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Catherine Engelbrecht used “weaponizing of government” to describe what she perceives as a federal campaign against her. Is it the latest blast of fevered rhetoric, or does she have a case?

Catherine and her husband Bryan were largely apolitical people who ran a small manufacturing business in Rosenberg, Texas. Over two decades the couple incurred nothing more than routine contact with government. Then in 2008 Catherine volunteered at the polls and saw cases of fraud and abuse she thought should have been exposed but weren’t. That prompted her to become more involved in the political process.

Catherine founded the King Street Patriots, a community group hosting discussions on personal and economic freedoms. She also founded True the Vote, which aimed to prevent voter fraud. Suddenly the federal government became more interested in Catherine Engelbrecht. As she recently testified, federal agencies such as the IRS, FBI, ATF and OSHA subjected her business, nonprofit organizations and family to more than 15 cases of audits and inquiries. OSHA imposed heavy fines. Even the Texas branch of the EPA paid a visit. A ballpark figure for the chances of all this being coincidental is zero.

Federal agencies are supposed to serve the taxpayers. Engelbrecht’s ordeal is evidence that federal agencies have indeed been weaponized and targeted against critics of the current administration, advocates of limited government, and even those dedicated to the integrity of the political process. And the President of the United States finds “not a smidgeon” of corruption in any of it, despite several ongoing investigations, one of them headed by an IRS trial lawyer who is a donor to the president. So that inquiry will doubtless find no corruption, even though other IRS bosses have already pleaded the Fifth Amendment.

Catherine Engelbrecht makes a strong case that government has indeed been weaponized but that doesn’t quite capture the whole reality. As this column confirms, the federal government has also institutionalized waste, fraud and abuse, to the point that reform is practically impossible. Victims in particular and taxpayers in general may be forgiven for seeing it all as part of an ongoing American Counterrevolution.

As we noted last year, the U.S. military has more than enough tanks and Army chiefs of staff such as Ray Odierno protest that they don’t want any more. Politicians, on the other hand, wanted the Army to have 280 more tanks, at $8 million a pop. It turns out that there is more to this story.

As this Washington Post report notes, “tanks are something of a relic,” and ill-suited for modern warfare, which tends to be asymmetrical. So the manufacture of tanks, the military says, is no longer essential. The future belongs to “nimble and tactical” weapons. Given those realities, why have politicians pushed for the manufacture of more tanks and armored vehicles? For one thing, the manufacturers of tanks and armored vehicles lobby Congress to support their work.

Last year, BAE Systems “convened its suppliers — it has 586 across 44 states — in Washington to storm the Hill, chatting up representatives about the jobs they provide and pushing for Congress to help the Bradley program.” As the Post observed “and jobs, after all, are what their representatives in Congress are working to protect in their home districts.”

Angela Canterbury of the Project on Government Oversight told the Post that all this “is really making us less safe when we’re throwing money that’s hard to come by at programs that don’t meet what should be our current national security strategy.”

The push for more tanks and armored vehicles the military does not want is not only wasteful but dangerous. As we noted last year, taxpayers have a right to expect defense spending to enhance national security, not detract from it. For all their sophistication and exemplary record of service, American tanks did not prevent terrorists operating out of caves in Afghanistan from inflicting major damage on the United States and killing thousands of innocent civilians.

How much will the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) cost Americans over the next 10 years?

It can be really difficult to specifically break out the specific cost of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), because it spans across multiple programs. The only good detail we have at this point is from the CBO, which issued its February 2014 baseline for the cost of the programs insurance coverage provisions on 4 February 2014, and only covers the period from 2014 through 2024:

From 2014 to 2024, spending for the ACA’s exchange subsidies, Medicaid, the Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and tax credits for small employers who buy into the system is projected to increase by $2.404 trillion. However, the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) will get quite a lot of that money by taking it away from Medicare, particularly from the beneficiaries of Medicare Part C – the popular Medicare Advantage program. Most of that cost shifting will take place over the next five years.

These costs don’t even take the government’s administrative costs into account. In addition to spending however more billions it might take to The IRS will be spending more money to enforce Obamacare’s new and increased taxes, which the CBO indicates that from 2014 to 2024, will take an additional $1.528 trillion from Americans.

These will primarily be low-to-middle income earning Americans, with the tax bite hitting people with incomes between $20,000 and $40,000 particularly hard, as the following analysis from the Brookings Institution makes clear.

Of course, since the spending for Obamacare is greater than its taxes, the Affordable Care Act will add to the nation’s deficit and national debt perpetually into the future, which is main conclusion of the CBO’s analysis of the effects of the Affordable Care Act upon the federal government’s budget.

Does anyone else think that the CBO is staffed by irrepressible optimists?

As this report notes, new Internal Revenue Service boss John Koskinen has announced that the IRS will pay out a total of $62.5 million in bonuses to IRS employees. Koskinen says the “performance award payouts are recognition of that great work done in very trying circumstances” and are needed to boost morale. Embattled taxpayers have a right to wonder what “great work” Koskinen is talking about.

As former IRS boss Steven Miller noted, the IRS had been guilty of “horrible customer service.” Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS manager heading the division that provided the horrible service, was not punished but promoted to head the IRS division working with Obamacare.

The IRS has also provided horrible service at fighting fraud, and ignored those who blow the whistle on fraud. Last year the IRS sent some $3.6 billion in fraudulent tax refunds to people using stolen identities. The IRS sent 655 tax refunds to a single address in Lithuania, and 343 refunds went to one address in Shanghai, in the People’s Republic of China. All told, the IRS issued 1.1 million refunds based on stolen Social Security Numbers, and paid out $385 million in 141,000 refunds based on stolen taxpayer identification numbers. As the president might have put it, if you like your fraudulent refund you can keep it, period.

Beyond all that, and much more incompetence, the IRS has been targeting groups that advance the cause of lower taxes and smaller government. That kind of targeting is likely the “great work done in very trying circumstances,” that new IRS boss John Koskinen had in mind when he announced the bonuses. The $62.5 million rewards the IRS for riding herd on groups less than worshipful of the current administration in Washington. The payouts make no sense on any other level.

Koskinen said the bonuses were needed to retain and attract good employees in a time of cutbacks. “This investment in our employees,” he said, “will directly benefit taxpayers and the tax system.” Actually, the bonuses rub taxpayers’ faces in ruling-class rot, and that should come as no surprise.

As Frank Zappa said, those people up in Washington are looking out for number one. And number one ain’t you. You ain’t even number two.

The CBO reports in its new Budget and Economic Outlook, which covers the years from 2014 through 2024:

Federal outlays are expected to increase by 2.6 percent this year, to $3.5 trillion, or 20.5 percent of GDP—their average percentage over the past 40 years. CBO projects that under current law, outlays will grow faster than the economy during the next decade and will equal 22.4 percent of GDP in 2024. With no changes in the applicable laws, spending for Social Security, Medicare (including offsetting receipts), Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and subsidies for health insurance purchased through exchanges will rise from 9.7 percent of GDP in 2014 to 11.7 percent in 2024, CBO estimates. Net interest payments by the federal government are also projected to grow rapidly, climbing from 1.3 percent of GDP in 2014 to 3.3 percent in 2024, mostly because of the return of interest rates to more typical levels. However, the rest of the government’s noninterest spending—for defense, benefit programs other than those mentioned above, and all other nondefense activities—is projected to drop from 9.4 percent of GDP this year to 7.3 percent in 2024 under current law.

The CBO provides the graph to project federal government budget deficits over the next 10 years:

Contrary to Barack Obama’s promise, Obamacare deprived millions of Americans of the health plans they liked and wanted to keep. To get the health plan the federal government wants them to have, Obamacare steered these people to HealthCare.gov, a dysfunctional, insecure website also inscrutable to Spanish speakers because it was written in Spanglish. The site’s “navigators” can be convicted felons. Those who manage to “enroll,” remain unsure whether they actually have health insurance. On top of all that, and much more, the Washington Post describes a new problem with Obamacare.

“Tens of thousands of people who discovered that HealthCare.gov made mistakes as they were signing up for a health plan are confronting a new roadblock: The government cannot yet fix the errors.” These people “contend that the computer system for the new federal online marketplace charged them too much for health insurance, steered them into the wrong insurance program or denied them coverage entirely.”

The Obama administration “has not made public the fact that the appeals system for the online marketplace is not working.” And according to attorneys at the National Health Law Program, there is no indication that infrastructure for conducting informal reviews and fair hearings “has even been created, let alone become operational.” A Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) mouthpiece told the Post that “We are working to fully implement the appeals system,” but that could be a stretch. Insiders told the Post that an appeals process is not among the top priorities for completing parts of the federal exchange that still do not work: the payment system for insurers, communication with Medicaid, and adjusting coverage to accommodate new family members.

The Post charted the case of Addie Wilson, 27, who was facing gallbladder surgery. The federal website would not calculate her subsidy. A federal call center told her to pay full price and appeal. Trouble is, the computer system that would allow agency workers to handle appeals “has not been built.” But not to worry, Addie, because the CMS is “inviting” tens of thousand of people just like you to return to HealthCare.gov and start all over again.

That could well make the problem worse. As Einstein said, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is insanity.

As we noted last week, the California Senate conducted a hearing on the problems with the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, which cost some $5 billion more than the original estimate. Bridge construction was delayed 10 years but doubts remain about its safety. Taxpayers should wonder why politicians took so long to conduct the hearing but at least they were able to see it on the California Channel. Just before the November election in 2012, Senate boss Darrell Steinberg, who claims to be devoted to transparency, killed the live broadcast of a hearing on several key ballot measures on taxes and spending.

In the recent bridge hearing witnesses testified that Caltrans bosses ignored and downplayed costly problems, reassigned whistleblowers, and telling engineers not to write things down to avoid public disclosure. One witness called for a “criminal investigation.” Caltrans bosses denied all the problems and said the bridge was safe. Senator Mark DeSaulnier, who conducted the hearing, said “I don’t believe you.” Now come new revelations about Caltrans itself.

Last May, governor Jerry Brown commissioned an independent review of Caltrans by the State Smart Transportation Initiative at the University of Wisconsin. The Initiative’s report did not deal with the Bay Bridge, but as this Sacramento Bee article notes, it pointed out longstanding problems with Caltrans, whose “mission, vision and set of goals” are not well aligned with California’s current needs. The problems are inherent in the system.

Caltrans management practices remain “out of date” and the massive state agency maintains a “culture of fear.” State transportation secretary Brian Kelly conceded that California highways are ranked 48th nationally on pavement condition. But before fixing this, Caltrans likes to “prioritize new construction.” The report called for sweeping reforms but any meaningful change remains unlikely.

As testimony confirmed, a criminal investigation is certainly warranted. Senator DeSaulnier didn’t believe Caltrans apologists, but he has failed to launch such an investigation. As recent events suggest, even a criminal prosecution might not do much good.

Last week a jury found state senator Rod Wright guilty of eight felonies. But Senate boss Darrell Steinberg is keeping Wright on the job. That recalls a solution suggested by Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. “Let’s limit all U.S. politicians to two terms; one in office, and one in prison. Illinois already does this, and it seems to be working.”

In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama had the following to say about the “success” achieved during his tenure in office in reining in the federal government’s spending:

Over the last few years, both parties have worked together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion – mostly through spending cuts, but also by raising tax rates on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. As a result, we are more than halfway towards the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists say we need to stabilize our finances.

Reducing the federal government’s budget deficit by $2.5 trillion sounds pretty impressive, doesn’t it? But what might not sound so impressive is that even with those minor spending cuts and large tax increases, the federal government will still run very large budget deficits throughout the rest of President Obama’s term in office. On top of the massive trillion dollar plus budget deficits in each of his first four years in office – before the president’s budget deficit reduction achievement. Deficits that will pile on top of a national debt whose size continues to swell.

Let’s flash forward to 2014. Here’s what President Obama had to say about that budget deficit reduction achievement in his 2014 State of the Union Address:

Here are the results of your efforts: The lowest unemployment rate in over five years. A rebounding housing market. A manufacturing sector that’s adding jobs for the first time since the 1990s. More oil produced at home than we buy from the rest of the world – the first time that’s happened in nearly twenty years. Our deficits – cut by more than half. And for the first time in over a decade, business leaders around the world have declared that China is no longer the world’s number one place to invest; America is.

We see that reducing the government’s budget deficit is something the President associates with good things – but the U.S. government is still running in the red by billions of dollars – all of which are inflating the national debt, which totals over $17 trillion now – larger than the nation’s entire annual GDP.

So what’s the real impact of that achievement in terms that can be related to typical American households? And how does that compare to other U.S. presidents in the modern age of chronic federal government budget deficits?

The answer is displayed graphically below for each president beginning with Richard Nixon.

To arrive at these results, we divided the total public debt outstanding for the U.S. federal government by the number of U.S. households counted by the U.S. Census Bureau for each year since 1967, when the U.S. Census Bureau first started tallying this data, and adjusted each of these values to account for the effect of inflation over time, expressing each in terms of constant 2013 U.S. dollars.

We then subtracted the national debt burden per U.S. household of the last year of the preceding U.S. president’s term from the equivalent value recorded in their final year in office, dividing that difference by the number of years that each was in office (which is five years and counting for President Obama). The results of all that math work out to be exactly what we’ve presented in the chart above.

We should note that the value for President Obama incorporates our projection that there were 123,700,000 households in the U.S. in 2013 – the U.S. Census Bureau won’t report its official tally until September 2013, so until that time, the figure representing President Obama first five years in office really represents a preliminary estimate – one that should be relatively close to what the final figure will work out to be.

The bad news is that there is a clear winner for the president with the worst record on budget deficits, which is perhaps why those economists are saying that we need even more deficit reduction to stabilize our finances. That’s the consequence of having spending get out of control.

If only we had effective leadership in Washington, D.C.

Cross-posted at Political Calculations

To all but the willfully blind Obamacare is a bust on health care, but it works much better as a way to expand government. Obamacare and its state subsidiaries also function as a cushy landing spot for former government officials.

As this report notes, Covered California has hired Ana Matosantos, California’s former director of finance, to advise the state exchange on “financial sustainability and budgeting issues, and evaluation analytics.” Covered California will pay Matosantos $20,000 a month. That is big money for someone who was not qualified for her previous government post.

For director of finance, taxpayers have a right to expect a proven economist with an earned PhD or at least an advanced degree. Ana Matosantos holds a BA in political science and feminist studies. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger hired her anyway and Governor Jerry Brown duly kept her on as state finance director.

Her finance department included the bureau of state audits, but Matosantos proved clueless about $54 million the state parks department had stashed away. But right around election time in 2012 her department claimed to have discovered an extra $1.4 billion for the budget. How convenient. Matosantos, once busted for drunk driving, resigned last year and is now bagging big bucks with Covered California, which recently released a promotional video featuring Richard Simmons cavorting with a contortionist. In fairness to Ana, she is not the only ruling-class retread to find a cushy landing spot.

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the state’s $3 billion stem-cell agency, has failed to produce the life-saving cures and therapies its promoters promised voters in 2004. In 2009 Duane Roth, a businessman with a background in biotechnology, offered to serve CIRM as vice chairman for no salary. CIRM turned down that offer and brought in Art Torres, a lawyer and former state Democratic Party boss, and promptly tripled his salary to $225,000.

Covered California is carrying on a long tradition, and the dynamics should be clear. Regardless of performance, government continues to expand. Regardless of performance, ruling-class retreads get high-paying government jobs and contracts.

The new eastern span of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge cost $6.4 billion, with cost overruns of some $5 billion, and its opening was delayed 10 years. That amounts to waste on a colossal scale, but according to testimony in a State Transportation and Housing Committee hearing last Friday, other concerns remain for all Californians, and they go far beyond safety.

Several witnesses testified in considerable detail that in a push to complete the project Caltrans bosses compromised quality by ignoring problems with welds, bolts and rods. They opted for a kind of steel prone to embrittlement, a metallurgist testified, and that is why a number of rods cracked. It was the sort of problem that prompted California governor Jerry Brown to say “s— happens.”

Caltrans outsourced work to China, which as one engineer testified, sends some of its own bridge welding projects to England. On the Bay Bridge project the Chinese produced welds with cracks. A full 750 panels needed to be repaired. As witnesses testified, Caltrans bosses ignored and downplayed these costly problems, reassigned the whistleblowers, and even told engineers not to write things down to avoid public disclosure.

Caltrans bosses rejected this testimony, downplayed the problems, and said the bridge was safe for 150 years. Senator Mark DeSaulnier, who conducted the hearing, said “I don’t believe you.” He had observed that “Caltrans audits itself,” unlike procedures in states such as Texas, and that in Caltrans “you don’t go after the trouble, you go after the troublemaker.”

The senator cited “a deliberate and willful attempt to obfuscate what is happening to the public.” But he did not follow up on one whistleblower’s call for a “criminal investigation,” a perfectly reasonable request. That surely pleased the Caltrans bosses. Along with their obfuscation, the hearing revealed that they essentially got away with it, and that California is woefully lacking in accountability.

DeSaulnier, meanwhile, did prove candid about his own concerns. The billions in cost overruns, the ten-year delay, and safety issues had eroded confidence and made Californians “adverse to taxes.” These taxes were needed for “infrastructure” projects that DeSaulnier claimed would promote economic growth.

He gave no examples but the prime candidate is surely the state’s high-speed rail project. According to its supporters, the “bullet train” will solve transportation woes, aid the environment, and boost the state’s economic fortunes, all for only $68 billion. Californians tempted to believe that should consider the Bay Bridge experience.