Business budget

If business experts were called in to revamp a company, they would use a standard three step approach. First they would collect data. Second they would arrange the data in categories of importance and third they would apply solutions to these categories. If the same methods were followed with our failing US Government, we could solve our problems. First we would collect data, most of which is already available. Second we would quickly see that the major problems are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Third we would concentrate on those areas. Instead what we are doing is looking at minor adjustments to minor areas of the budget. President Obama’s 2012 budget has cuts in 211 programs totaling 33 billion dollars. His budget is 3,730 billion. He ignores the 808 billion in social security, and the 1,111 billion in Medicare and Medicaid. The reason government does not follow the business approach is politics. When Paul Ryan put forth his plan, which contained cuts to entitlements, he was vilified for throwing Grandma over the cliff in her wheel chair. This is demagoguery at its finest and as long as voters can be swayed by this behavior, we will not solve our debt problem, which has now exceeded our GDP. We are going down the road that many European countries have followed and we see the results in the riots in Greece.