Subtrafuge

Obama's Spending ChartIn my business, I was taught to look for places to cut costs. This is a graphic world. We can process information easier if we see it graphically. POTUS has been spending money like a drunken sailor, and it’s been bothering the heck out of me. The most recent dialog on the news concerns the massively huge bonus package being given to AIG out of the bailout money from the government.   I agree, one hundred sixty five million dollars is a huge amount of money. It is so large that most people can’t process the number. Most likely because many of us accumulate much less than a million dollars over fifty years of hard work.  Those who do amass that much can retire,  as long as they also receive Social Security. The population is angry that we donate our tax dollars to save a failed company, and then reward the men who caused it to fail with bonuses twenty times larger than a typical nest egg.

What I can’t understand is why the citizens of this good country aren’t upset with the antics of our elected  representatives. The chart above shows it clearly.  All I have done is graph the costs of the federal budget, and the various bailout bills next to the cost of the AIG bonuses. The left side of the chart is graduated in trillions of dollars. I ask you this; if  this chart represented your personal expenses, and you had to trim your spending, where would you look first? Which area would produce the most benefit if it were attacked looking for savings?  Do I have to explain further?  Lee Iaccoa, chairman of the Chrysler Corp wrote that he could cut ten percent out of any budget and no one would notice. Ten percent of the first bar on the chart amounts to three hundred and fifty billion dollars. Any one with a brain could trim that bar deeper than ten percent. If you have a job in manufacturing in the USA you are faced with making cuts of that nature everyday. There are many qualified people who could see where to make cuts. Most of these people are managers, accountants, and engineers. Do we have people from these disciplines sitting in the Capital ?  

Why then, are these morons in the White House and the Capital steering all the news toward the AIG bonuses. Do they think we are as stupid as they are? Do they think the people of the USA are so dumb as to not see through their subtrafuge. It is clear to me they are trying to deflect the news away from massive spending they call “Change You Can Believe In.”  

Here is something to think about; after spending all those dollars shown in the chart all we will have left is “change”  in our pocket.

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.

Two Barry’s

 

My Flag Flies Everyday

My Flag Flies Everyday

Have you ever heard of Barry? I’m not speaking of Barack “Barry” Obama, I speak of Barry Goldwater. Mr. Goldwater was a US Senator from Arizona in the nineteen sixties.  Goldwater was the most conservative Senator ever to be elected in the modern USA. His book “Conscience of a Conservative” was a best seller, and is considered to be the credo of the conservative political movement.

I learned of Barry Goldwater from a colleague at my first job out of college. My friend was also a recent college grad. He had become a staunch conservative after reading Senator Goldwater’s book. We spoke often of the Constitution and the principles of conservatism; love of God and country, small government, low taxes. We spoke of  the vision the founding fathers had for this new country. They had had it with a dictator king, and the unfair taxes imposed upon them. They were tired of the King deciding what was good for his subjects, and how to worship.  They wanted liberty to determine the course of their own lives. The idea of the king deciding for them was an atrocious concept.

The new citizens coming to the soil of North America were from many countries. They were immigrants. They fled their homelands in search of religious freedom. They came from England, Holland, France, Spain, and Germany. All across europe the citizens were unhappy with the way the kings ruled, and kept their subjects in abject poverty, while the aristocracy became fat.  The only way out was to revolt, or to leave. Many revolted, others left. The ones that left formed the greatest country in the world. The ones that revolted, suffered at the expense of the kings. Eventually, European countries backed away from monarchial rule and formed governments ruled by the people. Many kept thier monarchies as figure heads of the past.

One of the largest revolutions occurred in Russia. Lenin and Stalin imposed an even greater evil upon the people in the form of socialism. Yes, they forced the country from a monarchy into collective socialism.  They made it happen by slaughtering millions of good Russian people. Along came another great idealist. His name was Hitler. He decided that the people of Germany needed a change. The German people were sick of being ruled by the Kaiser. Hitler wanted the people to have socialism. He wanted it so much that he went to war over it. He wanted to convert all of Europe to his style of socialism, even Russia.

By this time the little country formed by immigrants from all of these countries had to step in and stop the mayhem. It was called World War Two. The USA, founded on the principles of a belief in God, and Liberty, had to become the salvation of the western world. The USA beat Hitler at a huge cost of blood and lives. Instead of challenging Russia, we made them allies in order to defeat Hitler.  Eventually, Ronald Reagan beat communism in the nineteen eighties. The great Soviet Union went broke trying to convert the world to socialism at the expense of their people.

Now we have a new “Barry.” He is Barack “Barry” Obama. This man should know better having been educated in the best schools in the USA. Like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, he too espouses the concept of “socialism.” He hasn’t learned from history that socialism,  and a welfare state is a failure. Instead, he insists on changing our great country into a socialist state as fast as he can.  He has used the economic meltdown as a shield to force congress to pass legislation that will create  government so huge it will self destruct.

 It may be my warped mind, but all I  can think is that the subjects of  history, and political science are being slanted  by socialist leaning liberal college tenures. In the fifty years since Barry Goldwater wrote his conservative credo, our scholastic instituions have created several generations socialist leaning  people. At the same time, our government, in all of its benevolence, has done an outstanding job of creating a population of uneducated welfare recipients.

The result is that Barry Obama is leading the citizenry of the USA,  with an army of socialist college grads, and welfare dependents toward atheism, and total  government subjugation under the manifesto of “Change We Can Believe In.”.

When will we wake up and understand that we are being led down the path toward a new era of modern slavery?

Five Star Italian

Red Wine and Bread, Staff of LifeThis evening I met with my men’s club. Five of us dined at a new restaurant in Orland park called Ottimo. Originally the building was occupied by a mid-eastern restaurant that was quite interesting. We dined there two years ago. First strike against it was that it didn’t serve alcoholic beverages. Not a good thing for my group. Secondly, we felt we were a part of a some terror group. The clientele were mostly Muslims. Women all around us wore head scarves. A group of dark men sat at a round table in the back smoking a hookah. We don’t know what they smoke in one of those things, but suspect it to be  something mysterious.  The food was mediocre, and the service the same. That’s probably why they are no longer in business.After that evening we vowed never to return.

This evening was another matter. We barely sat down when the waiter brought a loaf of hot bread and a tub of garlic butter as an appetizer. We ordered drinks off an impressive wine list. I started with a Cabernet which arrived quickly. I decided to pass the bread around, and bumped the full  glass of red wine over onto the table and my lap. What a mess. Thankfully, Miguel, our waiter was right there and helped clean up the mess  quickly. He also followed up with a second glass of wine to replace the one I tipped.

Ottimo offers a special on Tuesdays; spaghetti and meat balls. It comes with a garden salad, and served family style. Three of the group opted for the spaghetti. I chose Chicken Marsala. It came with a rich sauce and smothered in mushrooms.  The taste was exquisite.  Sherman ordered mussels over linguine. He has a case for overcooked pasta, but noted that the linguine was cooked to perfection; al dente. I ordered some ravioli with ricotta cheese as a take home for Peggy. She also commented on it’s excellence.

We completed the meal and got the check. Most of the time, the longest part our evening belongs to calculating who pays what. This evening was a little strange, in that we were able to make it work in just a few minutes.  As we waited for Miguel to pick up the check, we expressed a  curiosity as to which part of Italy this style of cooking came from. I hailed the Maitre-‘De over to the table and asked. He told us that it was from southern Italy below Napoli. We then quizzed him about  which part of Italy he came from. It was like twenty questions as we rattled off town names. He kept answering, “further north.”  We ran out of towns and gave up. “Where,” we asked?

“Austria,” he replied. We were in shock. The guy was from Salzburg Austria. He left for a moment and returned with a complimentary after dinner drink of limongello. It was grand.

All in all, we gave this new restaurant five stars. A bit pricey since the menu is a la carte, but well worth the exquisite food.

Ottimo

161st and LaGrange Road

Orland Park, IL