Our government is weighted heavily by academicians like Jonathan Gruber, PhD professor at MIT who admitted lying, calling U.S. voters stupid and deliberately avoiding transparency. These troubling admissions characterize the healthcare law that has become known as Obamacare. Although considered by some to be legacy legislation, the law has not met the test of even the first six years of its existence. You may also remember that when these failures of integrity were uncovered, Mr. Obama denied that Gruber had much of a role in the development of the healthcare plan, a deliberate and outright lie.
Actually, the route taken by President Obama probably isn’t that incredible in government these days. Notice that officials and candidates call each other liars routinely. Hearing this, we voters scratch our heads and wonder who is telling the truth. Perhaps the most confounding information is about how the government handles money, how government gets into debt, how it explains failures as successes and how officials at the top and bottom confirm what they didn’t say yesterday. Then, go on to twist what was transcribed by witnesses who heard the words directly.
Professors of economics don’t agree on much it seems. Seasoned economists argue about the cause and effects of trade policy, minimum wage, the strong dollar versus the weak dollar and some even think the nearly $20 trillion national debt is not exorbitant. Here’s the way that government handles money for those of us who have not studied thick books of economic theory to receive a PhD in an academic profession where there is little accordance.
Let’s start where the government starts; taxation. Legislators, advised by lawyers, economists and lobbyists assume the responsibility of finding ‘things’ to tax as a career. President Ronald Reagan defined their quest with great aplomb when he said, “Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases, if it moves, tax it, if it keeps moving, regulate it and if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
Taxes collected are unrelated to the annual budget that some administrations don’t even bother creating. The reason is that big corporations and you and I represent a bottomless abyss of revenue. If there is a lot of complaining about spending the U.S. Bureau of Printing and Engraving (BEP) simply prints more fresh currency.
There are an infinite number of government agencies who hire people to do things that are both necessary and unnecessary. These millions of government workers (they are called workers even though many of them don’t actually produce anything) create and monitor regulations and subsidized enterprises like the USPS, Amtrak and the Flood Insurance Program. Most of these enterprises lose money. Some endeavors like Medicare, Medicaid and SSD (Social Security Disability) require government employees who are called actuaries and are supposed to be well-schooled in statistical math, computerized data manipulation and actuarial forecasting.
They determine how much money should be collected from citizens for the program they are involved with such as Social Security Disability benefits. In March 2016, 10,785,000 claimants, spouses and children received disability checks averaging a little over $1,022 each for a total of more than $11 billion. Federal government as fiduciaries of taxpayers paid out $140.1 billion in 2013. From the beginning of 2009 to the end of 2014, 1.5 million former workers have become disability recipients.
Insolvency is defined as the inability to meet financial commitments. That’s what the Disability Insurance Trust Fund would have been in December of 2016; insolvent and out of money. On November 2, 2015, the President signed into law H.R. 1314, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 that became Public Law 114-74. The problem here is that funds were taken from the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund as a patch for six years. Futility reigns.
And that is how government works. Oblivious government drones make decisions of short-term inconvenience rather than long-term benefit using assumptions that are faulty and unreliable. Our tax extractions and other federal government revenue sources are not in good hands and sadly may never be unless something in Washington changes drastically. Our federal government is based on false promises by too many people with too little common sense.
Dick Baynton
