I know this is a technology blog but we all need to understand the “business” of our federal government. This is a democracy which means “of the people, for the people”. If you don’t like what you read here get involved – who are your congressional representatives? How did they vote on this? How do you contact them? [see this]
We all need to help steer our great country to a better tomorrow.
This information presented below is attributed to:
David Thomas
Chief Executive Officer
Equitas Capital Advisors LLC
Let’s put the 2011 federal budget into perspective:
- U.S. income: $2,170,000,000,000
- Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000
- New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
- National debt: $14,271,000,000,000 [National Debt Clock]
- Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000 (about 1 percent of the budget)
It helps to think about these numbers in terms that we can relate to. Let’s remove eight zeros from these numbers and pretend this is the household budget for the fictitious Jones family.
- Total annual income for the Jones family: $21,700
- Amount of money the Jones family spent: $38,200
- Amount of new debt added to the credit card: $16,500
- Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
- Amount cut from the budget: $385
So in effect last month our Congress, or in this example the Jones family, sat down at the kitchen table and agreed to cut $385 from its annual budget. What family would cut $385 of spending in order to solve $16,500 in deficit spending?
Now after years of this, the Jones family has $142,710 of debt on its credit card (which is the equivalent of the national debt).
The root of the debt problem is that the voters typically do not send people to Congress to save money. They are sent there to bring home the bacon to their own home state. To effect budget change, we need to change the job description and give Congress new marching orders. We need to start with a balanced budget. All this does is simply prevent more debt from being accumulated.
Once we have a balanced budget we can begin to think about how to start paying down our debt.
In effect, what we have is a reverse mortgage on the country. The problem is that the voters (you and I) are still in the denial stage, and do not want to face the issue we all must face. Please, please think about this and get involved.
UC Berkeley just did a great assessment of Office 365 vs. Google Apps. What I really like is how they were able to make the results easy to understand for their constituency. As a CIO I often struggle to communicate large, impactful descisions across a large organization. They did a great job with the “Assessment Matrix” matrix they created that clearly spells out each function by priority, and which platform “wins”.
