Taking Care of Our Own First

We can’t take care of our own and we wonder why we pay higher taxes, go deeper in debt, continue to fund what we can’t afford, and have no money left to fund our own humanitarian problems.

The US government has an Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance (ERMA) account is funded at a ceiling of $100 million, set up to fund the initial 30-90 days of refugee resettlement in the United States.

The U.S. takes more than twice as many refugees as all countries from the rest of the industrialized world combined.

10,000 additional Syrian refugees would cost U.S. taxpayers $130 million per year. Over the next 50 years the costs for these additional refugees would add up to $6.5 billion for American taxpayers.

This $6.5 billion expense to provide these refugees with community services, health, education, welfare and retirement benefits would be in addition to to the almost $13.5 billion in foreign aid that U.S. taxpayers have already sent to the Middle Eastern nations to help with the Syrian civil war conflict.

Of the major refugee resettlement organizations in the US; many are run by former refugees.

Staff and management of the hundreds of taxpayer supported U.S. contractors are largely refugees or immigrants whose purpose is to gain entry for more refugees.

Refugee agencies refuse to use their own resources to maintain the U.S. refugee resettlement program. Public money has thoroughly driven out private money.

Welfare use is staggering among refugees and is never counted by officials as part of the cost of the program. Yet, when it is included, the total cost of the refugee program soars to at least 10-20 billion a year.

Refugees are not tested for many diseases, such as HIV. Refugees are a major contributing factor to TB rates among the foreign-born. TB among the foreign-born now accounts for about half of the TB in America.

The money the U.S. spends bringing one refugee to the U.S. could have helped 500 individuals overseas in countries where they currently reside.

In the U.S. 47% of loans made to refugees for transportation to the U.S. are unpaid leaving an unpaid balance of $450 million, and does not include interest or an unknown amount that has been written off.

Refugee resettlement is profitable to the organizations involved in it. They receive money from the federal government for each refugee they bring over. They have almost no real responsibilities for these refugees. After 4 months the “sponsoring” organization is not even required to know where the refugee lives.

A refugee legally resides in the country of resettlement and is eligible for federally funded cash assistance for up to 8 months.

Refugees arriving in the United States will receive $900 when they first arrive.

Refugees who are able to quickly enter the job market can elect to participate in the Match program, a federal program for refugees geared towards employment and self-sufficiency. The Match program provides families with money for rent and basic living expenses for three months. Adults are provided $325 each/month for the three month program, and children are provided $200 each/month for the three months.

The refugee program has a significant impact on U.S. foreign policy. It also affects internal and foreign policies of other nations by allowing them to rid themselves of unwanted minorities or close their borders to asylum seekers in the knowledge that the U.S. will take them in.

More than 500,000 people . . . a quarter of them children, were homeless in the United States this year. Approximately 15.3 million children are starving in US households.

As of 2012, 1,151,890 people live in food-insecure households in New Jersey alone

.In 2014, 77 percent of food-insecure households in New Jersey reported having to choose between paying for food, paying for utilities or heating fuel.

The state of New Jersey had the biggest increase in the number of residents participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—up 19 percent since June 2010.

The homeless during 2013, according to the Corporation for Supportive Housing. estimated a total of 25,612 people to be homeless in New Jersey.

New Jersey’s homeless population increased 16 percent in 2014.

Let’s take care of them first before we worry about taking care of someone else.http://savejersey.com/2015/11/syria-refugee-new-jersey/

The History of New Jersey’s Transportation (Mis)trust Fund

Did you know that New Jersey has $900 million a year going to pay off interest and principal on bonds issued years ago? The issuance of new bonds, not tax revenue, is funding the Trust Fund’s contribution to the Transportation Capital Plan.
Every year, the Transportation Trust Fund spends almost three times as much as it raises in taxes. Every time that the Trust Fund borrows $1.6 billion, it commits to paying $100 million a year for 30 years in debt payments (assuming a 5% interest rate).

Since 2005, the Trust Fund’s annual debt payments have escalated by over 56%, from $623 million to $845 million.
Did you know that starting around the middle of 2011, the entire $895 million that taxpayers contributed to the Trust Fund every year to pay for transportation projects will instead go to pay off the debt on previously issued bonds?
The Transportation Trust Fund was created by the Legislature in 1984. Its primary financing mechanism was designed to be a pay-as-you-go system. It was also supposed to prohibit the use of Trust Fund money for routine operations and maintenance.
Over the last 25 years, the focus of the Trust Fund as a funding mechanism for the DOT shifted from primarily pay-as-you-go financing to a heavy reliance at first with short-term 10-year bonds, graduating to 20-year long-term bonds, and then escalating to 30-year.
Trust Fund monies originally intended to support capital improvements have been used, instead, to fund maintenance costs once considered part of the operating budget paid for out of the state’s general fund.
In fact, the Trust Fund’s overall annual spending in Capital Program contributions and debt service payments have grown more than twice as quickly as the tax and fee revenues dedicated to the Trust Fund. The bonds issued to cover the gaps commit the Trust Fund to higher annual debt payments, further increasing the Trust Fund’s expenses.

Existing tax revenue to the Trust Fund is enough to cover only debt service payments; any new capital program costs must be met with new sources of revenue.
But if new taxes are only going to fund the refinancing and payments towards borrowed interest of the Trust Fund’s existing debt, I find that totally unacceptable.
Our legislature caused its own problems through mismanagement, the diversion of funds for unintended use and, ironically, by not following their own guidelines. Maybe the revenue generated from Red Light camera fiasco should go towards funding the Trust Fund dilemma?
Increasing the New Jersey gas tax will add about .45 per gallon of fuel. Why should New Jersey drivers compensate for the incompetence of our legislature? There is no guarantee that after leaving 1,000 miles of bad road behind us, we will only find ourselves right back on the same wrong-way highway in the not too distant future.

 

The Contradiction-in-Chief

President Obama is now back tracking saying you can keep your health plan. Well that’s nice, but just how do you do that after you received your cancellation notice?

Echoing his friend Frank “Monkey Court” Pallone‘s talking points, Obama also says most people won’t want to, anyway, and that anyone who’s had an individual policy canceled to look at what’s available at HealthCare.gov before they look to reinstate their old policy.

This guy is a walking book of contradictions!

Roughly 85% of Americans have insurance. Out of a population of approximately 317 million, about 11 million people have policies on the individual market.

Out of that 11 million, at least 4.2 million Americans have been sent cancellation notices by their insurers. People who were kicked off of a plan they liked and could afford are now facing higher premiums and deductibles.


Insurance companies and commissioners across the country now face the daunting task of deciding how they are going to handle already-cancelled health-care policies under the President’s new administrative ‘fix’ for the Affordable Care Act.

By reinstating cancelled policies, these insurance companies will need to issue coverage that doesn’t meet Affordable Care Act standards.

And it’s not so easy for an insurance company to reinstate a policy; insurance companies need to plan premiums and budget for expenses far in advance of issuing a policy.

Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the new law could destabilize the market and result in even higher premiums for consumers. Our central plannes overlook the fact that premiums have already been set for next year based on an assumption that consumers will be transitioning to the new marketplace.

Each state has  regulations of its own with which a plan needs to comply before it can be offered, including New Jersey. Many of those canceled plans no longer meet state regulations; even ones that do comply would need to be approved by the responsible state agency and with less than two months to go in the calendar year, it won’t happen.

It’s almost the New Year and a quick fix for this mess won’t be that swift. The insurance companies better have all hands on deck to prepare for this administration’s 2014 mid-term, because if this so-called temporary fix doesn’t work, God knows what our walking, talking, Contradiction-in-Chief will try next to save his congressional allies’ skins.

The Unemployed States of America

President Barack Obama has achieved the dubious distinction of being a sitting president with the highest unemployment rate ever,

We take him at his word that he loves the poor (we know this because he has created so many of them).

Humor aside, the only things booming in this country under Obamanomics are poverty and health insurance premium rates.

The history behind this sad pass is pretty clear…


Save Jersey has tracked the building unemployment and underemployment disaster for years now. We’ve never seen anything like it in U.S. History.

President Ronald Reagan suffered a severe recession starting in 1981, but all the job losses of that recession were recovered after 28 months. Reagan’s recovery was fueled by traditional pro-growth policies.

Under Obama, by April, 2013, a full 64 months after the prior jobs peak or almost 5½ years later, we still had not recovered all of the recession’s job losses.

By contrast, during the Reagan recovery, 64 months after the recession started, the raw number of jobs grew to a level 9.5% higher than where it stood before the recession started representing an increase of about 10 million more jobs.

In April, 2013, jobs in the Obama recovery were still about 2% below where they were when the recession started, about 2 ½ million less, or a shortfall of about 10 million jobs.

Even former president Jimmy Carter produced 4 times as much economic growth during his one term as Obama did during his entire first term . . . yikes! It’s pretty bad when a peanut farmer from Georgia is “happier than a pig on an acorn” having been surpassed for the title of worst president in our lifetime. But that’s where we’re at today, folks.

Legislative “Shared Sacrifice”

Each member of Congress “earns” 3.4 times more than the average American worker.

Congress also receives the equivalent of $14,000 in paid time off… assuming they only take half of the time off as the average federal employee. Taxpayers contribute about $6,000 to each Member of Congress’s health and life insurance and another $9,000 to the employer’s share of Social Security and Medicare taxes.

How much work did they do for it? Congress was in session just 126 days this year. They worked just two days in the month of August.

Congressional members average $3,346 per week, and their compensation including benefits totals around $285,000 per year. Unlike state and local government employees, who generally must contribute around 6 percent of their pay to defined benefit pensions, Members of Congress contribute only 1.3 percent of their salaries.

Members of Congress receive contributions toward retirement benefits equal to around 47 percent of their annual salaries, or about $82,000.

The number of laws passed by Congress last year was fewer than at any point since 1947.

Again, the current 2013 Congressional calendar consists of only 126 days. This left members of Congress with 239 “vacation days” to… perhaps… tour our great nation? Or mull over the idea of running for even higher office, or maybe visit a natural disaster or two to get some camera time. We know they weren’t visiting national parks because they closed them down.

Politicians like to say we should increase the retirement age to 70, as people are living longer.
If they actually worked, they might realize 66 is sufficient for most of the work force, as our legislative body works on average 2.3 days per week.

The “average” federal employee salary is $78,500. The median household income for most in the United States today is $50,875.

Federal workers receive health insurance, retirement health benefits, a pension plan with inflation protection, and a retirement savings plan with a government match. They typically receive generous holiday and vacation schedules, flexible work hours, training options, incentive awards, generous disability benefits, and union protections.

Taxpayers could save $39 million a year if members of Congress decreased their salary to $100,000 per year (still nearly twice as large as the average American worker’s salary of $50,875).

Our legislative leaders say they feel our pain; so exactly what is this “shared sacrifice” the people keep hearing about?

Elections Need to Matter Before the #Shutdown

It is a shame that we the people of the United States of America, the greatest country in the world, has legislators on both sides of the aisle (and let’s not forget about our president, too) who seem unable to reach an agreement and find a way to ease the pain that many Americans are feeling due to these antics.
They’ll continue to feel them for many months and possibly years to come.
While our government shuts down, federal legislators will continue to collect a substantial salary along with their many perks, millions of Americans are out of work and lacking benefits. Many folks who are still trying to recover from the recession or a natural disaster will now have to suffer even longer as government assistance remains hold.

This is not a game of cards where one can bluff and see who has the better hand with no regard to the repercussions that will be inflicted upon the American public. The lives of individuals and families are something the government seems to want to gamble with in order to prove who holds the winning hand between them.
Our economy was recovering, however anemically, even with the lower paying jobs that were being created. The housing market seemed like it was stabilizing, too, but these gains may all disappear and we may find ourselves back in another hole. The dollar becomes weaker every day the federal government is closed, the yen and euro become stronger, and the markets drop faster than a rock without a parachute. If we lose our current credit rating, the dollar will be worth nothing and it will take years to recover… if at all.
Congress is hardly the only problem. We have a president who is already planning a trip to Asia, probably bringing his kin along for the taxpayer-financed ride, all at an astronomical cost while our military is looking for food as the commissaries are empty, having to go elsewhere and paying upwards of 30% or more to feed their families on or off base.
It seems the priorities of our elected officials are their egos, something that they view as more important than the constituents whom they’re supposed to represent. It is a shame that as much as the American people are getting a bad hand in this shutdown poker game, they will nevertheless elect the same bunch of bureaucrats that engendered this predicament.
Unless we, as voters, clean house to show the world how tired we’ve become of the two major parties’ antics, the games will continue and we will continue on a course destined to negatively redefine our futures and, in the process, permanently changing the face of America.

The Sequester’s True Cost

“Instead of reducing our deficits with a scalpel to get rid of programs we don’t need but keep vital investments that we do – you know, this same group has kept in place this meat cleaver called the sequester that is just slashing all kinds of important investments in education and research and our military.”  ~  President Barack Obama blaming Republican’s for the sequester

When the sequester began, our President flew to 32 destinations aboard Air Force One, and only seven of the 32 destinations were directly related to politics.

It’s a pattern worth revising as politicians debate a government shutdown.

The flight from Andrews Air Force Base to Chattanooga, TN and back cost taxpayers $449,375 just so Obama could give a speech blaming the Republicans for it.

A flight Obama took on March 15th to give a speech on energy policy and again on May 29th for a Democratic party fundraiser cost $254,526 for a one way, one hour and twenty-five minute-long. A two-hour flight from Andrews Air Force Base to Miami on March 29th to give a speech on the topic of infrastructure was $359,500.

The government shutdown and the amount of money saved by canceling public tours of the White House was less than the cost of one of Obama’s vacations.

The Obama administration blamed the halting of the White House tours on the spending reductions mandated by sequestration and saved about $74,000 per week or close to $2 million over the year.

What you haven’t likely heard is the fact that those savings were roughly half the cost of Obama’s Christmas vacation to Hawaii last year. Documented by the ‘Hawaii Reporter,’ it was estimated the total cost of that trip was “at least $4 million,” the true cost could be nearly five times that. It does not include the cost of flying advance teams out to Hawaii and the separate Michelle flights she took in 2010 and 2011, with Obama catching up later. Estimates of the total cost for the four Hawaii vacations the Obama’s have taken during Christmastime 2009-2012 cost taxpayers in excess of $20 million.

Obama had returned from Hawaii to complete a deal on the Fiscal Cliff and then jetted back to Honolulu, adding an additional $3.24 million to the tab, bringing the cost of the 2012-1013 vacation to well over $7 million.

In 2011, Obama spent eleven days at a $50,000-per-week beachfront rental property with the cost of that trip to taxpayers reaching into the “millions.”

Obama’s golf outing with Tiger Woods cost the taxpayers “over a million dollars,” enough money to save 341 federal workers from a furlough.

The sequestration forced the Secret Service to cut $84 million from its budget.

The Obama’s African tour was estimated to have cost $100 million . . . $100 million that would fund 1,351 weeks or 26 years of White House tours.

During the months of the sequester, Obama took 10 flights aboard Air Force One during June, the most of any month. He took four trips in the months of March, April and August and five trips in the months of May and July. Travel that included trips through the Middle East, Central America, Europe and Africa.

A study by the National Taxpayers Union concluded “[w]ith four trips abroad over 18 days through the first six months of 2013, Obama is on pace to set the record for the most travel in a fifth year in office, if that precedent continues, he will be among the most-traveled U.S. chief executives in history by the time he leaves office.”

Millions of hardworking Americans are looking for jobs, struggling to pay their mortgages and make ends meet, all while Obama claims to care about the middle class as they continue to foot the bill.