Playing Catch Up

Wow...it never ceases to amaze me how much time can go by, and how many times I can think "I really need to write about that" and never do....So much has happened. Laying wreaths at Arlington in December. Christmas vacation, skiiing again and putting on wayyyy too much weight. Recovering from vacation, travel to Hawaii on business (not a bad gig if you can get it!) and battling the mother of all flu bugs. Not to mention the "our country will cease to exist unless we spend $44M to renovate the Department of Agriculture building" (courtesy of Glennbeck.com) mechanations in progress.
I was listening to a local radio show this morning in the shower - Star 98.7 (local FM) the "T-Bone and Heather" show. Nice folks, somewhat entertaining, AMAZINGLY uninformed and ignorant. Their primary rant on the "stimulus" was that all this money would disappear into another "military" $400 hammer type program. Then they went on a typical rant about "throw the bums out" term limits. It occurred to me that most people have NO concept about how government budgets work with the congress. The pork and corruption are inherent in the system. A quick primer:
A. Term limits / Elected Officials and why the "bums" we need to throw out aren't the problem - The current stimulus package is over 800 pages. Given that there are 435 representatives in the congress, and that this bill started in the house, that means each congressman typed up personally about 1 1/2 pages and submitted them, right? Yeah, sure. I would bet a paycheck that the last time ANY and I mean ANY legislator in congress ACTUALLY penned legislation him/herself, it was on an Underwood typewriter (http://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-history.html) in the early 1900's..... Suppose if you will, you decided to run for congress on a homegrown campaign. Your wife was your Public Affairs / Secretary, brother did logistics and planning, Dad was your security, Mom was your treasurer, and sister handled speech writing / policy research. Suppose your little tiny operation got you elected. When you walked into the door of your office at the Rayburn building in DC, you would be introduced to a professional staff, and they would have all of your party's resources / connections / etc to help coordinate your "opinions" with the party, your constituency, and the state party apparatus......in other words we elect figureheads and puppets that direct, manage, and try to wrangle the steer that they are riding into a coordinated direction, but that will never be broken to follow the will of the elected official...(maybe in Ted Kennedy's position, or Harry Reid - those dinosaurs that have been there forever...) Which leads me to my second point
B. Spending bills and government funding. In my current position, I manage the execution of more money than I could make in a lifetime. If I directed that some of that were spent improperly, I could go to jail. For example, I get X dollars from organization 1 to do a project that costs X plus $1Million. I get Y dollars from organization 2 to do a project that costs Y - $1Million dollars. In one project, I am a million short, in another I am a million rich. If I took the surplus from project 2 and spent it on project 1, I would be guilty of misappropriation and could go to jail. That having been said, every government entity (military and non-military) has a budget of projects that are funded, and a list of "unfundeds" - those things that they would like to do, but can't afford (say for example, renovation of the Department of Agriculture building). On a regular basis, there are calls for "unfunded lists" by each department - defense, agriculture, HHS, etc. which get sent to.....(drumroll).....congress! The professional staffers (those people that greeted you as your mom and pop election committee walked into your new office) maintain these lists - especially highlighted on their list are all the unfunded projects that are in your home state or home district. Sooooooo, when the call goes out to "stimulate" the economy, the professional staffers regurgitate their list of spending, and it gets conglomerated into one bill that has ABSOLUTELY FREAKING NOTHING WHATSOEVER IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM to do with stimulating the economy - it is merely a list of what your friendly governement wanted to spend money on, but couldn't justify it by any other means.

Here is a silly little idea...there is what 304 Million men, women and children in the US today? How about they write a one-paragraph "stimulus" bill that takes whatever random number they decide upon...say $900 BILLION as a stimulus and divide it equally....that means every man, woman and child would get a government check for $2960.53. That means our little family of four would net almost $12K. Hmmm....lets see, off the top of my head, that would pay off the loan we have on our Suburban. That would put us in a position where we could use the ASSET value of the car as a trade in and get a new (or better yet slightly used) one for a cheaper monthly payment. Retiring that debt would put more money in Navy Federal's coffers, allowing them to give us (and/or someone else) a new loan, breaking free some of the capital crunch, and based upon the practically world-wide education on the evils of debt and credit cards we are all now gaining would dramatically increase on hand savings and the savings rate in this country. Greater balances in savings accounts means more capital, right? That would help liquidate the bad debt, let the market work out the write off of toxic debt and market correction would be complete.

Funny thing too - a recent CBO report (http://www.cbo.gov/ - compare the comments on the current director's blog for HR 1 to those in the "budget projections" link) shows that if we did NOTHING, we would be better off in 2019 debt wise than if we passed this "Stimulus" package.

But then again, what the hell do I know? I am just a lowly manager that can't begin to understand the complexities of budgets, funding, and government execution....at least that is what they would have us ALL want to believe.