WILLIAMS: Forget the girls — government’s gone wild

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

If any chief executive officer in the United States of America presented his board with a budget that was one-third unfunded, he would be fired and tossed out of the boardroom immediately.

President Obama recently revealed a $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2011 that has a $1.3 trillion deficit. This budget shortfall represents $4,000 for every man, woman and child in America. It is equivalent to a business CEO presenting his board of directors with a financial plan to have a 34 percent loss. This is on top of a $1.6 trillion deficit in fiscal 2010 that is equivalent to a 40 percent business loss.

No bank in the world would finance a business with the losses (i.e. deficits that the U.S. government has had over the past few years).

The bankers would send the business executives back to the drawing board to restructure the company. This would include cutting personnel, reducing compensation and benefits, restraining travel and cutting commitments for services and capital expenses.

If the business executives could not eliminate the loss, the company would go into bankruptcy for the court to restructure or liquidate.

Unfortunately for our children and grandchildren, the U.S. government has another way to finance its losses. It transfers the payments of these losses to future generations of taxpayers by increasing the national debt. This deficit will increase the national debt to $15.7 trillion, or 101 percent of the gross domestic product. This is equivalent to $47,000 of debt for every American.

Mortgaging the future of American taxpayers should not be an acceptable option to the American people.

Our president has made anemic gestures to reduce spending in his budget in certain non-discretionary areas. However, these symbolic gestures take place after this fiscal year. If Mr. Obama truly and sincerely wishes to reduce the deficit, he must take similar actions that everyday U.S. corporations implement when confronted with huge losses.

Companies reduce their losses by cutting their work forces, reducing levels of employee compensation and eliminating all unnecessary spending to meet the shortfall. The U.S. government, on the other hand, continues to increase its work force in this great recession and is promoting and increasing the salaries of all government employees. It also has increased spending on new programs.

Only to exacerbate the issue, there have been no major discussions to re-engineer government employee retirement plans. Major companies in the auto industry have seen how difficult it can be to pay frightfully enormous pension plans over the years and how quickly this can monstrously grow into an uncontrollable financial burden.

However, our national government doesn’t have to face stock owners and a board of directors that would like to see the government grow and be prosperous and competitive.

Rather, these retirement benefits for government employees fly well under the public radar. Plus, their pensions will always be safe as unassuming taxpayers are continually cajoled by power-hungry politicians to uphold this lush retirement system. This is insane when our government continues to have this catastrophic deficit. This insanity is clearly a reflection on the extraordinary power that public-sector unions have on the Democratic Party. What this does, without question, is transfer wealth from the productive private sector to the unproductive public sector.

Wouldn’t it be great if the public sector were to be held accountable to the public? Wouldn’t it be nice if it had to answer to its investors — the taxpayers? Various arms of the government would have to become more efficient in their hiring, training and products and/or services. They would be forced to have balanced budgets, and the only bureaucracy would hold the dollar as king. Well, maybe only in a perfect world.

The deficit is driven not only by outrageous increases in labor costs, but by inextricably increasing entitlement costs. Unless this government faces the grim reality, these entitlement costs will soon drive our nation to severe bankruptcy — a bankruptcy from which our children and grandchildren will never recover.

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