Leadership is an Art-form

My Flag Flies Everyday

My Flag Flies Everyday

Leadership is an art-form. It takes substantial training, disposition, and intelligence to become a leader. What I am witnessing in the new administration is a lack of real leadership.  My own  tenure in leadership lasted forty two years. I have led projects and departments of many people throughout my career, I understand what it takes to lead. In addition to my professional career, I spent twenty five years as a volunteer in the Boy Scouts of America organization as a Cub Master, Scout Master, District Training Chairman, and more. What I see in our Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is an inability to put a handle on what it takes to run his department. The job is huge, yet he refuses to appoint anyone to assist him. A good leader is only as good as his smartest people. If he was really wise, he’d find people who could do the job better than him.  I can recommend Eagle Scouts who could lead circles around him. 

POTUS could also benefit from the experience of  private enterprise business leaders. He obviously is not getting it. He must not be hearing what business leaders tell him . If he is listening, he refuses to agree it is “Change He Can Believe  In.”  I truly think he will only listen to advisers who push his socialist program.

“$1,000,000,000,000.00 Like It’s Chump Change”

My Flag Flies Everyday

My Flag Flies Everyday

We hear an awful lot of commentary these days about the stimulus bill, the budget, the Porkulus Bill, on and on. Each time we hear the amount of money being spent, politicians and commentators alike bandy about the phrase “a trillion dollars,” like it is pocket change. The number, one trillion, continues to fascinate me. Probably, because  in my mind that number is so large, and unreal I cannot mentally process the information.  

It has taken me fifty five years to accumulate a nest egg large enough to feel comfortable with. In spite of the nest egg, I still have to rely on Social Security to make ends meet.  The egg became scrambled in three short months, and my fifty five years of hard work went down the drain. I must now consider returning to the working population.

My dilemma is this; I spent fifty five years working in a number oriented business, if I can’t process the number, one trillion, how in the world can a bunch of lawyers elected to congress do it? They can’t. They have no clue as to what is happening to their constituents. If they did, they would have done the right thing, and voted the  trillion dollar packages into the toilet where they belong. They would also impeach the president and his cabinet as being incompetent.

As an excercise to get an understanding of what a trillion dollars is, I made a spread sheet to calculate how long it will take to pay off a trillion dollar debt. The numbers are too large to show the entire spreadsheet on this page.

      years to pay off debt
           
debt in trillions   1 2 3 4
payback rate          
1 Million per day   2,740 5,479 8,219 10,959
1 Million per hour   114 228 342 457
100 Million per day   27 55 82 110
1 Billion per day   3 5 8 11
1 Billion per hour   0 0 0 0

My three year old  grandchild will be thirty years old if we pay back one trillion dollars of deficit at a rate of one billion dollars per day, and not spend another dime along the way. We don’t have one trillion dollars of deficit, we have ten,  and it continues to grow exponentially. Only the fat cats in congress will survive.  

 Send the tea bag, vote them out of office, do what it takes to get the lazy bastards out of office. Elect some people who are real citizens, and  who care about the country, and its people. If we don’t take radical action now to stop  “Change We Can Believe In,” only the fats cats will survive. The rest of us will spend the rest of our lives waiting in lines to get a roll of toilet paper.