The war on drugs, poverty, education, illegal aliens, terrorism.
Every problem the government throws money at gets worse with every dollar thrown.
Look at drugs. It used to be a fringe thing, now it's a real problem. The War on Drugs and the laws against them aren't even based on any scientific assessment of the relative risks of these drugs, but rather, it has everything to do with who is associated with these drugs.
The first anti-opium laws in the 1870s were directed at Chinese immigrants because they were the only ones using it in any real numbers. The first anti-cocaine laws, in the South in the early 1900s, were directed at black men for the same reason. The first anti-marijuana laws, in the Midwest and the Southwest in the 1910s and 20s, were directed at Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans. Then the 60s happened and Nixon freaked out, thanks in large part to a generation gap and being out of touch. He introduced the War on Drugs in 1971 and greatly increased the size and presence of drug enforcement agencies. Carter pulled things back a bit, but Reagan doubled down and expanded the fight against drugs. Nancy's "Just Say No" campaign had the exact opposite effect, which shouldn't be surprising. In 1970 there were a little under 8,000 people in the entire nation behind bars for nonviolent drug offenses. In 1980 it ballooned to a startling 50,000 people. In 1983 Los Angeles Police Chief Darrel "casual drug users should be taken out and shot" Gates founded the D.A.R.E. program, and by 1997 that 50,000 people ballooned once again and became more than 400,000 people.
Between 1975 and 2012 American spent more than $1 trillion fighting the drug war. Obama's 2013 budget contains $25.6 billion in federal spending to fight drugs, and when you combine that with state and local spending, it becomes $51 billion.
So, have all these millions and millions spent over the last 15 or so years had an impact on the War on Drugs? Why, yes, yes it has!
The US now has the world's largest incarceration rate, with 48% of the nation's 2.2 million prisoners, more than 1 million of them, serving time for non-violent drug offenses, up from that paltry 400,000.
It used to be that Americans were at the top of the list in education, academics, intelligence and innovation. But the disparity between the education of rich and middle class kids compared to poor kids kept Lyndon Johnson awake at night, despite the fact that throughout the entire history of history poor kids have always been less educated than those more well off. But he was determined to fix that, dammit. Thus came the double-barreled fight for the War on Poverty and the War on Education. Instead of raising the standard of living and quality of education of poor people, it has lowered the standard of living for the middle class and lowered the quality of education for an entire nation. Instead of at the top of the lists, we're now in the middle or near the bottom of most of them. We now have record numbers of stupid, uneducated people, living in record numbers of poverty.
Since the 70s we've spending gazillions of dollars to secure the borders and eliminate illegal aliens, despite the fact that illegals weren't even a problem in the 60s until Senator Ted Kennedy (and Cellar and Hart) passed legislation that abolished the National Origin Formula for immigration numbers, because he (and they) felt it was too discriminatory. Since the 70s, the more we've spent on illegal immigration the worse the problem has become.
The War on Terrorism has in less than 15 years gone from fighting a really small handful of Islamic extremists (a few hundred at best estimations) to the more than 30,000 official members of ISIS plus the hundred thousand or more of a new generation of Muslims that want to kills us.
I won't even mention the militarization of the civilian police force to fight drugs, un-mowed back yards, and past-due tax collections. Nor will I mention the gun control laws to fight crime that have resulted in more crime and more guns.
The people in charge of all these things are the same people now in charge of your healthcare, to ensure that people get the healthcare they deserve and at an affordable price. Uhm, OK.
