Business Background Not Needed to Fix National Problems

Good post and generally good comments. Definitive proof that CEO types aren't necessarily fit for service in the executive or legislative branches was given us by Ross Perot. His fall from grace was the result of impatience. Used to having his orders followed without question, he became irritable when the questions started homing in on how he'd respond to "herding cats" and his responses exposed the impatience. Very unpresidential.

Galupo's point about how the president could dave time by focusing on just four lines in the federal budget is well taken, too, but demand a bit of followup.

First, it's important to remember that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would be history if people were paid for hard, hard work at all times. The resultant higher rewards would eliminate the need for social safety nets except for cases where clear inability to work is involved. Making good money, all working people could do their own retirement funding, their own health insurance coverage, maybe their own disability insuring. We aren't even close to that now and are gradually shifting risk to those too underpaid to handle it adequately. In his book The Great Risk Shift, Jacob Hacker makes a compelling argument that with 90% of the personal wealth in this country in the hands of fewer than 10% of the people, we're headed back in time and to well-documented failed policies, not to mention socially irresponsible ones.

Having said that, I agree that everything should be on the table when it comes to finding ways to cut government spending.

Galupo mentions the Pentagon as a fourth possibility. He stopped too soon, and in indicating just the Pentagon when there's so much more to our national security "umbrella," he overlooks a major fact of federal spending. The U.S. spends more on the combination of national defense, homeland security, nation building, foreign aid designed to gain the cooperation of other countries, and veterans affairs than ALMOST the rest of the world combined. (It spends, for instance, more than the next 45 countries in the world combined on military alone.)

Whatever assumptions lie behind those figures need thorough, open-to-all-eyes investigation whenever cutting federal spending is the issue. The world's largest debtor nation AND by far biggest spender on the five combined? A good look at revamping our foreign policy is in order, I'd say, if only to see really why it is we're always at war and always a target of terrorists.

Ron W. Smith of UT 1:22PM June 10, 2010