Column for August 11, 2011

I don’t know about you, but I don’t enjoy losing thousands of dollars overnight. Thanks to the Congress and President of the United States, that is exactly what just happened. Whether or not I recover that money remains to be seen. I am sure that there are others who lost a lot more than I did, but any loss like this is something I notice. If you are like me, you may have a 401(k) retirement savings plan or perhaps some other sort of arrangements. Maybe you invest in the stock market for income or to dabble and play. Whatever your status is, I am sure that you have heard the news of the falling stock market over the past few days.

Quite honestly, I am not a big time investor, but I have made a few investments over the years and am working on building a nest egg for my retirement years. For years I have been socking away money into my company’s retirement plan. Like all things economic, the market fluctuates. I took quite a hit several years back when my employer merged with another company and the company stock plummeted. I lost thousands of dollars in the value of my 401(k). Just since last week, my retirement fund has lost over $6000 and that does not include the downturn from today’s market. Still, I would rather put my money in the market and risk it than putting it in the government coffers and pray that the government can afford to give me back my own money with a far lower rater of return on investment than what I am still getting in my 401(k).

With the recent federal government’s “credit rating” being downgraded a notch, a lot of investors are having knee-jerk reactions. David Beers, the head of Standard and Poor’s (one of three key credit-ratings agencies) government debt-rating unit, got it right. He said, “Congress and the administration are jointly responsible for the conduct of fiscal policy. So, this is not really about either political party." Predictably, the ones most responsible for the financial problems have been pointing fingers at everyone but themselves. I have in front of me two news articles about blame shifting for the stock market and credit rating debacle.

Far left liberals have been branding Republicans as steadfast ideologues that were inflexible. Senator (and former Presidential candidate) John Kerry blamed the “Tea Party” followers for the downgrade. No, Senator, it was a problem with spending that led to the downgrade, not a particular group of people who stood in opposition to the irresponsible and reckless spending that we have seen over the past five plus years (and yes, I include some of the tenure of George W. Bush in this) that was the reason that the nation’s credit rating was taken down a notch for the first time in our history.

The sodomite Representative from Massachusetts, Barney Frank proffered yet another absurd explanation. He blamed our “spending too much money being the military policemen of the world." In all fairness, I am in agreement with Frank that we should pull back our military from much of the world and police our own borders rather than protecting those of other nations and supporting the economies of foreign countries. However, military spending is not the problem alone. The problem is with entitlement spending that is eating up the majority of our budget. We spend far more on wealth redistribution than we do on the military. Barney Frank has had his hands involved with the Fannie Mae and Freddy Mack scandals, which were costly to the American taxpayers. The policies that he does support and fight for cost Americans far more than our military ever thought of costing.

I recently heard a Christian book publisher speak in Wilson, NC. He seemed fairly naive when it came to political issues. He stated that Democrats were too far to the left (I agree with that) and that the Tea Party was too far to the right. He was way off with that last part. The so-called Tea Party folks simply want a few things such as a return to fiscal sanity and the restrictions imposed by the US Constitution. There is nothing “far right” about wanting to adhere to our founding document. The ironic thing is that the person who coordinated that speaking engagement is a leader in the local Tea Party movement. I could feel the tension in the room after he made that inane statement.

In the interest of disclosure, I am not a registered Republican, nor am I a member of any Tea Party organization. As far as I am concerned, both are way behind the times. I don’t consider the GOP to be conservative any longer and I was preaching constitutional government and fiscal sanity long before the Tea Party Movement came about.

Here is what I do know for sure. It is the irresponsible policies of Congress and the President that have seriously affected my personal wealth and that of millions of other Americans. The leaches who depend upon government handouts and like the current reckless spending notwithstanding, let’s all remember who has been affecting our personal finances when we go to the ballot box in 2012.

Column for Oct. 7, 2010

I am sure that there are a lot of you are like me in that you know of someone who has been out of work for some time now. I stand by my earlier assessment that the economy was not as bad as many people made it out to be. Unfortunately, just as with the Great Depression at the end of the 1920's, government intervention that was intended to help had just the opposite effect. But that is a different subject for a different column.

There are two people in my family who lost their jobs in the past couple of years. Both of them were long time employees of their respective employers. Both ended up being laid off and receiving unemployment benefits while they applied for new jobs. Neither has found new employment to this day. One finally reached the proper age for retirement, so he started drawing on his retirement savings. The other decided to just become a stay-at-home mom full time rather than re-enter the workforce.

Both of these people ended up being "overpaid" in their unemployment benefits. The elder of the two was the first one laid off and ended up paying back about a thousand dollars (as I recall) to the state. The younger of the two was amongst the 38,000 people who recently got nastygrams from the North Carolina Employment Security Commission saying that she owed the state.

As a matter of fact, this young lady received a total of four letters saying that she owed the state money. Three of those letters all arrived on the same day. You may have read, seen, or heard about this story in recent newspaper articles, on television, on the internet, or on the radio. I heard numerous stories about it. It was even national news.

Every one of the people that received nastygrams from the government allegedly received benefits above which they were entitled. The state knew that over payments were being made as far back as January but did nothing about it then. They waited until September to do something about it and put pressure on the poverty-stricken to repay money they did not have.

My family member was rather unhappy with the demand for money back since she, like tens of thousands of others in North Carolina, is still out of work. She received the alleged overage money through no fault of her own. She showed me the letters and they were as confusing to me as they were to her. She told me that every time her unemployment benefits were supposed to expire, she would get an extension of benefits letter. After getting these four letters saying that she owed the state money, she got yet another letter informing her of yet another extension of her unemployment benefits.

I am glad to say that Governor Beverly Perdue did the right thing by stepping in and making sure that the people who received any overage did not have to repay it. I am not much on government entitlements, but unemployment benefits are a bit different than welfare, WIC, food stamps, government housing, and other such programs. People pay into the system, as do employers for benefits during such cases of unemployment.

As I was told about the fun that my family members had in dealing with a state agency, I could only marvel at the gross inefficiency. The same state that knowingly overpaid unemployment benefits and failed to correct the problem is the same state government that tries to run our education system. The same state government that sent duplicate letters to 38,000 unemployed people is the same state that is ruthless in collecting back taxes from its citizens.

Look at this on a larger scale. If a state government can be so inefficient with unemployment benefits for 38,000 people, imagine how inefficient and wasteful the national government is with all of its giveaways and entitlement programs. I imagine that it is 50 times or more as bad as North Carolina.

When I think about government inefficiencies like this, I wonder why in the world we agree to depend upon them for retirement income programs, for running the mail service, for income for the elderly and infirm, and for medical care. Is the government that knowingly did not make correct payments to the unemployed then tried to demand the money back, the same government that you want taking decisions for your children's education or for your health care? Not me.