God Bless America on this sunny but cold Easter morning. I fully intended to attend 7:30 mass this morning, and set my opportunity alarm to wake me at 6:15. It did the job, but instead Grumpa shut it off and talked himself ( 2 nano-seconds) into letting the snooze alarm give him ten minutes more. (HINT! The snooze doesn’t work if you turn off the alarm.) It was 7:15 when I opened my eyes again from a really wonderful sleep, I momentarily panicked. Not to worry I told myself, Catholics invented 9:00 o’clock mass for those who miss 7:30.
After not attending mass for two years because of the COVID-19 shut down, it was heartening to see so many families back to meet their yearly obligation. Actually, the obligation is to attend every Sunday, but many of us stretch that into twice a year, Christmas and Easter. On those two holidays Catholic churches swell with attendance. Most Sundays are well attended, but our fellow Christians do not fill every pew and spill over into the atrium like they do on the two holiest days of the Church calendar.
Nine o’clock is the children’s mass, and as I said, there were a lot of kids there. I sat in a pew behind a family, Grandma, Grandpa, Son, Daughter, in-laws and three kids between ages 18 months and four years. A little distracting, but nice because it reminded me of the days when wife Barbara and I had to corral three kids in that same age range. I remember once during mass, Barb was holding our youngest son Mike over her shoulder while he swilled a bottle of formula. When he finished, he did his best impression of Joe Montana by passing the bottle over the heads of several pews into the Sanctuary. This kid was great at sports, but never played football, even though he had a great throwing arm at eighteen months.
It is funny how seeing kids opens one’s mind to memories that have been locked up for fifty years. Someday, I will write a book full of those memories just so my kids can have a laugh about their own antics. In fact, that is such a great idea I will begin by logging the incidents the way I did for my childhood auto-biography titled Jun-e-or.
In my last post I made some comments about the Federal Bureaucracy. Afterwards I decided to educate myself on what I meant. A search was in order to learn just how many bureaucracies we have. We all know about a few that I list here:
All of the above agencies are mentioned frequently in the news, and I thought they were the only ones. Then, I made the mistake of searching the government websites for information on how many there are. I was amazed. The first page of the website
was a table by alphabet. Clicking on a letter yields a list of agencies with names beginning with the letter selected. I can create a table showing you just how many agencies there are listed under each letter of twenty-two alphabet, but it will be easier to click on the link and go there yourself. The letters Q, X, Y, & Z were not on the list. I counted the agencies and got a sum of 629. No wonder no one wants to tackle the problem of reducing government spending. At first glance the problem seems to be insurmountable.
How do bureaucracies begin? It is simple. When Congress passes a law to spend money on something like Civil Rights they need a way to implement the law. They hire people to put the law in place and to enforce it. That act becomes a new bureaucracy. I have never seen a Bureaucracy disbanded or a law repealed in my lifetime. The only law I know that was repealed was Prohibition.
In my job as an engineer, I was introduced to the Pareto-Principle by one Joe Duran a American Quality Control guru who converted the Japanese car industry to the QC system that would reverse their shitty cars into the most sought-after vehicles in the world. The Pareto Principle was invented by an Italian engineer in the 1800’s. Basically it states that 80% of the benefit comes from 20% of the effort. My first step in analyzing this problem of bureaucracy is to use the 80/20 rule on the whole problem.
The total budget for the federal government is $4.829 trillion. Applying the Pareto Principle to the budget means that we spend .9658 trillion to get 80 percent of the services, and flush 3.8632 trillion dollars down the drain for twenty percent of service. How smart is that? Why our simple-minded politicians can’t wrap their brains around that is astounding. All I can figure with my feeble old brain is that it is too hard for Congress to undo what they have already approved.
After a few seconds of research on the web I found some suggestions for how Congress can restrain executive agencies.
By:
revising statutes that established the agency’s mission.
exercising control over an agency’s budget.
conducting audits or holding hearings.
influencing the selection of agency directors (Senate)
Would it be a wet dream to believe that 469 Congressmen and 100 Senators could take on 503 Government agencies to reduce spending? In my book that is 503/569 = 0.884 agencies per Congressional seat. If a single Congressman can’t reduce costs of an assigned agency by eighty percent by the end of his first term he should pack up his bags and let someone in who knows how to do the job. That objective should be written in the job description.
I know, I know, a single Congressman cannot cut costs by himself. We are a country of laws and a Congressman’s responsibility is to draft laws to get things done. Well, with that in mind, a Congress-person can write a law to cut the costs and present it to the legislature for approval. Of course, if the law does not pass those that voted against the law will have to come up against you to pass theirs. Since your jobs depend on cutting costs. It won’t take long for Congress to get the idea, and begin to cooperate with each other.
My whole plan depends on people who run for office wanting to save the country, and stop inflation by reducing government spending. It also depends on us (We, the People) to pick the right individuals at election time. If we don’t like who is running, maybe we should throw our own hat into the ring.
Here are a few more goals to think about using the 80/20 rule:
Eighty percent of the benefit comes from 126 Agencies. Eliminate the remaining 503. Which ones would you save?
Cut the Federal Budget by twenty-five percent to save 1.2 trillion dollars.
Use the savings to pay off the National Debt over thirty years.
Cut the federal budget another 25% to save 905 billion dollars, and return it to the tax payers.
Think of all the money that would put in your pocket. A total of $905,000,000,000/350,000,000 = $2585.71 would go to each member of the population.
Instead of setting goals such as I have listed we will get nonsense like printing more dollars to pay bills. Since President Nixon finally ended the Gold standard in 1971 the US dollar has lost 70% of its value meaning one dollar can only buy thirty cents worth of goods today as it could in 1971.
Our current inflation rate exceeds 11% and is climbing. If it rises higher the USA will go bankrupt, and I don’t want to live to see that happen.
For the first time in the history of this blog the blogger took a month off from writing. It feels good. The time has come, however, that I must resume posting. Today I am overloaded with ideas and the result is I’m confused. There is nothing worse than a writer who has a confused mind. I hope today’s result turns into something worth your time to read.
Lovely and I are beginning to settle down to a more normal life. In the past month she and I had to prepare for an Immigration interview. For those of you like me who have never had to face off with Uncle to answer a seemingly unlimited number of questions dealing with your personal life, I can only say that it is intimidating. At the same time Lovely had to renew her passport, which in itself is not a big deal, except she decided to keep my name, and to change it on her passport. The passport is easy, changing the name is a little bit more complicated. All of it involved searching for birth certificates, marriage certificates, divorce decrees, and a new marriage certificate. Still pretty simple except that foreign governments don’t want documents in a language different than theirs. This has forced me to get proficient at finding interpreters, and the meaning of the word “Apostille.”
Add to this pressure a decision by Lovely’s grandson to accept our invitation to come and live with us. After spending three years clearing my home of unnecessary stuff I find myself absorbing the grandson’s stuff which includes the stuff of his recently deceased father who lived in a three bedroom house with a two car garage loaded with stuff. There were days in the past month when I didn’t have the energy to drag myself into bed at night.
Since the tension of passing the point of knowing that Lovely will not be deported is over life has become a little easier. I can deal with moving stuff, but dealing with the Department of Homeland Security-US Department of Citizenship and Immigration Services leaves me a bit frazzled. When I hear the words “our immigration system is broken” I now kind of understand what they are talking about. One question just keeps coming into mind over, and over, why did we allow it to get this way?
I see a new profession being formed in the USA. Actually, it is already in business, i.e. Immigration Lawyers. What I really see is that the need for people who can negotiate the too many forms and loop holes contrived over years of Congressional band-aids correcting the system will require a complete annihilation of the USCIS and every law regarding immigration. A new sheet of paper is necessary and the law should be limited to one page.
As an example, one of the last requests an immigrant in this process has to complete is Form I-693. I downloaded form I-693 and it is thirteen pages long. After reading it, I concluded that it is not even good toilet paper. Those pages merely explain that an immigrant must have inoculations for various diseases. That information can be stated on a half a page. Most of the boiler plate deals with the ramifications of falsifying information, and how long one will spend in federal prison if he does so. The USCIS can save a lot of money, and make things simpler by removing paragraphs stating what kind of trouble you will have if you falsify any bit of information on a form. Every form, and there are thousands of them, contains threats to lock you up. Getting back to I-693, the final result is a medical form completed by a registered Civil Surgeon declaring you are disease free and inoculated. The CS must sign it, date it, and seal it in a number ten envelope, and the immigrant must present this sealed report to the immigration officer conducting the interview (more like an interrogation). The initial application is a many page questionnaire which is completed at home, and sent in. The interrogator has the form with your answers in front of him during the interview. He asks the same questions that the immigrant has already answered, and is merely waiting to trip up the victim with an answer that is different. The idea, I suppose, is to determine if the victim can be prosecuted for falsifying his answers.
Here is my prediction on the matter of fixing immigration law in the USA, it’ll never happen. The bureaucracy is too large and the backlog of thousands of immigrants now being shuttled across the border illegally will take a thousand years to fix. I am in favor of a complete amnesty only if it comes with a totally new and streamlined immigration process, but Congress doesn’t have the balls to do the work.
If we as citizens of the USA want to have a great government we must decide to eliminate every unnecessary bureaucracy, and there are many of them. It boils down to asking ourselves what good does a specific bureau do for us? If you are honest with yourself you will realize that each and every department invented by government to make our lives better are doing the opposite. The cost of paying millions of employees to sit and invent forms is too great to support.
