No Sense Even Though We Have No Cents

If you have a lot of money in your bank account you can choose to be stupid about your money and live another day.  If you have no cents in your pocket you better have a lot of common sense today.  Tomorrow is going to come and it is going to be even darker than today.

When I look at some of the things that the federal government is doing today it is apparent that common sense is nowhere to be found.  And when we are borrowing almost 40 cents out of every dollar we spend we need both sense and cents badly.

A few examples.

Last year I wrote about the obvious fraud that is occurring with regard to illegal immigrants taking advantage of the child tax credit.  In 2010 more than 2.3 million persons who did not have Social Security numbers valid for working in the United States received an average of $1,800 in child tax credits.  The refundable nature of this credit makes it ripe for fraud.  It would not be so bad if the Internal Revenue Service was doing anything to track down the tax cheats.  They do not appear to be doing anything about it even though they have the names and addresses of every person who claimed the credit on their tax returns.

Indianapolis TV station WTHR has picked up on the story that BeeLine wrote about last October.  You can view the report here.  You have to see it to believe it.  They even have interviews with the perpetrators.   In summary, we are borrowing and printing money to pay cash to people who are not even supposed to be in this country for children that are living in Mexico.  Where is the sense in this?

I have also written several times about the significant problems with the Social Security Disability program and Trust here and here.    We have an unprecedented numbers of people on the disability rolls and the Social Security Trust Fund is just four short years from insolvency.

We now have a ratio of workers on disability to active workers that is over 6%.  In the 1980's it was around 2%.  It is a little hard to believe that given all the advances in medical technology, ergonomics, workplace safety and greater accomodations for disability that are made by employers, that the disability rate could be 3 times higher today than 30 years ago.

Is this another case where lax and liberal government policies have disabled initiative?

These numbers are particularly troubling in light of the recent Social Security Trustees' Report.  That report projects that the Disability portion of the Social Security "Trust" Fund will be insolvent in 2016.  That is a mere four years away.  Under current law, an across the board benefit cut would be required that would cut benefits by an estimated 21% when the fund becomes insolvent.

You would think that with all of these issues there would be some interest in rooting out potential fraud in the program to insure that those that have serious needs would not have their benefits put at risk.  However, you would be wrong.  Consider this recent edict by the Social Security Administration that now prohibits administrative law judges from using the internet in deciding disability cases.  In effect, this means that an individual could have pictures plastered all over their Facebook page doing flips on a trampoline and it could not be used by the judge in deciding a disability case based on a back injury.

A decree by the Social Security Administration has put the internet off-limits for disability-claims judges when ruling on cases. And by internet, Social Security means The Internet – all of it, most notably websites where people tend to share personal information, like Facebook or Google+.  

You can read this more about the decision in WebProNews and in this article in The Washington Times.   Where is the sense in this?

A final example that shows the utter nonsense that we see in Washington and The White House is the testimony of a representative of the Government Accountability Office before a House subcommittee last week that places our fossil fuel resources ahead of any other country in the world.  More than Russia.  More than Saudi Arabia.

There is a lot of oil locked within oil shale formations in this country that could go a long way to satisfying our future oil needs.  In fact, the Green River Formation, that lies beneath parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, alone contains an estimated 3 trillion barrels of oil and 1.5 trillion barrels of it is estimated to be recoverable based on available technology and current economics.  How much is that?  That is an amount equal to close to the entire world's present proven oil reserves!

This would normally be good news but we have a President and a number of Democrats who seem to have no interest at all in developing our natural resources.  They are more interested in spending billions of our tax dollars on so-called "green" projects like Solyndra while totally ignoring traditional energy resources that are proven and plentiful.  They have also refused to allow the Keystone XL Pipeline project that will not even allow us to benefit from oil produced in Canada.

Why is all of this troublesome?  Nearly three-quarters of the largely vacant lands that make up the Green River Formation is owned by the federal government.    Therefore, what we do with this opportunity is almost totally controlled by who is making the decisions in Washington.  It is there for the taking-a secure source of oil, energy to power our economy, jobs and something else we could use right now in Washington-MONEY.  Bruce Walker in The New American explains.

Because this oil is largely on federal lands, an enormous amount of federal revenue could be generated through lease options and royalty payments without raising tax rates at all.

How much? The standard royalty payment in the oil and gas business is “one-eighth of production free and clear of costs” or 12.5 percent of the value of the oil extracted. Assuming that the 3-trillion barrel figure is accurate and that the price of oil remains in the neighborhood of $100 per barrel, then the federal non-tax revenue from royalties alone could be as high as $37.5 trillion. However, that figure is no doubt an overestimate of revenue. As more oil is extracted, the price of oil will drop, and hence it will not be economically feasible to recover more of the oil at that point.

But even if only 30 percent of those royalty revenues flowed into the U.S. Treasury, that would be enough to pay off the entire national debt without raising tax rates or cutting federal spending. Moreover, state taxes on oil and gas produced would enable state governments to keep tax rates low without affecting government operations. 

Where is the sense in not doing everything to take advantage of this?

I think we should all be seriously concerned when we have solutions to problems right in front of us and we look the other way.  At times it seems that there is more interest in seeing us fail than in seeing us succeed.

Where is the sense in continuing with the "Hope and Change" agenda that gives us these examples of nonsense?