Tuesday, October 27, 2009

When an overall view is needed

If the United States were a small business, and if its budget were broken into different sub-categories for each one of the business divisions, at any one time, its CEO would look at the performance of each division, its interaction with the whole and its performance for the good of the company. In a successful business, all these “moving parts” would be honestly examined in terms of their respective short term and long term contributions as well as prospects.

The infrastructure, namely the equivalent of our entitlements, say social security and medicare, would be priority number two because they're so big and as they likely to grow the most in the foreseeable future; as a result, their move should be constantly anticipated and addressed. The economy of course should always be seen as the vital sales budget that decides what, if anything, can be spent or invested, so it would get all the attention it deserves before anything else. If wars could be compared to safety systems and procedures, they would have to make sense in order to command top priority and high expenditures, but would never become black holes in which resources are thrown into just because we blindly believe what some generals want as they're prompted by the likes of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin.

The financial community should be the backbone of our budgetary issues, nothing more, nothing less, and should be well reined-in to avoid to turn into the recent era of laissez-faire and its subsequent recent collapse. Bottom line, good governance should be like managing a business. When one looks at congress or even the White House, we are still light years away from that ideal situation...

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