Our Badly Run Budget

President George W. Bush was elected twice, promising to run the federal government like a business. Despite the fiscal crisis in Washington, there's no better time for the president to keep his promise than now.

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Well, when the going gets rough in the free market, businesspeople call up their accountants and scrutinize the company budget. As our CEO-in-chief, President Bush needs to make an honest assessment of our national checkbook.

Such an analysis would reveal that the Pentagon budget, more than the ledger of any other single federal department, could yield big-time savings if subjected to the cost-cutting methodology of a business executive intent on ferreting out waste.

That view is held by former President Ronald Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence J. Korb, who argues that America could save $60 billion by cutting weapons still being built or maintained, believe it or not, to fight the defunct Soviet Union.


http://www.alternet.org/story/30496/

"President George W. Bush was elected twice, promising to run the federal government like a business. "

Maybe what he really promised was to run the federal government FOR BIG business.

He's never succeeded at business, always getting his ass bailed out by some corporate savior. Why should his turn at running government "like a business" fare any better?

He's good at running things right into the ground.

Budget, meet ground.

...people go to jail for even less than what our government does. Scandal, bribery, theft and embezzlement, etc. The hundreds of millions our government loses and is unaccountable for every year makes the little sideshows like Enron and Worldcom look like a child's lemonade stand losing money because the kids and their friends drink up all the profits.

That implies negligence but not bad faith.

Is that all it is? The corporate elites and political cronies who serve them are robbing the country blind for their own benefit. They barely pay taxes at all. A rudimentary review of tax revenue statistics reveals that the ordinary middle class and working class citizens are being robbed blind while their childrens' futures are being bankrupted.

Huge political, economic, structural and demographic challenges to our continued survival as a free people are simply being ignored while a centralized police state with belligerent international ambitions emerges to defend elites pursuing indefensible policies.

The very purpose of the so called "war on terror" and the Iraq war was to preserve the pork filled obsolescent cold war leviathan for their shareholders and corporate cronies. This is how the national security budget exceeds that of height of the Vietnam conflict while a relatively puny force one third the size of forces in Vietnam is in the field in the Iraq theater.

This government and Pentagon is "badly run" in the same fashion as Hitler's Germany was "badly run."