Beyond Stupid – Laws and Policies of the US Government

Social Security Benefits are paid to immigrants who neither they or their spouses ever worked in America nor paid Social Security Taxes.

Global Companies who earned profits overseas and wish to invest those profits in America are taxed on those profits. Therefore, a global company can use their profits for free overseas to invest in their business, creating job opportunities there, but are penalized by new taxes (leaving less money available for investment) if they invest those profits in America to create American jobs. So why would they invest in America?

When the Federal Government sends out bids for work (for example to build a new highway), instead of accepting the lowest bid they can get, all bidders by law must price their bids as if they pay all their workers “union wages”. Therefore, the government never pays the cheapest price possible for the same work and quality.

Companies with union members cannot build factories or businesses in a different state without permission form a government board for fear that the out of state factory might become a non-union plant. A recent example was Boeing Corporation, headquartered in California, seeking to build another plant in North Carolina (while keeping their California plant) being turned down by that government board. Now if Boeing, having been stopped from expanding in the US, had decided to build that plant in Canada, it could do so without a problem.

America does not have an effective national system to stop voter fraud. A person with homes in two or more states can vote in all those states in the same election without a problem. Fraudulent voters (not registered, voting for someone else, not a citizen, using a dead person's identity, etc.) can cast ballots with little fear of being caught or stopped.

There is no system to catch a doctor who loses his medical license in one state, from moving to another state and practicing medicine.

There is no national, effective system to prevent illegal immigrants from working, collecting government benefits, sending their children to school, renting or buying housing, etc.. Therefore, there is no deterrent, and plenty of incentive, to illegal immigration.

Children born to American citizens out of the country are not automatically citizens, but children born to illegal immigrants in America are automatically citizens. It should be the reverse!

Though we have a shortage of scientists, mathematicians, and key technical experts in America, college graduated foreign exchange students, who can and want to fill those jobs plus have companies that wish to hire them, are quota bound denied the opportunity and sent back to their own nations. Meanwhile, low skilled illegal immigrants remain here with virtual impunity.

We have the highest corporate taxes in the world. Therefore, if you are a global company and can take your operations anywhere in the world, why would you choose America?

Government subsidizes some businesses such as 'green' companies, effectively and substantially lowering their taxes as compared to other business of the same size and profitability. This in effect is limited communism, a system that always failed miserably.
Government requires all gasoline to be at least 10% ethanol for the stated purpose of reducing oil imports. However, it takes more than a gallon of gasoline to make ethanol, so no oil imports are saved and more imports are actually needed. Also, it takes farming resources of land and water (6,000 gallons of precious, limited, fresh water for each gallon of ethanol) to produce ethanol. Ethanol delivers less power and efficiency than gasoline. It also results in less food products and animal feed, raising the costs of both to consumers and farmers. People are going hungry and some have died of hunger because we produce less food for human consumption around the world due to this policy.

While the government wisely requires all businesses who have pensions to adequately fund them, it has no such rules for itself. Consequently, government pensions for government workers are underfunded by tens of trillions of dollars.

Government pays pensions in a manner that would bankrupt a private company that offered the same plan. Full pensions are paid to workers in their 50s and sometimes in their 40s instead of 65. Pensions are padded by using the largest one year income that is often manipulated and padded by huge overtime pay deliberately condoned so that instead of collecting half their pay as pension, workers collect their entire annual salary or more as pension. In addition, cost of living raised are included for retirees. Plus they are excluded from paying Social Security taxes. Finally, overtime pay is given to managerial and professional workers by government they would not be given to such workers in a private company. Such people are paid by the job in private industry, not by the hour.

Subsidies for Agriculture. Another bit of communism at work. We pay farmers not to grow crops (to preserve the land which farmers would do anyway to protect their future). We set minimum prices for some crop prices which not only raises food prices to consumers, especially hurting the poor and middle class, but also produces unwanted surpluses that the government pays millions of dollars per year to store. The average farmer has a net worth of two million dollars, so why are we subsidizing multi-millionaires?

Minimum wage laws. The 'intent' sounds good – ensure payment of a 'livable wage' to workers, but what is the real 'impact' of this policy? Does it accomplish the intent? The answer is no. Studies show that these workers are often people in their first job. 10 years later, 98% of them are earning the average American salary which is much higher than the minimum wage. Studies also show that minimum wage workers are not usually head of household, but often teenagers and students being supported by someone else. Most importantly, people who can't find employment in their first job until later in life, often never join the middle class and are dependent on government welfare programs for most or their entire life. Since studies also show that unemployment among youth seeking their first job is much higher than the rest of the population and that the number of entry jobs substantially decreases (employers eliminate some jobs, reduces the number of other jobs by adding more responsibilities to the job) when minimum wage rates are raised, thus sending youth unemployment rates much higher, minimum wage laws are regressive/counter productive rather than progressive. This result shouldn't be a surprise as it is another example of government over-riding the free marketplace to institute a bit of communism (the management of businesses by the state). So why does government pursue this policy? The reason is that Democrats, by making the minimum wage increasingly higher, make it easier for unions to bargain for higher wages.

The huge spread of government subsidizing consumers who buy what the government wants them to buy such as 'green' cars. Basically, you have decided that a green car is too expensive to buy. Instead of letting the marketplace determine the winners and loses of the various green technologies being produced or researched, the government offers a substantial subsidy to you to buy this too expensive car that you wouldn't pay for with your own money. This is stupid in two ways. First, the government is reaching over to your back pocket, lifting your wallet, taking money out of it as taxes, then giving it back to you to buy this car. So you paid full price anyway. Secondly, the fact that it is too expensive to buy means that it is not market ready and most importantly may not be the right green technology that could ultimately be truly marketable. In fact, the subsidy to the wrong technology could delay or stop the right green technology from ever being developed. Same concept exists for government grants to universities and colleges to develop new technologies. Let business and the free marketplace, which is loaded with incentives to develop marketable products, handle it.

Blocking oil and gas drilling on public lands, especially in the places that energy companies most want to drill. I'm not talking about National Parks. Government owns plenty of land and ocean that will never be a National Park, but could produce needed oil and gas to make us energy independent and maybe even an energy exporter someday. Why is that good? Well besides protecting our economy from shortages and foreign nation oil boycotts such as happened in the 1970s, we could save the 700 billion dollars a year we pay for oil imports and invest that money to produce good jobs in America.

Declaring the polar bear as a threatened species. Really? There are 25,000 polar bears today compared to only 8,000 polar bears 50 years ago. So the polar bear population has tripled in just 50 years! This outrageously prejudiced decision was a government sponsored marketing event to promote false man-made global warming policies that liberals love and support because polar bears, almost universally liked by the general population, might help win more supporters to this global warming hoax.

Flood insurance by the federal government. Private industry won't handle it due to the cost. So again, government overrides the marketplace and installs another bit of communism. The result – the same homes are destroyed and rebuilt by the government multiple times at huge deficits to the premiums collected for all policies. At the very least, it should pay the damages, then confiscate the property so as never to build upon it again. Better yet, get out of the business (or at least publicly declare it will not accept new policies so that unoccupied flood prone properties are never built upon).

Labeling a reduction in future, “planned” spending as a “cut” to the deficit. This is a fairy tale embedded in a lie, designed to fool the general public. A true 'cut” means spending less than actual expenditures from the past, not the future. The current. nonsensical debate about cutting 4 trillion dollars from the deficit over the next 10 years is in actuality an 8 trillion dollar increase to the national debt, bringing it in 10 years from the current 16 trillion dollars to 24 trillion dollars.

Using discrimination policies to end discrimination policies. Contradictory in its concept, Affirmative Action policies and laws discriminate by using the color of one's skin to gain jobs, promotions, and acceptance into colleges over more qualified people with a different skin color. No amount of “dancing” around this issue can mask the fact that Affirmative Action is unfair and real discrimination. This certainly isn't the policy that Martin Luther King campaigned for. He campaigned for the end of all discrimination!

Random Thoughts - Questions without Good Answers

1. Heaven is supposed to be Paradise. Yet, every person in hell has a mother and a father. Some also have a spouse and children of their own. How can a person in heaven really be infinitely happy if a loved parent, child, or spouse of theirs is in hell? Could they really be themselves if they don't care of feel deep sadness? And if they do, can they really be in Paradise?

2. Some people who are kind to other people and even animals, who wouldn't think of inflicting pain or suffering on man or beast, take joy at the thought that "bad people" will go to hell and get their 'due'. Worse,they imagine hell as an eternal, unrelenting punishment of fire and brimstone. You wouldn't, as punishment, force a person's hand to remain on a hot stove for five minutes or worse be burned to a stake which would end suffering in a few minutes. Too awful and inhumane! Yet the hell you imagine forces an afterlife body to be consumed by fire for eternity. Have you ever considered the enormity of this? Imagine being forced for five minutes in a giant hot stove. Imagine one hour, then a day, then a week, then a year, then a hundred years. Now for a thousand years. How long would it seem for a million years. A thousand times repeated for a billion years. A thousand times repeated again for a trillion years. Now 100 trillion years. Not enough? Multiply that 100 trillion times. Eternally speaking that is less than a second in a thousand years. Can anyone really do anything so awful as to deserve this kind of punishment? You wouldn't condone anything like it on Earth. Why does it change after death in terms of justification in your mind? Maybe hell is an invention of people who wanted to exercise control of other people? Let's hope so.

3. Space is infinite. How could it not be? If you reached the end of space, then what's to stop you from going to the edge and sticking a ten foot pole past the edge? God is all knowing. If space is truly infinite, then how can God know all that is in infinite space? If he did, then space would no longer be infinite.

4. Time is eternal. There is no beginning, nor is there an end to time. If there was, then what happened an hour before the beginning of time or an hour after the end of time? Yet the universe and all of us exist. Therefore at some point in time, we were created. How much time from the beginning of time were we created? Since there is no beginning of time, it took an infinite amount of time before the Universe and us were created. But infinity can never be reached. That implys that we and the Universe could never have been created.

5. Apply the analogy in point 4 to God. God always existed is pretty much a universal religious belief. Then it would take infinity to reach this point in time. Infinity can never happen. If I could ask God a question, my question would be what was your very first thought and when did it happen? After receiving the answer, my follow up question would be, then for an infinite amount of time before your first thought, you did not think at all. How can that be?

6. Science has an answer for this next thought, but though I have heard it several times, it makes no logical sense to me. I am talking about traveling at the speed of light and its effect on time. In theory, if a person could travel at the speed of light, he would age much slower and return to Earth hundreds of years later. something to do with the 'bending' of space and time - the theory of relativity by Einstein. Here's my problem. Scientists agree that the nearest star to Earth besides the Sun is four light years away. A light year is roughly six trillion miles in length. So the star is 24 trillion miles away from Earth. Light from that star takes four years to travel that 24 trillion miles. If we allowed it to hit a mirror, it would take another 4 years to travel back to that star. So 8 years for a round trip and 48 trillion ymiles traveled. I have no problem with that. Now put a man in a rocked that travels at the speed of light to that star and back. logically, the return should happen in 8 years. However, scientists say that it would be hundreds of years before he returned to Earth? How could it be qany different than the light beam? If it took more than 8 years to complete the round trip to and back from the star, then the space ship had to be going much slower than the speed of light. If it wasn't, then it must have traveled much further than 48 trillion miles.

7. The speed of light is defined as the "cosmic" speed light. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light per scientists. We currently have satellites in space about 200 miles up that are "stationary" to Earth and thus spin with Earth. Earth spins roughly 24,000 miles (the circumference of the Earth) in a 24 hour day. These satellites also circle in 24 hours, but since they have a 200 mile longer diameter to the center of the earth, they cover about 25,800 miles in the same time period (200 iles more time "pi" which is roughly 3.14. Now put an imaginary stationary satellite one light year from earth (or an imaginary pole attached to earth one light year long). It would travel 3.14 light years in one revolution which is only one day. That's 1,146 light years traveled in an Earth year (365 days times 3.14). That's way faster than the speed of light.

Being Better Prepared for Natural Disasters

The super storm Sandy has taught us once again that we need to be better prepared for natural disasters. I don't think it either difficult nor hard to be much better prepared. Electric generators are essentially combustion engines that can restore electricity to a home or business when electric power is down for extended periods of time. Car engines are also combustion engines and nearly every home owner or business owns one or more cars or pickup trucks. It cannot be very difficult nor expensive to give car engines of the future an electric generator capacity. Nor could it be that difficult to design a conversion kit to turn current car engines into electric generators. Take the problem of gas stations without electricity. The station owner could use his own car engine to provide electricity to his station. He can get all the gas he needs to keep it going from his own gas station. Other solutions would be to equip FEMA with 10,000 electric generators. A tiny cost in government terms of about two million dollars should pay for that. Long term, require electric companies to convert their pole carrying electric cables servicing homes and small businesses to underground cables. Give them ten years to do it so that they don't have to pay out all those costs in one year.