How did we get into this economic mess? We are a wealthy country with access to the best minds on the planet. If we wanted to we could employ economists, geniuses, and a sundry other mental giants to solve this and every foreseeable crisis we will ever have, and yet here we are mired in a serious problem with only bad and slightly less bad solutions.
How did this happen?
I will tell you how this happened. Let's look at a company; let's call it Corporate Entity Number One. CENO has had ten excellent years. It has attracted top executives and pays them exceedingly well. Management is well-versed in the corporate mission, pursues the corporate strategy diligently and provides executives with timely and relevant information. Colleges routinely send CENO their best graduates and those graduates compete fiercely for entry-level positions. Rank and file are filled with educated and dependable employees. But this year, sales are down, profits are down, and trend analysis shows a slowing demand for product. CENO tinkers with a few new and improved products, but sales decline even further. CENO does not want that slow decline to obscurity so it needs to take more drastic, riskier steps. And to do that, it needs an influx of cash. It borrows a ton of cash and expands in a new direction. Months later, the writing is on the wall. Profits are still down, and new business extension isn't performing as well as expected, and the Board, investors, and suppliers are beginning to lose faith.
So, it fires a thousand non-essential employees, gets the Board to approve bonuses to the CEO and other key executives so that they will stay through these trying times, and hires a new marketing firm. Non-essential people are employees who don't make money for the company, rather they cost the company: secretaries, facilites, maintenance, IT, customer service representatives, retail clerks, etc.
Now. Let's look at America. Can you see the parallels?
GDP is down, we borrow too much money, and what is the awesome solution? Yep, fire a bunch of non-essential federal and state employees (teachers, firemen, police, transportation, etc, all all the people who cost government money) and give CEOs and other money makers obscene bonuses, and try and sell this load of bullshit with endless infuriating "messaging."
This is what happens when business people infest government. Their only goal, their only measure of worth is profit. They don't govern. They don't have any interest in community or long-term social goals. They don't understand that education is vital for the health and well-being of a nation. They don't see the value in tolerance, in compromise, in a broad range of investments in projects that may or may not make money.
Business is the worst thing that ever happened to government. If we didn't have business people or people who only understand capitalism infecting government, we would have done everything so much differently.
We would have plowed money back into the economy. Instead of bailing out banks by giving them loans, we would have used that money to help homeowners so they would keep their homes and their credit ratings, making the money flow upward, instead of downward in an ever diminishing amount.
One day we will have to realize that capitalism and the language of business has rotted our minds. We should not be thinking in terms of business but in terms of community. Not in terms of profit, but in what we owe each other. Leave business to business; it can take care of itself. Just like we have to take care of ourselves, and we have to do that by making business pay its fair share, follow our rules, and keep its grubby claws out of our Houses and our Senate.
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