Living Within One’s Means

How long can you survive borrowing from the future?  The founders of this country knew of the dangers of debt and the servitude and the shackles for which we hobble the future.

A farmer fully understands, that if he sells all his seeds he has nothing to plant the next year.

(For those of you who know that currently there are provisions in the contract with seed company’s that restrict the use of reseeding from existing crops, sorry for the example, but the metaphor is: you can’t borrow from the future without consequences.)

Maybe a better analogy is going to the gas station, if you only have $20 and fill the tank, you’d be indebted $60. You better have a great relationship with the gas station.

We desperately need a dose of common sense for decision-making. I remember the summary of Obama’s Obama Care Program.  We will add 30 million people to the healthcare umbrella and it won’t cost anyone any more.

The logic does not work and the politicians can’t explain it.

Politicians are in the business of staying elected. Term limits gives us the opportunity to see fresh faces and maybe the end of the elected officials career path.

We need the people we elect to have experience at running something were we do not provide on-the-job-training.

If you want to be a leader, prove you are worthy. Get a job, create value, create jobs, learn leadership, be in a position to give back. The job of the public official should be to provide the leadership and experience.

How can a job in the public sector, with job security, standardized pay raises based on longevity, not performance measures receive higher pay than a comparable job in the private sector. This is crazy.

We are creating life jobs that only do one thing; reduce the “unemployment figures” while increasing the cost to the taxpayer.

What does the government produce? More regulation, more bureaucracy, more Administrative agencies.

Let’s go back to the founding documents to determine what the government is supposed to do:

If there is a problem to be remedied, how about an committee to determine the solution, who’s purpose is to set forth a framework for accomplishing the solution, then the committee disbands. The solution if need be, establishes an administrative body; created to solve the problem.

Built into the administrative body is a series of milestones to determine the state of progress and once the task is complete the administrative body disbands.

Before, I close this missive, I do not intend to dismiss the value of our military, our court system, our police or firefighters, our teachers and the support staff necessary to maintain our country as a country ruled by law.

The role of government is clearly mapped our in our constitution, the expansion of which undermines the very beauty of the United States.

Our Country’s Obsession

We are in trouble when the head of state brags about killing someone. This is no longer a political issue.

Killing Osama Ben Laden, has been an obsession of our government since September 11, 2001. I have no issue with this obsession; our country has been violated, fundamentally and profoundly. Our government has take this violation and converted it to a security obsession that has no boundaries, crossing the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, personal dignity and geopolitical sovereignty.

Osama Ben Laden is dead. No politician should or can take credit for this act.  The US Military has done their job, eliminated a threat. Can we move on?

From a political standpoint, having a threat serves a useful purpose, it focuses our collective attention to an outside problem, away from the domestic issues that are affecting all Americans. Issue’s like unemployment, run away cost of health care, low or no-growth in our economy, galloping governmental mismanagement of the economy and the acceptance of high risk decision making with little concern about the ramifications of failure.

The way our government deals with a problem is rather simple:

  1. We identify some symptom that we don’t like
  2. We create some regulation
  3. Set up a institution to remedy the “problem”
  4. Never look back

Funding is set, and overtime the institution grows and takes a life of its own.

This is not what the United States is about. Our government officials both elected and appointed have it all wrong. The government is obsessed with looking like it is doing something to justify it existence. Rather than ask the question over and over again, “Is what we are doing working” and “have we achieved the objective?” The government tries to look like is doing something and justifies its actions without an objective criteria for success.

For this reason, we have created some seriously flawed institutions.