Posted by
Brian Norton on Saturday, October 04, 2008 3:35:27 PM
Thank you for an
excellent column, Laura, and for addressing what is most on my mind this election cycle, the "what then" question. I have been working with my brother to turn his business around because he made some choices that had the potential to cost him a lot of money yet he did not enact the needed fixes I advised until after he lost his shirt. Now he is completely changing his business without guarantee of success, a thing that would not have been necessary had he listened 6 months ago to basic business principles. What he did and what our government is doing now is so similar I want to shake somebody besides myself! Why is it that the needed common sense is sooooo absent on both a national and individual level? My brother needed to identify where he was losing money and cease operating in those areas before he could concentrate on profit making ventures, but thought refusing to fill orders (nothing like paying people to buy from you!) he had no legal obligation to fulfill would somehow damage his reputation (or something). Meanwhile, if his business goes bankrupt, he will have NO reputation, and no business. That is where you hit the nail on the head in this article, where we will be at as a nation if we do not engage in the policy analysis and tough fiscal decisions now, rather than wait for the inevitable crisis. Common sense dictates that you cannot spend more than than you make indefinitely, and government produces no goods or services, it just redistributes wealth. Even in printing new money, it actually robs citizens because of the devaluing of the extant money supply. The really fear inducing possibility is nobody will address root causes until the other shoe drops and one of the major governmental entitlement programs goes bankrupt..., then 800 billion will be small change. I like
Newt's ideas for changing and fixing our broken economic paradigms in government, but confess that sometimes I wonder if there is enough common sense left in America to make them work. If Obama gets elected by a majority, what little hopes I have are going to be pretty nigh destroyed. Anyway, thank you again for an excellent column, and if you have any ideas on how to get people to invest in foresight instead of pay dearly for hindsight, I would sure like to know:-)