agency (GSA) that were highlighted this year. Millions of your dollars wasted and hours of time spent on workers traveling to exotic places and having fun, food, and booze at your expense. That type of culture would never be tolerated in the private sector.

An example of waste, fraud and mismanagement is the recent case of John Beal, a high level employee of the EPA who bilked taxpayers of $900,000 pretending to his co-workers and superiors that he was a secret agent for the CIA. He hardly showed up at the office and was sometimes missing in action for months at a time. He was recently sent to prison for 32 months and required to pay back the money. From 1989 until 2013, he was employed in the Office of Air and Radiation (OAR) which developed policy for air pollution and climate change. His duties included assisting the Head of OAR, Gina McCarthy, who is now Head of the EPA. Imagine what analysis and policy this guy was cooking up while he was goofing off most of the time, and Ms. McCarthy was writing accolades and commendations about his work to her superiors. How many CEO’s in the private sector would be able to keep their jobs and get promoted no less, after showing such incompetence and lack of engagement about what’s going on?

Now you can see how Kathleen Sebelius could run the HHS and Obamacare for 3 years and never have one direct one-on-one meeting with Obama and nobody thought it unusual. Total disengagement, no teamwork, no concern, no accountability, only selective communication. This is why government cannot run healthcare and why waste and fraud will run amuck in such a system as Obamacare, just as it now does in Medicare, or anything else it runs.

If you want more of this, keep voting Democratic and for big government.

 

Inequality and this Presidency – A Bad Joke!

  Sometimes I think we are living a dream and a bad joke is being perpetrated on the American public and we will soon wake up and everything will be fine again. We have this President who keeps telling us that inequality in this country is our defining challenge and a moral disgrace. Not only is this blasphemy, because he runs his office as if he were our King and his crony capitalism favors all his benefactors, it also is misguided. An excellent op-ed article in today’s WSJ by Robert Grady entitled, Obama’s Misguided Obsession with Inequality, illustrates how he uses snippets of statistics that are incomplete and out of context to drive home an unsubstantiated point. He is a master of this and has done it for most of his political life.

This President tells us that “the deck is stacked against the middle class no matter how hard we work” and that future children will never escape poverty because “they will lack a decent education, healthcare, or a community that views their future as their own”. Who is he talking about, the Detroit ghetto? As Mr. Grady points out, Obama uses census income data that fails to include taxes, transfer payments, like Medicaid, Medicare, nutrition assistance, earned income tax credits, and employee benefits like health insurance. When you take this into account inequality actually declined 1.8% during the 16-year period between 1993 and 2009.

In addition, he neglects to tell you that recent (2011) studies at Columbia and the Congressional Budget Office showed that family income, including benefits, experienced a 62% gain above inflation from 1979 to 2007 and all 5 levels of the income distribution spectrum had real gains in family income. Since he became President the reverse has happened. The defining challenge for us Mr. President, is not income inequality but economic growth!

It’s obvious that income equality is a rather fruitless goal, nowhere in the world do we have it nor will any political system ever achieve it. Even in communist and socialist societies, which profess to aspire to it, income inequality is even more rampart and infested with graft and corruption. Since your income depends upon many factors related to your own desires and skills or factors that you cannot control, income equality is not a realistic objective. However, in a free market system with solid economic growth, we all benefit. We have proven that in the U.S. where even the most poor among us are taken care of better than anywhere in the world.

And now this President is striving for healthcare equality with a law that ignores the free market and inserts bureaucrats between the doctor- patient relationship and in fact dissolves that relationship by government decree. The law is so bad that he is actually revising it as it is being implemented, something our Constitution, which he swore to uphold, prevents him from doing. A law in which he misled and lied to us in order to get re-elected. A law in which he actually repealed the other day when he suspended the individual mandate for specific “hardship” cases who could not get insurance that met the requirements of Obamacare.

This has got to be a joke. I hope I wake up soon!