From Patriot to Sucker: Is the American Dream Dying Under the Weight of Government Waste and Widespread Fraud?

I grew up in a military family and lived on military bases most of my early life, five years of which were spent on Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.  Honestly, it was the most Americana place I’ve ever lived.  Think Mayberry surrounded by minefields.  Thankfully we didn’t often encounter the minefields, but we knew they were there. 

Fourth of July was always the biggest day of the year.  We had parades with tanks and marching bands and floats and classic convertibles with pretty girls waving from the back. The rest of the day would be filled with motocross races and boxing matches, track and field events and midway games and endless food. And everything was topped off with a concert and fireworks once the sun set. 

Never a great student, I went from one grade to the next holding on by my fingertips, except for history and social studies.  I was fascinated about history and loved reading about the Greeks and Romans and Egyptians, but mostly about America and WW II, which at that time had only been over for about 30 years. We of course studied the Constitution and what led to the Revolution, but we also read about slavery and the Trail of Tears and watched Roots. America was great, even if it was imperfect.

My joining the military after school was never a question. My parents never pushed me, but it was just what you did. And so after college I spent two years in the Army, stationed in what was then West Germany. One of the most interesting things I encountered while there was an old west town the local Germans had built. It looked like something straight out of Bonanza.  Inside each of the buildings was a wide collection of Americana, most of which was oddly anachronistic, like Mickey Mouse clocks and old pinball machines and lava lamps. The interesting thing was, these people loved everything American. Despite the war that was only a generation away, America was a place of dreams, a place of adventure, a place where anything was possible. 

That didn’t surprise me because my entire life I’d known that America was great.  It was imperfect, but I knew that it was fundamentally good, and that most Americans were fundamentally good.

After leaving the Army I went to grad school and earned my MBA and began my life as an entrepreneur, which I’ve done for the last 30 years.  In all honesty, I’m a terrible entrepreneur.  I’ve had some great ideas, but most came to naught. Aside from one minor success early on – a company teaching kids about investing and entrepreneurship, where I interviewed a young Elon Musk – every one of my entrepreneurial endeavors has been a bust.

But here’s the thing, I’ve always known that my life is better because of entrepreneurs and patriots who have come before me.  Our founding fathers gave us a constitution that created the foundation for the freest nation in human history, which in turn created unprecedented opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators to risk doing great things and then earn a reward for success.  For me, America was the land of opportunity, the place where anyone with a good idea and willing to put in the sweat and take some risks could find success. 

But sadly, I’ve started to question that… but not because of my own failings. Those I own. I was either in the wrong place at the wrong time or just didn’t do a good job selling my idea. No, it’s not my failures that have me questioning what America has become… It’s watching the millions and billions and trillions of dollars that get sent to grifters and thieves.    

I’m talking about the billions being funneled through fake or leftist NGOs that DOGE exposed.  I’m talking about the people who took PPP money during Covid and used it to live like rapper kings. I’m talking about the daycare fraud in Minnesota and the homeless grift in California and the home health fraud in Maine and elsewhere.  Not to mention the trillions wasted on countless green energy scams and the billions that go to support people who are here illegally. 

I’m talking about the people we see using EBT cards to buy lobster and steak while working people are living on Ramen noodles and hot dogs.  I’m talking about families who have been in Section 8 housing and on welfare for generations while working people are living like college students, sharing rooms and couch surfing among friends. I’m talking about colleges and companies dropping standards and accepting people not because of their hard work and merit, but because of a diversity thumb stuck on the scale.

The point of all of this is that over the last couple of years I’ve started to ask myself if I’m a sucker… and that maybe I have a lot of company.  I’ve worked hard my whole life and paid my taxes and aside from a college loan (non-forgiven) and a small PPP loan (forgiven) when Covid lockdowns hammered our business, I’ve never taken a penny from the government. Actually, my goal was always the opposite, to become sufficiently successful that I’d actually have to hire accountants to do my taxes.  And I wanted to do that by helping make other people’s lives easier or better.  That’s how fortunes have traditionally been made in America. Whether it was inventing the elevator or flash frozen food or selling Beanie Babies, you create a product or service that others are willing to voluntarily exchange their money for.  That’s America’s magic, a win-win exchange where everyone gets what they value most. 

But today I look around and I see companies laying off Americans while simultaneously bringing in millions of H1B visa workers.  I see grifting NGOs lining their pockets and using taxpayer dollars to keep Democrats in power – who then attack America at every turn.  I look at the fact that more than 50% of the money government spends is redistribution and half the country doesn’t pay income taxes.

And I wonder, why would anyone choose to follow the rules when it would be easier to simply run a scam or suckle at the government teat?  I understand that working hard and being honest is a part of one’s character, but at what point do conscientious people say “I’m done working my ass off just so everyone else can live like kings off my sweat”?

I love America and I always will, and I’m not giving up, but I have to wonder about the future. When someone like me who bleeds red, white & blue starts to question if it makes sense to do the right thing, I can’t imagine what the young people educated in the anti-American forges we call schools think.

From Athens and Rome to the Abbasid Caliphate and Song China, most of history’s greatest empires collapsed because they betrayed the very things that made them great in the first place.  For America that’s freedom and opportunity.  To the degree that grift, government corruption and “largesse” have replaced hard work, risk and merit as the primary avenues for “success” the Republic’s days are numbered. Sadly, I don’t see any signs in Washington that many of the people in charge of the system are much interested in fixing it.

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

Virginity, Failed Marriages and an Almost Perfect Government

How many people marry the first person they ever kiss or date or even have sex with? Not that many. The average age an American loses their virginity is 17 while the average age they get married is 27. Nonetheless, despite a decade in the dating pool, experiencing everything from one night stands to years of living with someone, when people finally take the plunge, half of all US marriages end up in divorce.

There are lots of things that one might take from that observation, but the thing that is most compelling is that despite their best efforts, people are not perfect. They make mistakes. After spending the first 10 years of their adult lives trying to get it right for what is arguably the most important decision of their lives, half the population still gets it wrong and asks for a “do over”. Despite all efforts to make a good decision, half the time we get it wrong. And that’s with everyone involved seeking a common goal!

So the question is: If American adults, with everyone involved seeking to do what’s best, get it wrong half the time, how does our government, with its myriad players promoting conflicting and even mutually exclusive positions, get things right almost all the time?

They don’t, but with the lack of “Do overs” we get with laws and regulations, you’d think they did.  In reality government fails at almost everything they try, but somehow they almost never step back and reevaluate.  Which makes what we’re watching with the debate around the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expires at the end of the year, so compelling.  Enacted in 2008, Section 702 allows the government to collect — without a warrant — emails, text messages and phone calls of foreigners overseas, even when they're talking to Americans.

Many in the GOP suggest it should not be reauthorized or should be neutered as they argue the Justice Department has used it as a fig leaf from behind which they could spy on Americans.  The GOP’s right, but that’s not the point.

Whatever the outcome, this is one of the few times in history that Congress – or anyone else for that matter – gets an opportunity to evaluate the efficacy of a piece of legislation and adjust accordingly.  That’s because most laws go on the books and never come off… regardless of how successful they actually are, or more likely, not.   

Take ethanol mandates… the poster child for zombie government programs that never die - regardless of the damage they do. Since the Carter administration the government has been diverting tax dollars to put ethanol into your gas tank. Initially it was intended to be a tool to help America become energy independent in the face of OPEC embargos, it then morphed into a tool to help increase gas mileage and later it became a critical element in fighting “climate change”. Now it doesn’t even do any of those dubious but theoretically positive, things. It’s simply become another failed government wealth transfer program.

Ethanol is an industry that enjoys no natural market. The only reason the ethanol market exists is because of government mandates. And who are the beneficiaries of this corporate welfare that is funded out of your pocket? You?  Of course not.  No, it’s mainly members of the farm / finance / producers cabal in the form of the Renewable Fuels Association. This ethanol boondoggle translated into a $41 billion industry in 2021 and is expected to grow to $124 billion by 2030, money that comes out of your pocket and could be spent elsewhere if it were not being, literally, set on fire.

The worst part of the entire ethanol fiasco is the fact that not only does it not achieve any of its stated – and oft changing – objectives; it actually causes a wide array of unintended consequences – none of which are good. Number one is the fact that it drives up the cost of one of the most important foodstuffs in the world, corn, the price for which has more than doubled over the last 20 years. That in turn drives up the price of virtually every other thing in the economy, from food to transportation to plastics. Then there’s the fact that ethanol damages engines and that the patchwork of ethanol standards across the country causes unnecessary price spikes and shortages. And if all of that weren’t enough, ethanol drives deforestation around the world and it starves third world populations and harms the environment too! 

But of course there are many other programs that simply fail, yet never go away.  At the top of the list are the many programs of the War on Poverty.  These various programs did nothing to solve the actual problem of poverty, but did generate more than $30 trillion of government spending over a half century and empowered an army of government bureaucrats while redistributing wealth to countless dysfunctional or fraudulent NGOs. 

Then there’s the plethora of other “green energy” programs besides ethanol that fail year in and year out but somehow the Department of Energy continues to fund them.  There’s Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education which has been an abysmal failure. Despite spending tens of billions of dollars annually, American student test scores have barely budged since the department was created in 1980, have been stagnant on the world stage for decades all while the  DOE focuses on resource guides for LGBTQI+ students. And we can’t forget the Border Patrol, which ostensibly exists to protect the nation’s borders but today functions more as a collection of crossing guards for the millions of illegals who walk into the country every year.

If there seems to be a theme here, there is.  The more government tries to do, the more it fails.  And not only fails, but usually makes matters worse. And here’s what makes the 702 debate so potentially intriguing, the potential for Congress to actually do its job, to evaluate how effectively the Executive Branch is spending the money it allocates, uses the power it gives them and at the end of the day, achieves the goals it lays out. 

A MAGA led Congress in 2025 should apply 702’s lessons and across the federal government.  They should propose a Constitutional Amendment that states that all federal laws have an implicit sunset provision of 10 years unless it passes each house of Congress by at least 60%. It would also stipulate that all federal regulations would sunset after 10 years, regardless of the margin of passage of the underlying law. The effect of this Amendment would be a greatly diminished the number of zombie like federal regulations that never die, regardless of their cost, efficacy or unintended consequences. Each sub 60% law would have to be re-authorized each decade.

The most obvious impact of this change would be that politicians and bureaucrats would no longer be able to spin yarns about milk and honey without any accountability. (Which is why this idea will likely never see the light of day…) At the time of reconsideration, each sub 60% bill (or every regulation) would have a decade’s worth of hard data to analyze, making it far more difficult to hoodwink the public with rosy scenarios that have no basis in reality. The beauty of this proposal is that it would force legislators and regulators to defend a law’s actual results rather than opine on its promised virtues. Given that most government programs cost more than projected, rarely work as promised, and often have significant unintended consequences, a decade should be a long enough time to inflict any law or regulation on the country and her citizens.

What might Albert Einstein think about Barack Obama's Green Energy Obsession...

As I’ve written before, I was a very uninformed young person for the first half of my life. I remember watching a movie in the Florida State student union about how Campbell’s Soup treated workers unfairly. I quickly decided to start my own boycott. Inexplicably, they somehow survived my boycott. I once went to the Tallahassee airport to try and meet Gary Hart before his presidential campaign imploded and I also sat on the stage when Jessie Jackson gave a speech during his 1984 race for the White House. As a Political Science undergraduate one of my professors, a self described Bolshevik, explained the great successes of the Soviet Union thus: Their economic and political system had to be superior to ours, otherwise how could they produce the weapon systems we were so scared of? Made sense to me… There were probably numerous other episodes but my brain has apparently, thankfully, forgotten most of them.

The reason I mention this is because we all did things during our college years that we might want to forget. Luckily for me, none of my nonsense was captured on video. Not so lucky for our President. The video of him encouraging a gathering of Harvard students to embrace the man and the message of the late leftist Dr. Derrick Bell has been making the rounds of the Internet. Although Democrats (and most of the media) suggest this is nothing more than a student showing support for the first black tenured professor at Harvard Law School, I’m fairly sure the President would just as soon not have to deal with the issue during an election campaign.

Luckily Americans recognize that by the time most of us reach middle age, the explorations, experimentations, the ill advised exhortations have been tempered by time and real world experience. Most of course does not mean all, and while one might be inclined to offer a pass to the President for what said in college two decades ago, the same cannot be said for his equally ill advised words two weeks ago.

Of course I’m not talking about Professor Bell. I’m talking about President Obama’s “Energy Speech” delivered last month. Aside from the fact that he makes a number of factual errors, the biggest problem is that the President doesn’t seem to learn from actual experience.

The President seems determined to run the United States off an economic cliff for the sake of his belief in the scam known as “Green Energy”. Not only has he wasted billions of taxpayer’s money on boondoggles like Solyndra, the very expensive and nonworking Fisker-Karma and the rapidly shrinking National Renewable Energy Lab, but more importantly he has added, literally, $243 billion a year to what Americans pay for gasoline. (130 billion gallons a year X $1.86 – the increase in the price of gas since Obama took office) That’s more than 10 times what Americans spend on the NFL, Hollywood movies and in Starbucks annually! Of course there are other unseen costs Americans must bear as businesses have to wrap their increased energy and transportation costs into everything they offer, be it canned tomatoes or package delivery, but those are too numerous to discuss here.

The problem is not a lack of accessible energy as the President suggests, rather the problem is his laser like focus on the illusion of economically viable “renewable” or “sustainable” energy to the explicit detriment of the demonstrably viable and abundant energy sources that fueled the 20th Century. More concerning is that he maintains that focus in the face of the repeated failures of virtually every aspect of the Green Energy hoax:

From subsidized windfarms that are now being subsidized further to stop operating to General Motors halting production of its heavily subsidized Volt because no one wants to buy it to the $50 light bulb that won the Department of Energy’s prize for a “green” but affordable light bulb. Add to that the fact that Green jobs are largely an expensive mirage and you have the makings of what must be a parody of a plan to actually revive the economy. Then when you think about the closing of actual, functioning plants across the country due to increased regulation, and the quixotic support for foreign fossil fuel exploration, it seems like more than just a parody, it’s like he’s mocking the American people.

But, no, really, his intentions are good… Well, even if they were, one must remember Einstein’s definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I don’t think the President is insane, which leads me to the conclusion that he’s doing the same thing over and over again expecting the same results. He believes so strongly that he is right about his green agenda that he simply refuses to believe that things will not turn his way eventually. He’s a modern day Walter Duranty, where billions of dollars are being wasted and millions of jobs are being destroyed yet somehow he doesn’t see it, or doesn't care. Like Duranty’s reporting of the economic miracle that was the USSR while Stalin used an iron fist to inflict bloodshed and starvation across the Ukraine and other areas of the Soviet Union, President Obama’s words increasingly ring hollow. More and more often when Americans hear “We can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices” or “We’re focused on (oil) production” or “The only real solution to helping families at the pump in the medium and long term is clean energy. That's how we'll save families money” they recognize they are being lied to in a way that seems almost impossible to believe coming from a President.

Perhaps the President thinks the government’s education industrial complex has eradicated the critical thinking or skepticism gene from the average American so that they will simply believe something because it’s delivered by a man with a smile and an air of confidence. As much damage as government schools do, I don’t think they’ve succeeded in that yet.

At the end of the day most Americans are willing to look past the defiant words of a college student looking to make his mark on the world. I think they are less likely however to accord the same deference for equally nonsensical words uttered by someone old enough to have learned that the world does not actually operate like the ivory towers of academia, where theories and speeches and a lack of real world consequences rule the day. As much of a headache his words at Harvard might be causing for the President, his more current words are causing a much bigger one for the American people. This will take more than aspirin to fix…