Somebody explain this to me.
Run The Government Like a Business. What The Fuck Does That Mean?
- Thread starter thoughtone
- Start date
It is a ruse and scam talking point designed to befuddle low information US citizens. No one would ever float such a preposterous postulate 40 years ago because the benefits of government were so visible, apparent and acknowledged. In my city New York City the benefits of government were in-your-face daily. I traveled to school as a kid using a free transit pass, which allowed me to not only ride the train & bus free, but go to any free library I needed to go to, attend school sporting events, go to music lessons etc.
When you graduated New York City high school prior to about 1974,you had the option of free admission in CCNY, (City College of New York) was free. Graduates of CCNY who got a FREE college education are:
Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Ed Koch (former NYC mayor), A.M. Rosenthal (editor New York Times), Alan Abelson (editor Barrons), Walter Mosley (novelist), Andrew Grove (former CEO INTEL) ; and Five Nobel prize winners just to name a few.
The federal government after WWII devised a plan, the GI bill to educate and find work for the millions of men who were returning from defeating fascism in Europe & Japan. These are things governments do; not the private sector.
The demonization of government started with the 1980 Ronald Reagan campaign and presidency. Reagan said: “Government is the problem not the solution”
The run a country like a business –freemarket propaganda started then and via the RepubliKlan echo chamber, it continues today
Running Government Like A Business?
by Laura Clawson
April 2011
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/17/967855/-Running-government-like-a-business
"Running government like a business" is one of those zombie Republican lines; no matter how dramatically it fails time after time, it always comes back. That it survived the "MBA Presidency" of George W. Bush was staggering enough, but the 2010 class of governors went right back to it: John Kasich, Rick Scott, and Nikki Haley are among those raising zombies. And that's not even counting the high-profile failed candidacies of candidates like Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, and Linda McMahon.
Rotting, staggering reanimated corpse it may be, but it's a rotting, staggering reanimated corpse affecting how our states and nation are being run and how students are being educated, so it's worth poking at a bit.
In response to her governor's "run government like a business" moment, Laurin Manning at South Carolina Soapbox asked:
Don’t most—if not all—well-run businesses seek to grow? Don’t Republicans want to shrink government? Isn’t a business that is shrinking an unprofitable one?
Are the citizens of the businesstate of South Carolina the customers? Or the shareholders? Or both?
Do Haley campaign contributions = stock?
These are intended to be facetious questions, and the answer to the third one in particular may be an eye-rolling "well...how honest is Haley going to be about that?" But they come uncomfortably close to truth. Because Republicans do not want to run government well. They want to run it so badly that people won't trust it.
As for whether citizens are customers or shareholders, in the business model that does all depend on our profitability to the people and corporations for whose benefit government-as-business is run. If we're customers, the point is to try to extract as much profit from us as possible. If we're shareholders, the point is to try to get us as much money as possible (after executive bonuses are subtracted, of course).
The "run government like a business" school of Republicans wants to treat us as customers of the least customer-friendly business imaginable. The business that charges its average customer exorbitant prices and gives them a broken product in order to rake off giant profits. Only here, the average customer is 90% or so of wage earners and taxpayers, the broken product is our nation's government, and the giant profits go to the wealthiest in the form of massive tax breaks.
As Seth Masket writes at Enik Rising,
Businesses exist to turn a profit. They provide goods and services to others only insofar as it is profitable to do so, and they will set prices in a way that ends up prohibiting a significant sector of the population from obtaining those goods and services. And that, of course, is fine, because they're businesses. Governments, conversely, provide public goods and services—things that we have determined are people's right to possess. This is inherently an unprofitable enterprise.
That's unprofitable in the financial sense, of course. There are other meanings of the word "profit," though, and by that token there are human and moral profits to good government. Matt Yglesias has gone all Jonathan Swift with this:
It’s not “entitlements” and it’s not “Social Security” and it’s not “Medicare” and it’s not “health care costs” it’s the existence of old people. Old people, generally speaking, don’t produce anything of economic value. They sit around, retired, consuming goods and services and produce nothing but the occasional turn at babysitting. The optimal economic growth policy isn’t to slash Social Security or Medicare benefits, it’s to euthanize 70 year-olds and harvest their organs for auction.
Proving the difficulty of satire in this political climate, Republicans then go and vote to end Medicare. Organ-harvesting it's not, but did you ever think you'd see the day?......
.......I’ve mostly focused on how the “business” model refuses responsibility for many of the things government is supposed to provide. But there’s also the revenue side. As noted above, businesses are supposed to turn a profit. They do that partly by not providing unprofitable services, but they also do it by trying to maximize revenue. And that is certainly something today’s “run it like a business” Republicans do not want to do.
Take Indiana Republican Congressman Todd Rokita, who recently told MSNBC:
We have too much revenue as it is. We spend too much.
His slide from “too much revenue” to “too much spending” is telling, and as ThinkProgress notes,
It’s worth noting that the last time Republicans claimed there was too much revenue coming into the federal government, they ended up solving that problem by helping to create the deficits of today. “[M]ore than any other” reason, President Bush justified his 2001 tax cuts by claiming the budget surplus President Clinton created was actually bad. “A surplus in tax revenue, after all, means that taxpayers have been overcharged,” Bush explained. Of course, the Bush tax cuts are one of the largest contributors to today’s budget deficit by depriving the government of needed revenue.
Time and time again, Republicans have shown that they don’t really want to run government like a business. What they want is to introduce the worst excesses of business—the incentive to poor service, the race to the bottom on wages, benefits, and workplace rights—and leave out the ideologically inconvenient bits like growth and the importance of revenue. We’ve seen its extremity in the Ryan budget, the attempts to turn Medicaid recipients into the new “welfare queens,” the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy and the insistence on keeping them going despite (or because of) what they’ve done to the economy.
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Considering you're on a porn board, you should be old enough to know that nothing is free. I believe most parents still teach their children this. Unfortunately, people have allowed themselves to accept a false premise & look at government as some sort of adult version of Santa Claus. It's the idea that someone can get something without any cost to themselves or someone else.
Disregarding the nonsensical and unneeded pejorative ad hominem I won’t spend much time on this simple to understand issue. FREE College education for qualified students is the hallmark of a civilized modern democratic society. It is paid for via TAXATION. It is as simple as that. When the allied powers defeated Hitler’s Nazi Germany in 1945 the Truman administration set up their new government charter and constitution that exists to-this-day. FREE College education for qualified students was initiated in Germany, it continues successfully to this day.
It was modeled on what was occurring in the biggest most successful states in the US. California, New York, Illinois etc. The most famous FREE university system in the modern (post World War 1) world was the California State University System (CSU). Millions of students went to CSU and got world class educations for FREE. They became the engineers, scientists, educators, biologists, physicists, pre-med students, computer scientists, etc. that propelled California to becoming the eighth largest economy in the world.
RepubliKlans were always horrified of the idea of FREE education funded by taxes. Ronald Reagan as governor of California attempted to end FREE tuition for the California State University System (CSU) but was rebuffed by the state legislature. Instead what he did was cut the funding for (CSU) which resulted in higher local property taxes — (the same “starve-the-beast” strategy the RepubliKlans are using today) — which ultimately broke the FREE tuition system. <div align="right"><!-- MSTableType="layout" --><img src="http://i.min.us/ijs5zK.jpg" align="right"></div>
Today CSU costs students about $6,400. This cost has doubled since 2007. This means that millions of NO income, low income, students will not be able to attend, unless they take on debt (loans).
Colin Powell and Henry Kissinger and millions of other people who came from families with NONE ( Kissinger’s family came here with nothing $$$ escaping Hitler) or very little money, are now precluded from attending college without incurring debt. Unlike every other type of debt, tuition loans can not be modified or discharged in a court proceeding. What’s happening now is that people are enrolling in for profit private colleges and state universities, — receiving particularly at the private schools, junk education, and then have no recourse when they seek a refund of the tuition they borrowed to attend the school. I’ll post a link for the video “College Inc.” which shows how this scam works.
Those who disparage FREE college education funded by taxes are either ignorant of the history or are longing for the past (prior to World War 1) where only the elite and wealthy sent their kids to college. Both of my parents like Colin Powell went to CUNY – City University Of New York- FREE. My father was an M.D. My mother was a school principal. Without FREE college neither had the money to go to college. Their success gave me the opportunity to go to Columbia University undergrad and graduate school. There are millions of similar stories, a dozen that I could personally attest to that validate the success of FREE college funded by taxes. Today millions of qualified high school kids if they can’t get a scholarship or loans wind up on the treadmill to oblivion.
The RepubliKlans like this system they call it the free market. Meanwhile where has the tax money gone that used to fund FREE college tuition for state residents. It has gone to build prisons. As you have contemptuously pointed out; this is a porn board, so do your own research. Since New York ended FREE college tuition in 1972, check out the dramatic increase in prison spending & construction in New York State. The cost of incarcerating ONE prisoner in New York State per annum is $55,000 a year. This is not a tough issue to figure out; it’s about Civilization versus Barbarism.
So it's not free. Thanks, this was all you needed to say.
So cut the defense budget by 50% and raise taxes (revenue) on the top 3%
Welcome back VegasGuy.
We probably could and should cut the defense budget by more than 50%.
You cut the defense budget (not just the Pentagon, but Home land Security, CIA and the so called "Black Budgets") by 50% and raise taxes (revenue) on the top 3%, the debt would be a surplus in 25 years.
The Real U.S. National Security Budget
The Figure No One Wants You to See
$1,200,000,000,000-($1.2 Trillion)
by Chris Hellman
March 2011
What if you went to a restaurant and found it rather pricey? Still, you ordered your meal and, when done, picked up the check only to discover that it was almost twice the menu price.
Welcome to the world of the real U.S. national security budget. Normally, in media accounts, you hear about the Pentagon budget and the war-fighting supplementary funds passed by Congress for our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. <span style="background-color: yellow;"><b>That already gets you into a startling price range -- close to $700 billion for 2012 -- but that’s barely more than half of it. If Americans were ever presented with the real bill for the total U.S. national security budget, it would actually add up to more than $1.2 trillion a year.</b></span>
Take that in for a moment. It’s true; you won’t find that figure in your daily newspaper or on your nightly newscast, but it’s no misprint. It may even be an underestimate. In any case, it’s the real thing when it comes to your tax dollars. The simplest way to grasp just how Americans could pay such a staggering amount annually for “security” is to go through what we know about the U.S. national security budget, step by step, and add it all up.
So, here we go. Buckle your seat belt: it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
READ: Entire Article-- HERE
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http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/04/entertainment/la-et-college-inc-20100504
Video Download Link
Code:
http://rapidshare.com/files/3494509470/CollInc.rarwatch video online link
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/
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We may be able to do without the entire Department of Homeland Security, it seems to be just another bureaucratic mess.
Add to this that business is not run on efficiency, it's run on profit margin. A company will run on outdated technology for as long as they can if it produces a better profit margin because reinvesting in new technology is always going to eat into base line profits.
