It is quite fascinating to look over the events of the past few weeks and not feel a little bit squeamish. I don’t know about you but I am becoming more and more accustomed to change. Both as an old fart and understanding that our world is an amalgamation not a single credo to be adhered to.

As an American, a citizen and some sort of student of recent history, I always look to some sort of hook I can hang my hat on. The constitution, precedent, morality and maybe just a belief in our government and our people to be able to figure things out in a relatively civilized manner.

Governance is the whole shebang of how we mange this great nation.

Elected officials, bureaucrats, armed forces, central banks, you name it. Commonly built on fairness, transparency, responsibility, accountability, and the rule of law. These aren’t  wannabes or lofty principles. This is the way things should be done. I feel we have drifted so far from the basic tenets and life becomes more of what you can get away with rather than how you should act.

We spend a lot of money to keep the lights on and water running and planes flying and kids in school. The feds spend $7.4 trillion and state and local governments $4.6 trillion. That is about $34,000 for every single person in our United Sates. I wouldn’t dare try to figure out whether that has been properly spent or how much has gone to waste and fraud.

For a moment consider Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Probably $200 billion dollars are lost to error or fraud. Throughout all our spending about $770 billion never gets to where is is intended. If you add up state and local the number is at least $1.2 trillion. I am not trying to fill you up with numbers but that is about %10 of what we expend. Better put, it is saying you are and I are paying x and only getting 90% of X. That is our nickel and no-one else’s.

Getting back to that governance thing all of this is the result of years if not decades of a bunch of people not doing their jobs. Red and blue are equally bad. We have programs that give away some of that money. We have others that cut off revenue sources by loopholes so that money never comes in. The deficits that now teeter on $40 trillion. We didn’t do that. Our duly elected officials of all stripes did it.

We see insane projects like the high speed train from San Francisco to Los Angeles that is hopelessly mired in overruns and barely half built sections. Billions of cost overruns to become even one quarter operational.

The F35 strike fighter was introduced in 2001 at a projected cost of $232 billion. The expected lifetime cost is estimated to be

$2 trillion. We pay over $1 trillion in debt per annum. It there any culpability for this mess? We have a had decades of mismanagement, lack of oversight, and very little if any comeuppance for incredibly poor performance.

Immigration has been on the agenda since 1988. A good number  those people  that are being rounded up have made some sort of application. Backlogs and a horrible system of tracking make this a morass of enormous proportions. Bills are not brought the floor, referrals back to committee and a total inability to reach consensus bring us to grid lock. Each one blames the other and let’s adjourn for summer vacation or running for election. We will take it up under a new congress.

I could talk about education, infrastructure, drugs or AI. I would be wasting your and my time. At this point in time  we are unable to govern ourselves by ineptitude or malfeasance or a combination of both. This is not only on a national level but state and local too. Some say this is the way things have always been. Perhaps but the complexity of our world here and the confluence of geopolitics throughout every inch of the globe has made this a critical stress point.

France is a mess both politically and economically. Ditto good portions of Europe and South America. Young people are unemployed. Welfare systems are outpacing everyday needs just to keep things running. And elected officials are immune to removal because they all including us, just want to take care of the folks at home to insure their reelection. Nobody has a big picture and God forbid we would look at things long range.

People want to believe they can stay in their own little part of the world and let the others fend for themselves. Sorry kids. We are all in this forever. No we cannot secede or cut off funding. It just does not work that way.

I know let’s form a committee. We can do studies and hearings. We can come up with with a 10,000 page report with all sorts of good sounding points of action. Then two or three years from now we can have open discussion. By then the previous assumptions will be obsolete.

In our glitzy and overblown world we need a gigantic dose of sobriety. The Nvidia thing proves money in the right places can supersede laws and guardrails. Sorry, love conquers all. Ha!

The Democratic idiots are going to replace the Republican idiots. We will hit the restart button and waste time and money as usual.

They will tell you, “We’ve got this”. We have heard that before. People we don’t have a plan. We don’t have leaders. Sorry to say, “We haven’t got this at all”. I never thought I would say that.

As Always,

Ted The Great

Factoids:

Party Breakdown: Public opinion is sharply divided along party lines. For example, tracking polls like The Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll indicate that a majority of Republicans express optimism about the country’s direction, whereas large majorities of Democrats and independent voters view the current path as the wrong direction due to economic and financial pressures. It ain’t the other guys. It is all of us.

Major tax legislation over the past 25 years—including the 2001/2003 Bush tax cuts, subsequent extensions, and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA)—has significantly reduced federal revenues.

Over the last 25 years (FY2001 to FY2026), spending on the three largest federal entitlement programs—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—grew by approximately 370.4% in nominal dollars. Including broader mandatory safety-net and veterans’ programs, overall entitlement spending increased by roughly 298.1%, climbing from about $1.09 trillion in FY2001 to $4.36 trillion in FY2026

Sorry for all the data but someone tell me how this is ever going to work out?

Something for everyone is going to turn out to be nothing for anyone.

I have written a short book on Hospice. Hospice Is Not A Dirty Word. Please click on the tab  at the top of Ted’s Head to get more information.  Thank you