The National Debt

I am not going to pretend that I understand the national debt situation and the impact that raising the debt ceiling will have on the overall financial health of the nation. I can only try to relate it to my own experiences and situations that I do understand.
Working for a large corporation, the bottom line was always extremely important. However, the growth and competitiveness of the organization is also important. But allocating money toward these areas does not allow for immediate results. You cannot grow without risk. You allocate resources now based on research and your most educated guesses in the hope that it will pay off in the future. On top of that, the overall culture and morale of your organization is also important. However, if you allocate resources to this area there is generally no quantifiable measurement of its benefits but in my opinion most well-run, successful organizations include this component in their budgets.

Ok, so the budgeting process. How do you grow your bottom line, not only keep up with the competition but try to grow and get ahead, and keep employee morale up? Tricky, tricky, tricky.
- increase revenue. Easier said than done. How do you do it? You need to improve the product or service you are providing or provide more of it. Either way, there will be associated costs.
- cut costs. if you cut costs, chances are the quality of the product or service you are providing may also suffer. But from experience, you try to cut as much as you can here and there. Usually the first thing to go are the company parties and other fringe benefits that really have no quantifiable benefit. Cut miscellaneous supplies wherever you can. But chances are, you really aren't going to come up with much by doing this. The only way to come up with a material amount of money is to cut your headcount. You can do this by not filling positions that are currently open, or by actually laying off people.

I think the only way to actually accomplish the goal of increasing your bottom line is to do a combination of increasing revenue as well as cutting costs. However, sometimes you may have to risk your bottom line in the short term in order to grow and stay competitive and plan for a big payoff in the future.

My point is, in a large organization there are a lot of moving parts that are all connected. You can't touch one area (cut costs) without impacting another area (revenue).
I realize that this is not exactly how the government works, but I do think that there are a lot of similarities. It is my understanding that in the government the only way to make a significant dent in cutting costs would be to eliminate jobs. But by doing that, you are also reducing the amount of taxes that you are collecting.

I certainly don't have the answer to our problem, but am extremely annoyed by the people who think it is a simple problem that the president and entire congress are too stupid to figure out.