YGTBSM - Where Have You Been All This Time?

Reader comment on: Spend It Or Lose It

Submitted by Kurt Todoroff (United States), Sep 10, 2013 12:44

I look forward to visiting this site every day. Well Done!

I want to believe that both Gretchen Hamel and the FOC editor don't consider this story to be news. This was the way that we did business in the Air Force during my tenure (1975-1991). My commanders told us that this was the way that they did business in the AF twenty years earlier. Most federal agencies conduct business this way. Fact, not apocrypha.

Congress is oblivious (grotesquely ignorant ?) of the cyclical spending nature of those government organizations whose nature is to spend a significant amount of their budgets for the direct benefit of the organizations' staff. For example, flight suits, fluit jackets flight gloves, flying boots, g-suits, helmets. Compound this with the rapid turnover due to reassignments, which is the nature of the military. This year, a fighter wing may have a light turnover. If it doesn't spend its entire budget, then congress with reduce their budget for next year (if the wing doesn't burn through their remaining money in September), despite that next year the wing will experience a heavy turnover, when it really needs that money. All government roads to hell begin in congress (the opposite of progress).

The systemic problems in government, didn't start yesterday, or in the last decade. That's why they are systemic. Government, at the very highest level (read: congress) is neither accountable nor competent. Government is mob rule in a fancy dress. Government is self-legitimized mob rule which intentionally and deliberately transforms itself into self-deified mob rule. Ironically, members of government, especially the legislature, consider themselves to be omniscient. To employ a bumper sticker metaphor: "Congress are out of touch with reality." That metaphor hardly scratches the surface.

Kurt Todoroff

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