For what it's worth, the Dutch version of the IRS is fairly straightforward, cooperative, and usually customer-friendly. So it is possible.Originally Posted by Veldan Rath
For what it's worth, the Dutch version of the IRS is fairly straightforward, cooperative, and usually customer-friendly. So it is possible.
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
How insane is a world where you can't even get an answer out of the government on how to follow the law? And, of course, that the mainstream approach, favored by an overwhelming majority of citizens is to pretend nothing's wrong, except for the letter under the politicans' names?
*<sigh>*
Does kind of make me think that this whole "end of the world" thing I've been hearing about might not be the horror it's hyped up to be... or at worst, might just be a lateral change that brings a nifty new change of pace to this primate asylum we call life.
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
Just think: almost every person who was called (excluding the NGO) will be getting a pension and healthcare coverage for life.
That bit from politico was stupid. All it means is that President Obama doesn't know which department of the government might deal with these vaguely defined regulations that may or may not exist. Once you call the wrong organization, it's not surprising you'll get a runaround. If I call the FDA to find out something about my prescription drug coverage because, well, they're the Food and Drug Administration, why would I expect they'd know precisely who to direct me to? So, Obama was wrong, but that doesn't really seem to be an indictment of the USDA or anything else.
Well, other than the fact that the bureaucracy in this country has become so expansive and complicated and utterly ricockulous that the guy in change of all the agencies can't keep it straight... but the rest of us damn well better be able to, or we may wind up with our lives destroyed, all our assets seized, standing before a federal court on the first day of our trial.
Not to mention that if Bush had said the same thing, we'd have to endure weeks of hearing about how it's because our president is such a dumb redneck.
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
It wasn't just the USDA, wiggin, it was five different government agencies (both state and federal) and NGO's, plus multiple branches within many of the same organizations. None of them seemed to know which agency would be the right one to handle the request, and some seemingly weren't certain what their respective agency's sphere of responsibility was.
Maybe there is an obscure agency out there that handles the guidelines for dust and particulate matter from combines, tractors, and livestock, (as defined in paragraph 31a subsection C of the EPA's guidelines on aerial flotsam) but not being able to be directed to it, even after spending a couple days on the phone certainly is an indictment on government bureaucracy.
It's also an indictment of just how far removed from reality the POTUS's perception of the inner workings of government actually is. Telling someone that determining the relevant rules and regulations they are expected to follow is really just a phone call away, when the reality is far more complicated than that speaks to a person who isn't aware of just how much bureaucracy and red tape an average person would have to deal with. Perhaps it's a phone call away for the leader of the free world, but for the majority of Americans dealing with the government isn't as easy.
I know lots of people who deal with the housing agency here, and you won't believe how incompetent (or more likely, lazy) they are. People have been waiting 3 years to get a simple piece of paper. Documents are lost repeatedly. Things are entered into a computer by one person and don't appear in another person's computer. People who go to the agency themselves are treated like sub-humans. Frankly, the Soviet Union wasn't particularly worse than some of our agencies.
Last edited by Loki; 08-19-2011 at 05:11 AM.
Hope is the denial of reality
Maybe they should hire better computer programmers who can make comprehensive networks and streamline the "runaround"?
That would require laying-off people. Or re-structuring departments and making some re-apply for new jobs within the organization. That's not allowed.
How do you figure that? They'd still need the phone/customer service reps to answer calls. But they could actually do their jobs better with better tools.
I think this is one of the major problems with computing in this day and age actually. They make structural and endemic inefficiencies more manageable. I remember having to prepare my taxes in one of my high school finance courses by hand, and even with a helpful guidebook in front of me it was frustrating and time consuming. It also made me go out and buy TurboTax the first chance I got, which took something that was arcane and occult and made it into an easily manageable, GPS guided game of twenty questions.Maybe they should hire better computer programmers who can make comprehensive networks and streamline the "runaround"?
Between TurboTax, CPA's, and any number of other tax prep services, there are many Americans, myself included, who don't have to come face to face with the mangled terror that is our tax code, (or any number of other bureaucratic boondoggles). They simply don't see or feel a need to push for the reform of an obviously broken system.
The solution isn't to find a way to make a broken system seem more functional, the solution is to fix the broken system.
This. Holy fucking shit. THIS.Maybe they should hire better computer programmers who can make comprehensive networks and streamline the "runaround"?
Most of my job now consists of playing phone operator for the county. I get everything from code enforcement complaints (which i have to process), driver complaints (which I have to process), missed trash (which I have to process).
Basically, anything that is not a direct "what number" or "what department" I have to process into the system for that department. Do the departments use the same systems? Fuck no. Do the departments use a system that appears to have been programmed in my generation? Fuck no.
Answering the county email is even more of a pain in the ass. 24" monitors that are neutered to a resolution thats one step above 800x600 (for security reasons). Every email gets processed, no exceptions. Every email that requires being handed over to another department (99%) requires transposing the information 2 times (for 3 copies). No dual screens, no window docking. Saving and printing everything in pdf.
This all used to be handled by a floor full of staff down at county center. Its now done by at the most 6 people at once, but usually 2-3 a shift. Do any of us like this part of the job? No. There is only one person on staff that was hired with the understanding of this being a job duty. But it has taught me one thing. Stereotypes exist for a reason, and there is a large portion of the population that does not understand how to use a phone, much less understand why the paperwork they submitted to a department I have nothing to do with is so full of errors.
Last edited by Ominous Gamer; 08-19-2011 at 03:39 AM.
"In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."
Yeah, playing phone operator is not fun....and it's stupid when it's fairly easy to correct in the new digital age, when phones are like mini-computers, and computers can be networked, right? A couple of prompts, a few defaults, and both worker and customer might be happier.
I've been misdirected numerous times by the "computer-assisted" phone chain ("press one for English"...) and none of the people I eventually am privileged to speak with know how the hell to re-direct my call. That's just crappy IT and administration, and it's the same crap I used to deal with a long, long time ago, in a universe far, far away, when phones had curly cords.
It's also a mystery why secondary departments can't be networked, even if they're "technically" under different authorities. Like my Geico insurance that bundled auto/home/umbrella policies, but the homeowner's part is administered by Liberty Mutual. The Geico folks can't connect me to Liberty Mutual directly, after my auto questions were answered but then I have one about homeowner's....so they give me a new number to call after hanging up.
There ought to be one county-wide phone number that can weed and direct initial calls, with no more than three choices per queue. If some dude looking for Animal Control ends up at the Library system....that's a big F for the network designers.
Funny how that goes, huh? I mean, when people's employment isn't contingent on competence, and their salaries aren't related to performance, it's almost as if they don't care about being competent, or performing their jobs better than an inbred chimpanzee. Someone should do a study... see if there's a correlation there.
That's not actually a viable solution for a couple of major reasons. The first is that it won't help anyway, and the second is that what you propose isn't possible. It's not possible because, generally speaking, only hacks who can't get hired elsewhere work in a technical field for the government. It's a little better at the federal level because you've got prestigious agencies with geek-chic perks to attract talent, but even there, it's a lot of contractor work - you get in with a company that contracts to the government and knows how to treat geeks and keep them happy, and then get assigned to a government project where you play with the cool toys, but don't have to put up with the maddening problems of working for the government. The state agencies don't have that option, and even a lot of the federal agencies don't either. Want to the find the bottom 10% of techies? Look at those applying for work at a state/county/local agency... or wanting to go do IT work for the USPTO... BCIS... State Department, etc. And that's before you get into compensation issues, like how Google wooed away one of Microsoft's star coders in social media... for 10 million dollars (to work on Google+). You think you're gonna be able to recruit anyone good offering an average salary, and the chance to work with older gear on bureaucratic crap? Yeah, good luck with that.Maybe they should hire better computer programmers who can make comprehensive networks and streamline the "runaround"?
And of course, the reason it won't help is closely related to why it's not possible to attract top talent. Government work is a hellish bureaucratic quagmire staffed with incompetents and superiors who literally get irate that some things aren't possible. The same morons who draw up the project plans and specs are usually the same morons who don't know the difference between webmail and Exchange server... this happens, to some extent, in a lot of businesses too, but it's vastly worse in government for a lot reasons. You can have the best techies in the world working for you, but if you restrain them with policies and procedures from the era of type-writers and filing cabinets, anything they spit it out is still going to work as well as what a student in a 101 class can punch up. And by the time government polices and procedures catch up with last decade's technologies, well, it's the next decade already, technology has advanced 5 or 6 generations of hardware, and those policies they finally pushed through to make life possible with mainframes and command line personal workstations make no sense for an era of smart devices and VMWare.
And why do you think that is, by the way? Do you think the team that built those systems decided to do many times more work than was required to build multiple systems that don't interface with each other? (You know, instead of building one system and copying it over to multiple departments.) Or might it be something else... like every department being run by a bureaucrat, who thinks like a bureaucrat, protects his turf like a bureaucrat, and micromanaged his project/system into the clusterfuck you see before you? For that matter, who do you think it was who wrote all those asinine rules and regs you have to follow? The world's worst, unluckiest techie, or one of the countless government bureaucrats who can barely run Excel?
Honestly, it kinda cracks me up to see you complaining about the government incompetence you personally have to deal with, knowing that any time now, you'll be telling us about how government needs to do [x], to solve problem [y]. Heh. Why do you think your job is what it is, if not that very attitude, by someone else, back when COBOL was cutting edge?
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
Funny how everything stays in the system once an English-speaker starts bothering them every week. In case you think this is an isolated incident, my experience with INS and several other agencies hasn't been any better. Seems to be a trend with any agency that "gives things" to applicants, kind of like a third-world country, only here doing nothing replaces bribery.Maybe they should hire better computer programmers who can make comprehensive networks and streamline the "runaround"?
Hope is the denial of reality
Well, other than the fact that the bureaucracy in this country has become so expansive and complicated and utterly ricockulous that the guy in change of all the agencies can't keep it straight... but the rest of us damn well better be able to, or we may wind up with our lives destroyed, all our assets seized, standing before a federal court on the first day of our trial.
Not to mention that if Bush had said the same thing, we'd have to endure weeks of hearing about how it's because our president is such a dumb redneck.I wouldn't expect Obama to know, any more than I'd expect him to know much of any other parts of our complex government. A farmer should have a much better handle on this than the president because they actually need to know the nitty-gritty details. I know things about the inner workings of the NIH and FDA that are absolutely unnecessary for the president to know. This isn't to say that these organizations aren't inefficient and bloated, but the politico piece doesn't prove that. It just proves that Obama doesn't know who regulates that particular question. *shrugs*
As for Bush, you may have a point - but there's no one queuing up to say Obama's stupid, just that 'OMG the government is too big'. If they want to make fun of his lapse, go right ahead. It's about as juvenile as those people who spent the Bush presidency calling him stupid, but there's no harm in a bit of circus with our bread.
If you start at the wrong place, it's not surprising at all that you'll get a runaround. If I wanted information on the specific details of one of my grants, calling the main number for the NIH isn't going to get me anywhere - if I don't have a grant number, study section number, institute I'm applying to, etc. And that's in the same organization! Imagine how bad it would be if I contacted the Fish & Wildlife guys to talk about my animal testing. They wouldn't even know where to start. (Interestingly, I believe they'd have to send me to the USDA.) The US government is huge, and starting out at the wrong place is going to set you back a very long time.
Fair enough. It may have been more rhetorical flair ('Call USDA') than an actual expectation that one phone call would answer everything, but I agree that if he genuinely meant it, he was wrong.It's also an indictment of just how far removed from reality the POTUS's perception of the inner workings of government actually is. Telling someone that determining the relevant rules and regulations they are expected to follow is really just a phone call away, when the reality is far more complicated than that speaks to a person who isn't aware of just how much bureaucracy and red tape an average person would have to deal with. Perhaps it's a phone call away for the leader of the free world, but for the majority of Americans dealing with the government isn't as easy.
I don't disagree, Loki. I just think this particular story doesn't demonstrate that.
I agreed from the beginning that this really isn't much of a negative reflection on Obama at all, and more telling of our systems failures; however this is the only point I do agree with the others here on. Where it does show a disconnect between how streamlined Obama perceives the internal structure verses how it actually is. This is perhaps another major issue that could be addressed (making things more streamlined). That would be a significant accomplishment toward solving this head-chasing-tail run around people experience. It does need to be solved. It costs us money, it costs us time, and is one way citizens are disconnected from their governments.I wouldn't expect Obama to know, any more than I'd expect him to know much of any other parts of our complex government.
Last edited by Lebanese Dragon; 08-19-2011 at 05:41 PM.
As far as I'm concerned, the burden of proof is on a given agency to show that it can't do more with the same resources. Simply claiming that it needs more resources doesn't make it true.
Hope is the denial of reality
Well, I don't think "which particular agency handles this query" is a nitty-gritty detail, for starters. If he'd said "EPA" (I think that would be the proper agency), you'd be right about it not being a poor reflection on Obama, per se, but not even knowing which particular agency to direct the question to is.
And, on a relatively related tangent, you don't see anything wrong with a situation where the government bureaucracy is too huge and complex for the president to pick the right agency, but that same president is relentlessly expanding its size, scope and complexity? (I sure as hell do, but maybe that's the difference here.)
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
I think this was more the problem I was seeing than anything else. I don't care that Obama didn't know the right agency, given the size and scope of the government how could he? That is the problem.
I don't find it surprising that a government administering a 300 million-person population, a $14 trillion dollar economy, and a vast globe-spanning network of military/diplomatic/economic power is a complex entity, no. I do find issue with needless complexity, and I fully agree there's plenty of places to economize or simplify. But I fully expect that even in an optimum configuration, any organization large enough to effectively manage our country is going to be very large and very complex.
Let's ignore parts of the government that frequently are the targets of criticism; let's just look at the military. Is there waste in the military? Absolutely. But if you just whittled our entire military down to 'trigger-pullers' and no one else, you'd still have hundreds of thousands of people. Do you think an organization containing hundreds of thousands of people - and administering to their very legitimate needs (healthcare/mental health, pay, discipline/law, etc.) isn't going to be hideously complex? Do you think the decision to commit hundreds of billions of dollars into a weapons system containing millions of parts is going to be cheap or simple?
The government deals with large, complex problems, and I fully expect that it will require a large, complex organization to adequately deal with them. Obviously such organizations have bureaucratic creep, and there is often a perverse system of incentives that reduce efficiency. I don't deny this. But even an optimum solution isn't going to be something a single guy will be able to fully know/comprehend.
to wiggin.
I'd wager that asking any top executive of a large, multinational corporation couldn't answer specifics about their own departments, either. That's rather the point of having smaller parts of the whole, just like a government....the ability to delegate to those who deal with the day-to-day relevance.
Actually most good CEOs have a decent understanding of the workings of their company. They just can't tell you which office to talk to about getting a purchase order for office supplies. And the scale is completely different - even the largest companies only produce tens of billions of dollars of goods a year.
This isn't what anyone here is complaining about. You need only the most basic, high level understanding of the government to know to direct queries on environmental regulation to the EPA, instead of the USDA. No one is expecting him to fully "comprehend" the bureaucracy, but the fact that he ostensibly doesn't even understand the basics is a problem, and is compounded by the fact that he's striving to make it bigger and more complicated, and expecting the average American to do what he can't.
And how does that work when no one even seems to know where to delegate what?
More importantly, the difference between an incompetent corporation is that it costs people money (mainly its own owners and employees). An incompetent government, however, forces itself on everyone and ruins innocent lives by the bundle. Last time MS misdirected my call, it didn't put me on the hook for a dozen federal felonies.
Ummm, GE?
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
Uhm, incompetent banks and financial institutions didn't force its ruins on the taxpayers when the whole thing blew up?
As I see it, the gov't was lax in swallowing hook-line-'n sinker the belief that the markets will monitor themselves, avoid outsized risk, and don't need oversight or regulation that could be 'restrictive'. Greenspan later admitted he found a flaw in his model, but only after it was too late, and deregulation had undone the protective measures put in place after the Great Depression.
...
And how, exactly, did the banks force their ruins on the tax payers GGT?
You aren't seeing the flaw in your own argument here?
I'm not interested in repeating threads about the housing bubble, over-leveraged banks, debt derivatives of MBSs and CDSs, AIG/ Lehman/Bear Stearns, Kool-Aid bingers, deregulation, and the financial meltdown....the reasons behind Big Bank Bailouts, TARP, HAMP, or QE I and II, etc. Suffice to say, those ruins were forced upon the tax payers.
Why all the usda hate?
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...a_fact_gawande
A
t the start of the twentieth century, another indispensable but unmanageably costly sector was strangling the country: agriculture. In 1900, more than forty per cent of a family’s income went to paying for food. At the same time, farming was hugely labor-intensive, tying up almost half the American workforce. We were, partly as a result, still a poor nation. Only by improving the productivity of farming could we raise our standard of living and emerge as an industrial power. We had to reduce food costs, so that families could spend money on other goods, and resources could flow to other economic sectors. And we had to make farming less labor-dependent, so that more of the population could enter non-farming occupations and support economic growth and development.
America’s agricultural crisis gave rise to deep national frustration. The inefficiency of farms meant low crop yields, high prices, limited choice, and uneven quality. The agricultural system was fragmented and disorganized, and ignored evidence showing how things could be done better. Shallow plowing, no crop rotation, inadequate seedbeds, and other habits sustained by lore and tradition resulted in poor production and soil exhaustion. And lack of coördination led to local shortages of many crops and overproduction of others.
You might think that the invisible hand of market competition would have solved these problems, that the prospect of higher income from improved practices would have encouraged change. But laissez-faire had not worked. Farmers relied so much on human muscle because it was cheap and didn’t require the long-term investment that animal power and machinery did. The fact that land, too, was cheap encouraged extensive, almost careless cultivation. When the soil became exhausted, farmers simply moved; most tracts of farmland were occupied for five years or less. Those who didn’t move tended to be tenant farmers, who paid rent to their landlords in either cash or crops, which also discouraged long-term investment. And there was a deep-seated fear of risk and the uncertainties of change; many farmers dismissed new ideas as “book farming.”
Things were no better elsewhere in the world. For industrializing nations in the first half of the twentieth century, food was the fundamental problem. The desire for a once-and-for-all fix led Communist governments to take over and run vast “scientific” farms and collectives. We know what that led to: widespread famines and tens of millions of deaths.
The United States did not seek a grand solution. Private farms remained, along with the considerable advantages of individual initiative. Still, government was enlisted to help millions of farmers change the way they worked. The approach succeeded almost shockingly well. The resulting abundance of goods in our grocery stores and the leaps in our standard of living became the greatest argument for America around the world. And, as the agricultural historian Roy V. Scott recounted, four decades ago, in his remarkable study “The Reluctant Farmer,” it all started with a pilot program.
I
n February, 1903, Seaman Knapp arrived in the East Texas town of Terrell to talk to the local farmers. He was what we’d today deride as a government bureaucrat; he worked for the United States Department of Agriculture. Earlier in his life, he had been a farmer himself and a professor of agriculture at Iowa State College. He had also been a pastor, a bank president, and an entrepreneur, who once brought twenty-five thousand settlers to southwest Louisiana to farm for an English company that had bought a million and a half acres of land there. Then he got a position at the U.S.D.A. as an “agricultural explorer,” travelling across Asia and collecting seeds for everything from alfalfa to persimmons, not to mention a variety of rice that proved more productive than any that we’d had. The U.S.D.A. now wanted him to get farmers to farm differently. And he had an idea.
Knapp knew that the local farmers were not going to trust some outsider who told them to adopt a “better” way of doing their jobs. So he asked Terrell’s leaders to find just one farmer who would be willing to try some “scientific” methods and see what happened. The group chose Walter C. Porter, and he volunteered seventy acres of land where he had grown only cotton or corn for twenty-eight years, applied no fertilizer, and almost completely depleted the humus layer. Knapp gave him a list of simple innovations to follow—things like deeper plowing and better soil preparation, the use of only the best seed, the liberal application of fertilizer, and more thorough cultivation to remove weeds and aerate the soil around the plants. The local leaders stopped by periodically to confirm that he was able to do what he had been asked to.
The year 1903 proved to be the most disastrous for cotton in a quarter century, because of the spread of the boll weevil. Nonetheless, at the end of the season Porter reported a substantial increase in profit, clearing an extra seven hundred dollars. He announced that he would apply the lessons he had learned to his entire, eight-hundred-acre property, and many other farmers did the same. Knapp had discovered a simple but critical rule for gaining coöperation: “What a man hears he may doubt, what he sees he may possibly doubt, but what he does himself he cannot doubt.”
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The following year, the U.S.D.A. got funding to ramp up his activities. Knapp appointed thirty-three “extension agents” to set up similar demonstration farms across Texas and into Louisiana. The agents provided farmers with technical assistance and information, including comparative data on what they and others were achieving. As experience accrued, Knapp revised and refined his list of recommended practices for an expanding range of crops and livestock. The approach proved just as successful on a larger scale.
The program had no shortage of critics. Southern Farm Magazine denounced it as government control of agriculture. But, in 1914, after two years of stiff opposition, Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act, establishing the U.S.D.A. Cooperative Extension Service. By 1920, there were seven thousand federal extension agents, working in almost every county in the nation, and by 1930 they had set up more than seven hundred and fifty thousand demonstration farms.
As Daniel Carpenter, a professor of government at Harvard, points out, the demonstration-farm program was just one of a hodgepodge of successful U.S.D.A. initiatives that began as pilots. Another was devoted to comparative-effectiveness research: experimental stations were established—eventually, in every state—that set about determining the most productive methods for growing plants and raising livestock. There was a pilot investigation program, which, among other things, traced a 1904 fruit-decay crisis in California to cuts in the fruit from stem clippers and the fingernails of handlers (and, along the way, introduced modern packing methods industry-wide). The U.S.D.A.’s scientific capabilities grew into the world’s greatest biological-discovery machine of the time.
The department invested heavily in providing timely data to farmers, so that they could make more rational planting decisions. It ran the country’s weather-forecasting system. And its statistics service adopted crop-reporting systems from Europe that allowed it to provide independent crop forecasts—forecasts that, among other things, dramatically reduced speculation bubbles. (In 1927, Republicans, prompted by aggrieved New York speculators, managed to prohibit the U.S.D.A. from releasing the forecasts; the program was reinstituted three years later, following an outcry from farmers.) The department continuously updated its storehouse of technical assistance, so that when new technologies arrived—new hybrid varieties, new kinds of fertilizer, new forms of mechanization—farmers were able to make use of them more swiftly and effectively. The U.S.D.A. established an information-broadcasting service. A hundred and seventeen commercial and forty-six military radio stations carried crop reports; printed reports were distributed to fifteen million farmers a year. It also introduced a grading system for food—meat, eggs, dairy products, and fresh fruits and vegetables—to flag and discourage substandard quality.
What seemed like a hodgepodge eventually cohered into a whole. The government never took over agriculture, but the government didn’t leave it alone, either. It shaped a feedback loop of experiment and learning and encouragement for farmers across the country. The results were beyond what anyone could have imagined. Productivity went way up, outpacing that of other Western countries. Prices fell by half. By 1930, food absorbed just twenty-four per cent of family spending and twenty per cent of the workforce. Today, food accounts for just eight per cent of household income and two per cent of the labor force. It is produced on no more land than was devoted to it a century ago, and with far greater variety and abundance than ever before in history.
This transformation, though critical to America’s rise as a superpower, involved some painful dislocations: farms were consolidated; unproductive farmers were winnowed out. As the historian Sally Clarke, of the University of Texas at Austin, has pointed out, it’s astonishing that the revolution took place without vast numbers of farm foreclosures and social unrest. We cushioned the impact of the transformation—with, for instance, price supports that smoothed out the price decline and avoided wholesale bankruptcies. There were compromises and concessions and wrong turns. But the strategy worked, because United States agencies were allowed to proceed by trial and error, continually adjusting their policies over time in response not to ideology but to hard measurement of the results against societal goals.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
I'm more surprised at how he seemed to be unaware of how not streamlined it was to get through in our system. I'm not worried about how he didn't know the right department to call or whatever, but his misconception on how easy it is/fast it is to get certain questions answered. That's the only negative aspect toward Obama I take from this article.But even an optimum solution isn't going to be something a single guy will be able to fully know/comprehend.
How was the ruin forced upon the tax payer, GGT? Did the big banks send letters and emails out demanding our money?I'm not interested in repeating threads about the housing bubble, over-leveraged banks, debt derivatives of MBSs and CDSs, AIG/ Lehman/Bear Stearns, Kool-Aid bingers, deregulation, and the financial meltdown....the reasons behind Big Bank Bailouts, TARP, HAMP, or QE I and II, etc. Suffice to say, those ruins were forced upon the tax payers.
The government that is big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.
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