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If this country was actually run like a business, the CEO would be fired by now.

busterarm 8y ago
In a real business, the finance department and the CEO wouldn't be locking horns over what to use company money for and it would never block payroll.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  In fairness it's not really the finance department and the ceo, it's the ceo and the board locking horns. And the ceo and the board decided to shutdown the whole company until they get their little tiff ironed out. (Which, yeah, was a pretty dumb idea. But the ceo and the board are kind of known for having dumb ideas.)
  - busterarm 8y ago
    No, it really is the finance department. Boards vote on the CEO and serve as his advisors and that is certainly not the correct metaphor. More importantly, Congress sets the budget through the House and Senate budget committees, which then draft and pass appropriations bills. This is the point in the process where we are stuck. The President is saying "bring me budget bills that have the things I want and I won't veto them" and Congress is saying no. It's nothing new really, barely anyone knows basic civics and so people are letting their emotions drive their opinions. Both parties here are playing games that affect peoples' lives and are both worthy of blame.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - hannasanarion 8y ago
      That is the point in the process where we are stuck now, but not where the sticking began a month ago. Trump had a perfectly good budget on his desk, written by his allies and passed by Republicans, and it even had wall funding in it, and he vetoed it because it wasn't enough. Then the government shut down. Then the Democrats took control.
      - jki275 8y ago
        Trump hasn't vetoed anything. Neither party has "had control" in the senate for years. It takes 60 votes in the senate to pass a budget, and neither party has had that. The situation is far more complex than you're stating it.
      - leereeves 8y ago
        You posted a similar fiction more than once so I'll post the same correction in both places. The House passed a budget bill that included wall funding. https://www.npr.org/2018/12/20/678602214/senate-approves-temporary-funding-bill-house-likely-to-act-today-avoiding-shutdo https://www.npr.org/2018/12/20/678602214/senate-approves-tem... It never reached the President's desk because the Senate failed to pass a compatible budget bill when Democrats refused to include any funding for a wall. > Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, of New York, pledged to continue the discussions, but said it was clear there are not enough votes to pass a spending measure that includes funding for a wall along the nation’s southern border. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/21/government-shutdown-lawmakers-have-just-hours-strike-budget-deal/2383394002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/21/gove...
        hannasanarion 8y ago
        The house only passed that bill because Trump called Paul Ryan personally and said he would veto the bipartisan budget that was on the table and passed by the Senate. This is no fiction, it is Trump's shutdown
        leereeves 8y ago
        Everyone knows Trump's refusing to sign a budget without wall funding, that's no secret. The part you left out is that the Democrats blocked a bill with wall funding, even before they took over the House. Trump never "had a perfectly good budget on his desk, written by his allies and passed by Republicans". Both parties put this issue ahead of the continued operation of the government and both are responsible for the shutdown.
    - bilbo0s 8y ago
      Again, I'd have to respectfully disagree here. The US Treasury Department is most analogous to the finance department of most corporations. Which, incidentally, is also shutdown right now because the board and the ceo told them to close. (Just as an additional point of fact, the finance department of many organizations does not set departmental budgets. That's not how it works. One of the reasons they exist is to, "finance", projects. Which could involve the use of any number of financial vehicles.)
      - busterarm 8y ago
        Congressional appropriations bills are exactly how projects get financed in government. All this does it make it all the more clear to me that you don't know how this process works. You still have provided zero justification for Congress being the "board" even though it is a terrible metaphor.
        bilbo0s 8y ago
        Wow. Relax guy. We can just agree to disagree. No worries. I just thought that since the Founders' intended congress to act as a check and balance on the president it's pretty much analogous to the boards that act as a check and balance on a given ceo in your average corporate structure. It also seemed reasonable to view Treasury as the finance department. But seriously, no worries if you see things differently. No biggie man. You have a nice rest of your day.
        leereeves 8y ago
        Boards are very much like the parliament in a parliamentary system. Voters/shareholders elect the parliament/board who appoint the prime minister/CEO. There just isn't a good analogy to be found with the US system because corporations don't have the same structure as the US government.
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    This is 100% the CEO's decision. Remember, he rejected a perfectly good funding plan that was put forward by his own allies back in December, before his enemies took over the board on January 3.
    - busterarm 8y ago
      The President makes budget requests to Congress before the budget committees plan and submit their appropriations bills. The perfectly good funding plan did not include the budget requests the President made. Whether you agree with his politics or not is immaterial. It is not 100% his decision.
      - spurcell93 8y ago
        Right. It's the majority leader's decision to override a veto or keep putting bills on the floor. This is a multi-level catastrophe fabricated by disgusting people.
      - hannasanarion 8y ago
        And the Congress is by no means required to give the President everything he asks for. The perfectly good funding plan was given to Trump by his allies when they controlled both houses, it was the most favorable plan he could ever possibly get. It even had some wall funding in it. It was 100% his decision to veto it, and 100% his stupid fault for thinking that he could get more concessions from his enemies than he could from his friends, right after those enemies won the House by the largest popular vote margin in history.
        busterarm 8y ago
        I commend you for being motivated but this doesn't match the actual facts. President Trump has not vetoed a single bill during his term of office thus far. Go look this up if you do not believe me. Please see spurcell93's sibling comment to yours in this thread.
        8y ago
  - Symmetry 8y ago
    In a corporation or other well designed systems there's a clear chain of authority. In the US we have two different branches that can both claim to have a mandate from the people that can get into fights. The designers of the US constitution did better than I would have with the information available to them but we've had lots of sorts of democratic republic tried since then and now we know that US style presidential systems usually end up falling apart fairly quickly. We're lucky that we had Washington as a good example of temperance and then then the weight of tradition keeping our system afloat.
    - rjf72 8y ago
      And a few years after Washington we'd have the current vice president and the former secretary of the treasury engage in a duel to the death! Claiming temperance is what kept our system afloat is probably a bit of a stretch. The American political system is literally designed to be dysfunctional. This is what checks and balances are all about. One clique wants A, one clique wants B. If they can't come to a compromise then nobody gets anything. The idea was to keep the government small and avoid a tyranny of the majority. What's really changed since then is that government has grown unimaginably larger than the forefathers ever imagined possible, let alone intended. And we've also massively increased the power of various branches. For instance, that the president alone can now unilaterally deploy our military throughout the world is just insane and arguably completely unconstitutional. In any case it completely destroys the entire system of checks and balances that our system, and country, was built and prospered upon. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by system such as ours failing, nor that our system was kept afloat by tradition. We started a revolution against a heavily centralized mercantalistic monarchical empire to create a decentralized capitalistic democratic republic.
      - Symmetry 8y ago
        The problem with "nobody gets anything" is that it's unworkable in the long run and sooner or later someone decides to just ignore the rules with popular support. See How Democracies Die for a book length treatment but I believe that's an uncontroversial statement about the political science consensus. I'm not saying it's temperance that keeps the US together (except for the first 8 years) but rather tradition. Long standing institutions tend to amass legitimacy over time. It's not so much that we have a larger country these days as that we have ideologically distinct parties. We had real ideological distinctions between the Democractic Republicans and the Federalists in the old days and in addition to what you mention there were people considering a military coup if the election of 1800 went the wrong way. Thankfully the Federalists imploded and for a long time parties were mostly patronage machines, though you did have the pro-science, pro-religion, pro-treating other races with respect party versus the pro-freedom, pro-small government, pro-treating other religions with respect party as sort of vague ideologies. Except for the bit where they polarized over slavery and we immediately had a civil war. After progressive reforms made patronage less of an issue the two parties were both still ideologically mixed until the South defected to the Republicans and things have been polarizing ever since. Right now we're in a situation where the most conservative Democrat in Congress is more liberal than the most liberal Republican, a situation that is basically unprecedented. I don't expect the current system to break soon, hundreds of years of tradition is pretty resilient, but if the current level of partisan divide and constitutional hardball continues it will break down eventually.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > In a real business, the finance department and the CEO wouldn't be locking horns over what to use company money for and it would never block payroll. (1) Congress is more like a board of directors than a finance department. (2) Internal issues would never be allowed to block payroll except in the most extreme cases in a normal business because there is an external actor, the government, which will impose severe consequences for that. A business operating in an environment without that external force would not be unlikely to delay payroll.
HarryHirsch 8y ago
Yes, but this country is a country, and countries need continuity, and they can't provide even that. The People ought the install a strikebreaker in the White House.
sparkie 8y ago
If the country was run like a business, they wouldn't be in business, they would be bankrupt. The purpose of a business it create wealth. The purpose of government is to take wealth. Government does some useful functions with the wealth it takes, but extremely inefficiently. Private enterprises which are profit motivated consistently outperform government on budget, quality and time.
- CamelCaseName 8y ago
  The purpose of businesses is to create private wealth. The purpose of government is to create social wealth.
- sgjohnson 8y ago
  It’s sad seeing people actually disagreeing with you. The US government is $21tn in debt. 21 trillion. With a constant budget deficit. No private entity would be ever allowed to go that far. If the Government is still taking money out of my paycheck, it simply isn’t shut down enough.
  - SilasX 8y ago
    >It’s sad seeing people actually disagreeing with you. It's because of a high-status meme that's gone around that "Governments Aren't Households" followed by a pedantic lecture about a few dimensions where they have interesting, but not fundamental differences. And it's true: reliable, trusted governments e.g. suffer lower costs from going into debt, and are able to recapture some of the expenses. Plus, they can default in a way that's technically legal (inflate away the debt). But none of that changes the more important, relevant similarities: - There are limits to how quickly you can accumulate real resources to pay off debts. - There are severe consequences to being unable to pay debts. - There are debt levels that are dangerous to have and which prevent you from raising funds for real emergencies. All of these are true and relevant for both governments and households. Yes, you can debate how close you are to the breaking point, but you can't simply avoid the comparison entirely just because Governments Aren't Households.
  - sgjohnson 8y ago
addicted 8y ago
If the government was run like a business it would have merged with the Chinese government by now. It almost certainly would have shut down half the state governments due to poor performance. And it would have declared bankruptcy and not paid any of its workers or maintained any of its infrastructure. There’s a reason government exists. The greatest strength of private industry is any one institution is allowed to fail, without destroying the system. The government is needed where that does not hold true. That’s why the Too Big to Fail companies are such a threat to capitalism and private industry. They break the fundamental Darwinian impulses that makes private industry such a great creator of wealth and ideas.
taftster 8y ago
What's interesting about your statement is, I believe, that's one of the reasons why Trump was elected. There are a certain demographic of people who want our country to be run more like a business. These people likely thought Trump would be able to do so, given his "business acumen". I'm not sure what the current situation says about this concept, if anything. Maybe the government is its own beast and can't be run like a business at all -- not saying that Trump was the right guy for the job, but wondering if any CEO type would be?
- ConceptJunkie 8y ago
  The government could be run like a business but it never will be for two reasons. First, it can make its own rules. And second, there's no competition. If you don't like what it doesn't you can't find a competitor, unless you leave the country. Yes, you can vote, but voting only changes so much. If you're changing CEOs and radically changing direction ever 4 or 8 years, it's not likely any large scale reform will ever go long enough to have any effects. And as we've also heard a lot recently, the entrenched bureaucracy isn't easily or quickly reformed.
  - theseatoms 8y ago
    Yeah. They analogy makes no sense. They can print however much money they choose to. There's no "profit" for government.
- xaqfox 8y ago
  We see the same situation publicly play out in business whenever a large or powerful newcomer moves into an already entrenched industry--like Sony did with Hollywood, Netflix did with TV production, Amazon and Apple did with music and book distribution, etc. Maybe this is less a shock if you consider that our politicians are working for separate competing "businesses" with competing goals, instead of, as one may have assumed, for a single business that has a single set of goals.
lgrapenthin 8y ago
If this country was actually run like a business with that much debt, a good CEO would reduce it in size. IMO that is exactly whats happening.

In a real business, the finance department and the CEO wouldn't be locking horns over what to use company money for and it would never block payroll.

bilbo0s 8y ago
In fairness it's not really the finance department and the ceo, it's the ceo and the board locking horns. And the ceo and the board decided to shutdown the whole company until they get their little tiff ironed out. (Which, yeah, was a pretty dumb idea. But the ceo and the board are kind of known for having dumb ideas.)
- busterarm 8y ago
  No, it really is the finance department. Boards vote on the CEO and serve as his advisors and that is certainly not the correct metaphor. More importantly, Congress sets the budget through the House and Senate budget committees, which then draft and pass appropriations bills. This is the point in the process where we are stuck. The President is saying "bring me budget bills that have the things I want and I won't veto them" and Congress is saying no. It's nothing new really, barely anyone knows basic civics and so people are letting their emotions drive their opinions. Both parties here are playing games that affect peoples' lives and are both worthy of blame.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    That is the point in the process where we are stuck now, but not where the sticking began a month ago. Trump had a perfectly good budget on his desk, written by his allies and passed by Republicans, and it even had wall funding in it, and he vetoed it because it wasn't enough. Then the government shut down. Then the Democrats took control.
    - jki275 8y ago
      Trump hasn't vetoed anything. Neither party has "had control" in the senate for years. It takes 60 votes in the senate to pass a budget, and neither party has had that. The situation is far more complex than you're stating it.
    - leereeves 8y ago
      You posted a similar fiction more than once so I'll post the same correction in both places. The House passed a budget bill that included wall funding. https://www.npr.org/2018/12/20/678602214/senate-approves-temporary-funding-bill-house-likely-to-act-today-avoiding-shutdo https://www.npr.org/2018/12/20/678602214/senate-approves-tem... It never reached the President's desk because the Senate failed to pass a compatible budget bill when Democrats refused to include any funding for a wall. > Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, of New York, pledged to continue the discussions, but said it was clear there are not enough votes to pass a spending measure that includes funding for a wall along the nation’s southern border. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/21/government-shutdown-lawmakers-have-just-hours-strike-budget-deal/2383394002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/21/gove...
      - hannasanarion 8y ago
        The house only passed that bill because Trump called Paul Ryan personally and said he would veto the bipartisan budget that was on the table and passed by the Senate. This is no fiction, it is Trump's shutdown
        leereeves 8y ago
        Everyone knows Trump's refusing to sign a budget without wall funding, that's no secret. The part you left out is that the Democrats blocked a bill with wall funding, even before they took over the House. Trump never "had a perfectly good budget on his desk, written by his allies and passed by Republicans". Both parties put this issue ahead of the continued operation of the government and both are responsible for the shutdown.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    Again, I'd have to respectfully disagree here. The US Treasury Department is most analogous to the finance department of most corporations. Which, incidentally, is also shutdown right now because the board and the ceo told them to close. (Just as an additional point of fact, the finance department of many organizations does not set departmental budgets. That's not how it works. One of the reasons they exist is to, "finance", projects. Which could involve the use of any number of financial vehicles.)
    - busterarm 8y ago
      Congressional appropriations bills are exactly how projects get financed in government. All this does it make it all the more clear to me that you don't know how this process works. You still have provided zero justification for Congress being the "board" even though it is a terrible metaphor.
      - bilbo0s 8y ago
        Wow. Relax guy. We can just agree to disagree. No worries. I just thought that since the Founders' intended congress to act as a check and balance on the president it's pretty much analogous to the boards that act as a check and balance on a given ceo in your average corporate structure. It also seemed reasonable to view Treasury as the finance department. But seriously, no worries if you see things differently. No biggie man. You have a nice rest of your day.
        leereeves 8y ago
        Boards are very much like the parliament in a parliamentary system. Voters/shareholders elect the parliament/board who appoint the prime minister/CEO. There just isn't a good analogy to be found with the US system because corporations don't have the same structure as the US government.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  This is 100% the CEO's decision. Remember, he rejected a perfectly good funding plan that was put forward by his own allies back in December, before his enemies took over the board on January 3.
  - busterarm 8y ago
    The President makes budget requests to Congress before the budget committees plan and submit their appropriations bills. The perfectly good funding plan did not include the budget requests the President made. Whether you agree with his politics or not is immaterial. It is not 100% his decision.
    - spurcell93 8y ago
      Right. It's the majority leader's decision to override a veto or keep putting bills on the floor. This is a multi-level catastrophe fabricated by disgusting people.
    - hannasanarion 8y ago
      And the Congress is by no means required to give the President everything he asks for. The perfectly good funding plan was given to Trump by his allies when they controlled both houses, it was the most favorable plan he could ever possibly get. It even had some wall funding in it. It was 100% his decision to veto it, and 100% his stupid fault for thinking that he could get more concessions from his enemies than he could from his friends, right after those enemies won the House by the largest popular vote margin in history.
      - busterarm 8y ago
        I commend you for being motivated but this doesn't match the actual facts. President Trump has not vetoed a single bill during his term of office thus far. Go look this up if you do not believe me. Please see spurcell93's sibling comment to yours in this thread.
        8y ago
- Symmetry 8y ago
  In a corporation or other well designed systems there's a clear chain of authority. In the US we have two different branches that can both claim to have a mandate from the people that can get into fights. The designers of the US constitution did better than I would have with the information available to them but we've had lots of sorts of democratic republic tried since then and now we know that US style presidential systems usually end up falling apart fairly quickly. We're lucky that we had Washington as a good example of temperance and then then the weight of tradition keeping our system afloat.
  - rjf72 8y ago
    And a few years after Washington we'd have the current vice president and the former secretary of the treasury engage in a duel to the death! Claiming temperance is what kept our system afloat is probably a bit of a stretch. The American political system is literally designed to be dysfunctional. This is what checks and balances are all about. One clique wants A, one clique wants B. If they can't come to a compromise then nobody gets anything. The idea was to keep the government small and avoid a tyranny of the majority. What's really changed since then is that government has grown unimaginably larger than the forefathers ever imagined possible, let alone intended. And we've also massively increased the power of various branches. For instance, that the president alone can now unilaterally deploy our military throughout the world is just insane and arguably completely unconstitutional. In any case it completely destroys the entire system of checks and balances that our system, and country, was built and prospered upon. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by system such as ours failing, nor that our system was kept afloat by tradition. We started a revolution against a heavily centralized mercantalistic monarchical empire to create a decentralized capitalistic democratic republic.
    - Symmetry 8y ago
      The problem with "nobody gets anything" is that it's unworkable in the long run and sooner or later someone decides to just ignore the rules with popular support. See How Democracies Die for a book length treatment but I believe that's an uncontroversial statement about the political science consensus. I'm not saying it's temperance that keeps the US together (except for the first 8 years) but rather tradition. Long standing institutions tend to amass legitimacy over time. It's not so much that we have a larger country these days as that we have ideologically distinct parties. We had real ideological distinctions between the Democractic Republicans and the Federalists in the old days and in addition to what you mention there were people considering a military coup if the election of 1800 went the wrong way. Thankfully the Federalists imploded and for a long time parties were mostly patronage machines, though you did have the pro-science, pro-religion, pro-treating other races with respect party versus the pro-freedom, pro-small government, pro-treating other religions with respect party as sort of vague ideologies. Except for the bit where they polarized over slavery and we immediately had a civil war. After progressive reforms made patronage less of an issue the two parties were both still ideologically mixed until the South defected to the Republicans and things have been polarizing ever since. Right now we're in a situation where the most conservative Democrat in Congress is more liberal than the most liberal Republican, a situation that is basically unprecedented. I don't expect the current system to break soon, hundreds of years of tradition is pretty resilient, but if the current level of partisan divide and constitutional hardball continues it will break down eventually.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> In a real business, the finance department and the CEO wouldn't be locking horns over what to use company money for and it would never block payroll. (1) Congress is more like a board of directors than a finance department. (2) Internal issues would never be allowed to block payroll except in the most extreme cases in a normal business because there is an external actor, the government, which will impose severe consequences for that. A business operating in an environment without that external force would not be unlikely to delay payroll.

HarryHirsch 8y ago

Yes, but this country is a country, and countries need continuity, and they can't provide even that. The People ought the install a strikebreaker in the White House.

sparkie 8y ago

If the country was run like a business, they wouldn't be in business, they would be bankrupt. The purpose of a business it create wealth. The purpose of government is to take wealth. Government does some useful functions with the wealth it takes, but extremely inefficiently. Private enterprises which are profit motivated consistently outperform government on budget, quality and time.

CamelCaseName 8y ago
The purpose of businesses is to create private wealth. The purpose of government is to create social wealth.
sgjohnson 8y ago
It’s sad seeing people actually disagreeing with you. The US government is $21tn in debt. 21 trillion. With a constant budget deficit. No private entity would be ever allowed to go that far. If the Government is still taking money out of my paycheck, it simply isn’t shut down enough.
- SilasX 8y ago
  >It’s sad seeing people actually disagreeing with you. It's because of a high-status meme that's gone around that "Governments Aren't Households" followed by a pedantic lecture about a few dimensions where they have interesting, but not fundamental differences. And it's true: reliable, trusted governments e.g. suffer lower costs from going into debt, and are able to recapture some of the expenses. Plus, they can default in a way that's technically legal (inflate away the debt). But none of that changes the more important, relevant similarities: - There are limits to how quickly you can accumulate real resources to pay off debts. - There are severe consequences to being unable to pay debts. - There are debt levels that are dangerous to have and which prevent you from raising funds for real emergencies. All of these are true and relevant for both governments and households. Yes, you can debate how close you are to the breaking point, but you can't simply avoid the comparison entirely just because Governments Aren't Households.
- sgjohnson 8y ago

addicted 8y ago

If the government was run like a business it would have merged with the Chinese government by now. It almost certainly would have shut down half the state governments due to poor performance. And it would have declared bankruptcy and not paid any of its workers or maintained any of its infrastructure. There’s a reason government exists. The greatest strength of private industry is any one institution is allowed to fail, without destroying the system. The government is needed where that does not hold true. That’s why the Too Big to Fail companies are such a threat to capitalism and private industry. They break the fundamental Darwinian impulses that makes private industry such a great creator of wealth and ideas.

taftster 8y ago

What's interesting about your statement is, I believe, that's one of the reasons why Trump was elected. There are a certain demographic of people who want our country to be run more like a business. These people likely thought Trump would be able to do so, given his "business acumen". I'm not sure what the current situation says about this concept, if anything. Maybe the government is its own beast and can't be run like a business at all -- not saying that Trump was the right guy for the job, but wondering if any CEO type would be?

ConceptJunkie 8y ago
The government could be run like a business but it never will be for two reasons. First, it can make its own rules. And second, there's no competition. If you don't like what it doesn't you can't find a competitor, unless you leave the country. Yes, you can vote, but voting only changes so much. If you're changing CEOs and radically changing direction ever 4 or 8 years, it's not likely any large scale reform will ever go long enough to have any effects. And as we've also heard a lot recently, the entrenched bureaucracy isn't easily or quickly reformed.
- theseatoms 8y ago
  Yeah. They analogy makes no sense. They can print however much money they choose to. There's no "profit" for government.
xaqfox 8y ago
We see the same situation publicly play out in business whenever a large or powerful newcomer moves into an already entrenched industry--like Sony did with Hollywood, Netflix did with TV production, Amazon and Apple did with music and book distribution, etc. Maybe this is less a shock if you consider that our politicians are working for separate competing "businesses" with competing goals, instead of, as one may have assumed, for a single business that has a single set of goals.

lgrapenthin 8y ago

If this country was actually run like a business with that much debt, a good CEO would reduce it in size. IMO that is exactly whats happening.