What is Missing?

I hope that the government would consider adding the missing elements of Analysis, prioritization, common sense, and good judgment back in and give politics-as-usual a holiday.

Courtesy: banglasavvy.com

(HARRISVILLE, N.H.) - As we watch the airing of the daily soap-opera that Washington D.C. has become, it appears that one or more things are missing. Issue after issue and incident after incident assail our senses and resolution to those issues and incidents appear to elude us. We have to ask; Why must every issue and incident take on an eternal life of its own?

The list of ongoing issues and incidents grows day by day, and as it grows, a pattern emerges. When we look carefully, we begin to notice a common appearance. We notice not so much that which was done, as that which was not done.

The best leaders and managers share a couple of traits. They analyze, prioritize, and exercise common sense and good judgment.

To understand how this should work, let us pick just one of the many issues plaguing our country right now . . . Unemployment. The analysis would go something like this:

Unemployment exerts a direct hit on the individual and adversely affects their life, their family, and their future. It destroys their pride in themselves because they, through no fault of their own, end up on the government dole. It eliminates their ability to share in the cost of running our country via the income taxes they would be paying if they had remained employed. As more and more individuals become unemployed, consumer spending in our economy becomes less and less because there is less and less disposable income available to the economy. This in turn reduces the demand and thus the need for consumer goods, which, in turn, reduces the need for workers to produce consumer goods. So, as you can clearly see, unemployment becomes self-fulfilling and feeds on itself. That is a pretty heinous little parasite isn’t it? To make matters worse, if allowed to continue, unemployment gains momentum and leads to other issues like deflation and depression.

With this analysis in mind, let us prioritize the issues and incidents we currently face. I would place unemployment in first place because it could possibly cripple if not destroy the economy and our very monetary system. If the economy and our monetary system are broken, we simply cannot address or fix any of the other issues and incidents facing us.

Now for the Common Sense and Good Judgment part: Since we know the breadth and depth of the unemployment issue and have properly placed it in first place on our priority list, common sense and good judgment tell us that whatever is in second place is so far behind, we need to spend 95% of our financial and human resources on resolving unemployment.

We all know that this is not what has happened. We have seen Tarp, Stimulus, Healthcare, Card-Check, Cap and Trade, Bank Bailouts, Automotive Company Bailouts, vacations, welcoming victorious basketball teams to the Whitehouse, sponsoring Whitehouse beer busts between a police officer who tried to do his job and a professor who took offense when the police officer asked for ID, campaigning for congressional representatives, governors, and senators who are fighting for their political lives, etc.

To make matters worse, a second true top priority issue emerges . . . the catastrophic Gulf oil spill. As the government doubles its estimates of how bad it is and then redoubles those same estimates, more livelihoods are put in jeopardy, more businesses go under, and the futures of more United States citizens are trashed. So far, little more than talk about “Kicking Ass” has been done about it.

Support for the current administration and current congress appears to be hemorrhaging faster than the oil is gushing out of the floor of the Gulf. It shouldn’t be too difficult to understand why!

Considering the fact that lip service does not appear to be solving the issues or addressing the incidents, I would hope that the government would consider adding the missing elements of Analysis, prioritization, common sense, and good judgment back in and give politics-as-usual a holiday... but that is just my opinion.

You can write to Bob Collingsworth at this email address: colli2@webryders.net