Thoughts on the road, 12/10/12

1.

There's a lot of angst on the conservative side of the aisle with the expected cave-in on taxes.  Republicans are preparing for the next election, but none of this floor show will make any difference to me.  Where's the problem solving?  Where's the creative leadership?

2.

The leadership seems to be on the other side.  This is not meant to be in admiration, but simply an observation.  In spite of the craziness of the proposals, there doesn't seem to be any response except for rejection to any new ideas.

All of the focus on entitlements are well and good, but that's not the only area in which government spending is out of control.  Besides, the people are already paying for their social security.  They are not paying for the other things that government finances.  When Republicans try to get control over this spending and shut down the government, the left just threatens to withhold social security checks.  So, the Republicans have no effective means of opposition that will work.  The Democrats just make the threats to do things like make trillion dollar coins, or threaten not to send out social security checks, and the GOP just caves in.

So, why not try to be creative?  Why not put a big ( trillion dollar ) coin in the social security trust fund, which currently has nothing but IOU's in them?  You could then separate the social security budget from the rest of the budget and concentrate on each separately.  From that point on, all social security checks will be backed up by a funded account.  The threats to senior citizens will hold no more force.  Once that account starts to run out of money, they will have to go before the public and raise taxes in order to keep it solvent.  Just break down the problem into smaller parts and it will not be so insurmountable.

By separating out social security, they will be able to shut down the government and it won't have the sympathy of the public.  Why?  Well, how are you going to get sympathy when a big company doesn't get its subsidies?  Fight that way, and you have a chance to win.

3.

We don't have any creativity like this, nor any backbone.  It makes me suspicious that they really don't have any intention to do anything at all.

Evidently, they have this faith that fiscal moves like tax cuts are going to be the salvation of us all.  We are going to need more than just that.  We need growth drivers, like the world wide web was in the nineties.  But how?

There's a current model for success in the space program.  As Bill Whittle discussed in his video, it comes down to a matter of how these space programs get funded.  If it is cost plus, it almost guarantees a bloated, gold-plated government program, like Constellation or its replacement--- the SLS.  If it is fixed price contracts, the incentives assure that the spending will be effective and produce results that are on budget---like Spacex's Falcon 9 rocket.

You can expand that model throughout government and have a leaner, more efficient government that can do the big things again.  Or it can do the mundane things that it already does and do it better, cheaper, and faster.  There's simply no excuse for the government to be this big and this inefficient.

But their stuck-in-the-mud oppositional tactics guarantee failure at every turn, and the country loses by default, just as Romney did in this last election.  Our problem isn't just big government, its bad government that has no ideas, nor solutions to our problems.  All it seems that it has is useless floor shows like the current one in the GOP and the bigger one in Washington DC.