The Collective Speaks. The Elective Obey

I guess the politicians will be scrambling now for yet another solution to the “problem”. Not that they have ever had a solution, nor for that matter have they understood why they don’t know what to do. How then will the Republicans or the Democrats, or a collaborative compromised agreement amongst them, solve the dilemma of the national debt and its deviant little brother the deficit with public opinion polls starting to indicate that the Great Unwashed do not like what has been proposed?

Well, our great leaders will do what politicians always do. They will change their statements and try and find some obfuscating means to accommodate their plans to appease the masses. What they won’t do is change their methodology. They will not recognize that ‘cutting’ is not the tool, at least not the tool that you should use to work this problem. Cutting equates to a surgeon removing parts of the patient because everyone agrees that the disease must be removed, but it doesn’t differentiate between healthy tissue and diseased tissue. Just cutting may result in a healthy patient (they may survive despite the cutting), the patient could wind up pretty bad off with severe impairments, or the patient might just be a corpse. And this is the technique that Congress is intent on using. They will cut us to salvation.

If our eager elective officials were problem solvers, they might want to step back, examine and study the factors that drive the spending, and once they understand what our governmental systems, programs and policies are doing wrong they need to modify the mechanisms that drive spending. Unfortunately, Congress is neither competent nor qualified to achieve such a degree of understanding. Thus Congress is in great need of the “a miracle happens here” mechanism. Congress may not have the ability to solve the problem but fortuitously they have the means to evoke the miracle; and to make it even better, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat or even someone intelligent.

The solution is not in cutting the budget. The solution is in reducing the budget. The difference is that cutting is not directed, it is not focused and it is not productive or efficient. Reducing the budget is a proactive process. Reduction will occur because it will be targeted at an opportunity, focused on a specific area of spending that can be improved to the benefit of both the funders (us) and the drivers of the spending (hopefully us also), and reduction will craft a governmental operating process that strives to continuously deliver more for less. The output of the reduction approach is, now wait for it, cutting. It’s not cutting and then seeing what you get. It’s getting what you want and when you’re done you can cut-away the excess that you didn’t need.

The polls may show what the public doesn’t want cut, but just like Congress the polls don’t tell you what to do to achieve what the polls tell the public does want. They want to be able to afford our society, our nation and our future. So reducing spending also provides a path that fulfills the other aspect of saving our economy and country that the cutting method won’t. It will insure that the pledge that every American makes will be achieved, because we will be responsible and accountable for the tasks that are required to meet our obligations of a free, democratic society.