Too Big to Handle

I’ve written before about the morality of government welfare as a first resort.  Here’s a practical reason for cutting back: it’s too big to manage effectively.  Here are some failures from that too big to handle:

A postal worker who ran marathons found her race times improved after she began drawing federal disability checks for an alleged back injury.

Another disabled federal employee went scuba diving, skied in Switzerland and did flips on a trapeze.  She spent part of her $193,000 in disability payments on a boat named “Free Ride” before she was caught.

A Justice Department lawyer collected $90,000 in annual disability checks after claiming the stress of his job kept him off the job.  Apparently the cable TV show he began hosting while drawing disability pay wasn’t so stressful.

And

15,000 recipients are 66 or older.  Six of them are over the age of 100—well past retirement age.

The Federal government compounds this by being disinterested in controlling the failures and the resulting waste of taxpayer wealth being redistributed.

funding for all agencies—about $3 billion per year—is automatically appropriated and run through the Department of Labor.

And

the federal [disability] program does not require employing agencies to order a second opinion. The claimant can pick his own doctor.

If his claim is rejected, he can file for a different disability, as often as he likes.

And

The Department of Labor, which administers FECA for 70 federal entities, doesn’t track fraud referrals and convictions[.]

The program is too large to be properly controlled, and it needs drastic paring back for economic and legal reasons as well as moral.

A Thought on Disparate Impact

There is another disparate impact case wending its way to the Supreme Court; hopefully, this one actually will be argued, and the Court will come to a right decision.  The case is Township of Mount Holly v Mount Holly Gardens Citizens, and it concerns Mount Holly, NJ’s, plan to

redevelop a housing project afflicted with crime, overcrowding and property code violations.

Naturally, some of the affected renters sued, and importantly here, they’re claiming no intent to discriminate on the part of the township or the redevelopers.  They’re just saying that, because most of the folks impacted are minority, there must be racism in there somewhere.

No racism actually is present, so we’ll make some up.  Because the redevelopment will inconvenience us.

But that’s the purpose of disparate impact, generally.

Racism of the Federal Government

Here’s another example of the WilsonianObaman government’s racism.

The EEOC is haling Dollar General and a US unit of BMW into court, charging them with racism for the heinous practice—seriously—of using background checks to screen those convicted of

Murder, Assault & Battery, Rape, Child Abuse, Spousal Abuse (Domestic Violence), Manufacturing of Drugs, Distribution of Drugs, [and] Weapons Violations

from job applications.

Just to add racism to the EEOC’s racism, in the BMW case, there’s this: 70 black and 18 non-black contractors had criminal convictions, and the company declined to hire any of them.  The EEOC is only suing over the blacks’ non-hiring.  The non-blacks can go hang.

Indeed, the President Barack Obama’s EEOC has proudly codified its racism.  It said just last April that

an employer’s evidence of a racially balanced workforce will not be enough to disprove disparate impact.

Don’t worry about the inherently racist nature of disparate impact.  Such a worry would be racist.

Laughingstock

That’s putting it mildly.  “Futile” also applies.  I’ve written earlier how President Barack Obama reduced himself to a laughingstock and is reducing the United States as a whole to a laughingstock.

Now those in Syria who’ve been begging us for help speak derisively about us as a result of Obama’s…behavior.  On the heels of Obama’s belated acknowledgment that his bright red bunting strewn upon the beach sands had been stepped on and over; followed by his decision to send small arms to Syrian rebels (which all of Arabia already is providing them) with which to fight al Assad’s helicopter, artillery, and tank assaults (supported by Hezbollah fighters and Iranian soldiers); coupled with Obama’s continued refusal to send the rebels the weapons with which to defeat those helicopters and, artillery tubes, and tanks; and his continued refusal to suppress al Assad’s air force in any way, the rebel beneficiaries of the Obama Munificence had this to say:

It’s all talk.  Until we see weapons in our hands here in Syria, they are just words floating in the air.

Obama’s team is cited at the WSJ link just above in this way:

While US officials acknowledge that Hezbollah and regime forces are closing in on Aleppo, they believe there is time to train rebels and improve their defenses—with or without a no-fly zone, officials say—underscoring their belief the conflict is nowhere near a conclusion.

Umm, maybe not.  This isn’t the mid-19th century, when a two week holdout at the Alamo was enough for Sam Houston to train his forces to effectively resist Santa Ana.  More importantly, whose fault is it that the conflict “is nowhere near a conclusion?”  It’s not the rebels’.

And those…officials…had this:

US officials question whether US and European arms alone will make a decisive difference in a country already awash in weapons.

What a breathtaking, willful ignorance.  Of what use to these persons think small arms—rifles and pistols, and the occasional light machine gun—are against helicopters, artillery, and tanks?

And where is Obama anyway on this seeming change of position concerning chemical attacks and arming the rebels?  Why is he sending out low-level functionaries to tell us, in vague terms, about this?

Of what is Obama so terrified that he can’t talk to us—in detail—personally?