U.S. Debt Clock

With the mid-term elections coming up next week, this seems like a good time to take another look at the U.S. Debt Clock...

A national debt of almost $18 trillion ($153,000+ per taxpayer) is a lot scarier to me than anything I expect to see on Halloween.

Obama/Biden: $295,437 For Week-end Vacation

According to new records obtained by the taxpayer watchdog group Judicial Watch, three separate jaunts taken by President Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, and Vice President Joe Biden during last year's Presidents Day weekend cost at least $295,437. Judicial Watch said the expenses are extravagant:  “The Obamas and Vice President Biden are oblivious to the costs to taxpayers for their vacation travel".

Government Bans Front-Yard Vegetable Garden

May the government prohibit you from peacefully and productively using your own property to feed your family?
 
For 17 years, Hermine Ricketts and her husband Tom Carroll used their front yard to grow food for their own personal consumption. And for 17 years, nobody had a problem with it . . . until now. In May 2013, Miami Shores Village, Fla. amended its ordinance to make clear that front-yard vegetable gardens were prohibited. Only vegetables are explicitly banned—trees, fruit and garden gnomes are just fine.

A few days later, the Village’s code enforcement department served Hermine and Tom with a notice informing them they were in violation of the front-yard vegetable ban. The department threatened them with fines of $50 per day if they did not destroy their beautiful garden. Unable to bear the cost of such hefty fines, Hermine and Tom had no option but to surrender to the government’s demands and uproot the garden.

The battle, however, is far from over. Hermine and Tom are part of a nationwide movement of small-scale food producers and consumers who are tired of the government dictating what foods they can grow, sell, and eat. On November 19, 2013, they joined with the Institute for Justice to challenge Miami Shores’ senseless front-yard vegetable garden ban. Their case aims to vindicate the right of all Americans to peacefully use their own property to support their own families.

Internet Sales Tax Legislation

If you oppose Internet Sales Tax Legislation, sign/send eBay letter at www.ebaymainstreet.com/action-center.

Medicare Fraud

In 2006 Medicare announced that only 7 percent of its payments were a result of fraud. Two years later, The New York Times reported that it was actually 31.5 percent. Do you think a privately run insurance company would take three years to notice that one-third of its payouts had been obtained by fraud? But with federal programs, there’s a powerful incentive not to look for fraud. That would merely vindicate critics of big government!

In 2012 Medicare investigators noticed that more than a billion dollars in home health care payments for 2008 had gone to one single county in Florida – more than all such payments made to the rest of the entire country. Do you think it would take five years for a private insurer to figure out it had been scammed out of $1 billion by a few health care professionals in one county? Wherever there’s a government program, there’s a gigantic opportunity for criminals.

In a recent press release the Department of Justice listed the following criminal convictions for Medicare and Medicaid fraud against the taxpayer in just a four-day period ending Nov. 7:

– Nov. 7, 2013:
Mehran Javidan, owner of Acure, a home health care company in Oak Park, Mich., was paid more than $2.2 million from Medicare based on fraudulent physical therapy files he submitted between December 2008 and November 2010.

– Nov. 7, 2013:
Javed Rehman, Tausif Rahman and Muhammad Ahmad – no relation to the Tsarneav brothers – fraudulently obtained Medicare beneficiary information to bill Medicare for home health services, swindling approximately $13.8 million from Medicare.

– Nov. 7, 2013:
Eliza Lozano Lumbreras, San Juanita Gallegos Lozano, Manuel Anthony Puig and Romelia Puig used their operation of the Mission Clinic and La Hacienda Family Clinic to submit false claims to Medicare and Medicaid, stealing approximately half a million dollars from the taxpayers between 2001 and 2006.

– Nov. 6, 2013:
Karen Kallen-Zury, Daisy Miller and Christian Coloma were convicted for receiving approximately $40 million from Medicare for patients not eligible for psychiatric treatment because they were not severely mentally ill.

– Nov. 6, 2013:
Jose Rojo, Antonio Macli, Jorge Macli and Sandra Huarte in Miami paid patient recruiters to refer ineligible Medicare beneficiaries to their clinic for services that were never provided. They were paid more than $11 million in fraudulent claims to Medicare.

– Nov. 4, 2013:
Godwin Umotong, Leslie Omagbemi, Munda Massaquoi, Comfort Gates, Ovsanna Agopian and Boghos Babadjanian were convicted of fraudulently billing Medicare of millions of dollars for office visits and diagnostic tests that were never performed, more than $1.3 million of which Medicare paid.

– Nov. 4, 2013:
William Dale Sidener was convicted of submitting fraudulent bills to Medicare and receiving $4,677.00 in payments for services not performed.

Given this abuse of Medicare/Medicaid, can you imagine what will happen with ObamaCare.

Government Programs

Government Ineptitude

The Washington Post reports that the federal employee retirement system paid more than $400 million in benefits over the past few years to deceased retirees. On the same page, we learn that despite the U.S. government’s $7 billion investment in combating heroin cultivation in Afghanistan, the trade is booming. Last week, the Brookings Institution published a study suggesting that Cash for Clunkers was a failure, costing taxpayers $1.4 million for each of the 3,676 jobs created.

Millions in Medicare to Deceased, Illegal Immigrants

The federal government has paid tens of millions of dollars in Medicare benefits to dead people and illegal immigrants, according to a pair of reports from federal watchdogs released on Thursday. The Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services paid out $23 million to beneficiaries after their deaths in 2011, according to one report from HHS’ inspector general.

Another report tallied more than $28 million in payments from 2009 to 2011 to individuals who were in the country illegally. In all, CMS paid Medicare benefits to 4,139 illegal immigrants and 17,403 deceased people, according to the two reports. The two IG reports were the latest in the office’s ongoing investigation into the issue. Reports released in January found CMS had paid $125 million to illegal immigrants and prison inmates.

National Park Service's Wasteful Spending

"Taxpayers shell out $52,000  a year to maintain the home of Black History Month founder Carter Woodson. Yet the tiny, dilapidated row house in northwest Washington D.C., with a "No Trespassing" sign and iron bars blocking the front door and windows hasn’t seen a visitor in the seven years since the National Park Service bought it  for $2.1 million and designated it a National Historic Site." Click here to read Fox News report.

Disaster Plan For Magician's Rabbit

Marty Hahne, a children's magician in Ozark, MO, has a small white rabbit, which he pulls out of a hat in his show. According to the USDA, that makes him an "exhibitor" of animals, and it means he must have a license. Recently, the government added a new condition to his license: Hahne must write a disaster plan for his rabbit. Click here to read The Washington Post article.

"For Hahne, the saga has provided a lesson in one of Washington’s bad old habits — the tendency to pile new rules on top of old ones, with officials using good intentions and vague laws to expand the reach of the federal bureaucracy."

$9.7 Billion Loss on General Motors Bailout

The U.S. government has booked a loss of $9.7 billion on the nearly $50 billion bailout of U.S. automaker General Motors, according to a quarterly report to Congress on Tuesday. In 2009, the U.S. Treasury extended $49.5 billion in loans to GM in exchange for $2.1 billion in preferred stock and a 60.8 percent equity stake.

Treasury has since whittled down its stake in GM through a series of stock sales. Those sales have all taken place below the price Treasury needed to break even on its GM investment, resulting in the loss, according to Tuesday's report from the Special Inspector General overseeing the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

IRS Wastes Billions

The Internal Revenue Service paid up to $13.6 billion in bogus claims for the Earned Income Tax Credit last year and as much as $132.6 billion over the past decade, according to an internal audit that already has some members of Congress questioning how the agency will be able to administer Obamacare.

IRS problems with the tax credit are not new. In fact, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration said it warned officials about the problems in 2011 — but two years later, the agency still has not solved the situation and remains in violation of one of President Obama’s executive orders. Indeed, the IRS has not established annual targets for reducing the payments, which is required by law, nor is the agency complying with requirements that it report to auditors each quarter on any EITC payments.

The large error rate left some lawmakers questioning whether the agency will be able to administer the tens of billions of dollars in health care tax credits that are part of the Affordable Care Act. “That the IRS can’t figure out how to rein in the improper Earned Income Tax Credit payments does not bode well for the $1.1 trillion in ObamaCare subsidies,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.

He said if the error rate in Obamacare subsidies is as big as it is in the EITC, that could mean $250 billion would be wasted in health care payments. The size of the erroneous payments was staggering to lawmakers. At more than $13 billion a year, the bogus tax claims are more than the entire budget of the Environmental Protection Agency or the Interior or Labor departments.

“The waste outlined in this report — more than $13 billion a year — equals or exceeds the annual budgets of some federal agencies,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican and Congress‘ chief waste-watcher. “Before we ask taxpayers to send even more of their own money to Washington, we must do more to prevent these egregious examples of waste.”

U.S. Debt Tops $17 Trillion

U.S. debt jumped a record $328 billion on Thursday, the first day the federal government was able to borrow money under the deal President Obama and Congress sealed this week. The debt now equals $17.075 trillion, according to figures the Treasury Department posted online on Friday.

Senate's Elevator Operators Cost $1.2 Million

Even after Senate said the jobs in the senators-only elevators were nonessential in 2011, the jobs still exist. Over the last five years the cost of those jobs has reached $1.2 million. The longest serving operator has seen a salary increase every year of those five years, earning over $210,000.

$634 Million For Obamacare Sites

Digital Trends has an informative article on the cost of building the website Healthcare.gov which has been plagued with problems. As with most government programs, the cost has soared from an initial estimate of $93.7 million to $634 million. And in as much as it does not work as advertised, many more dollars will be spent trying to fix it.

"Given the complicated nature of federal contracts, it’s difficult to make a direct comparison between the cost to develop Healthcare.gov and the amount of money spent building private online businesses. But for the sake of putting the monstrous amount of money into perspective, here are a few figures to chew on: Facebook, which received its first investment in June 2004, operated for a full six years before surpassing the $600 million mark in June 2010. Twitter, created in 2006, managed to get by with only $360.17 million in total funding until a $400 million boost in 2011. Instagram ginned up just $57.5 million in funding before Facebook bought it for (a staggering) $1 billion last year. And LinkedIn and Spotify, meanwhile, have only raised, respectively, $200 million and $288 million."

Update (10/11/13): Canadian officials fired IT firm behind troubled Obamacare website.