Autopsis

Ranking America

The United States of America enjoys many riches, inherent capabilities and positive attributes, as well as shortcomings, unresolved issues and a converging set of existential threats.

The challenge is to be aware of the upsides of the United States without becoming defiantly hostile to any discussion of specific shortcomings or ways the U.S. could improve, or, conversely, becoming so immersed and versed in America’s downsides as to become blind to the unique positive capabilities, characteristics and opportunities the U.S. offers.

When you live in the United States, it often seems as if the U.S. is either all bad or all good depending on which political party is in power and which talk radio station, screaming cable channel or hyper-partisan web site or publication you are feeding into your head at the moment.

In addition, the United States has a long cultural history of and peculiar cultural affection for jeremiads, mournful and often bitter lamentations about the state of society and government. If you spend any time exposing yourself to discussion or media concerning public or foreign policy, it won’t be long before you come across one form of jeremiad or another predicting the imminent doom of the country, accompanied by a long list of complaints and depressing statistics. However, as they say about paranoia, just because a jeremiad shouts that the sky is falling doesn’t mean it isn’t true. The challenge is to sort out the real threats from the partisan fueled hyperbole and opponent bashing.

Faced with so much hyper-partisan ideology and agenda-advancing content, it can be difficult to establish and maintain an assessment of where the country actually is relative to the rest of the world, much less where it needs to go.

Here are some objective facts to help achieve that goal.

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Tags: airports, cell phone, exports, fixed investment, GDP, GDP per capita, Gini, gross domestic product, household income, imports, infant mortality, innovation, international aid, internet hosts, life expectancy, metric, military spending, mobile phone, movies, oil consumption, oil production, public debt, railways, roadways, telephone lines, top 100 software companies, top 500 businesses, universities, weights and measures

Posted in Cultures, Econ / Finance, Outside the Fishbowl, US Politics | No Comments »

A Perfect Storm

“…our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  Now we are … testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” – Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

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The United States of America faces an unprecedented combination of challenges in the coming decade. Bankrupt finances, political extremist and ideologues, government gridlock, a decaying infrastructure, dependence on foreign oil, declining education standards and results, loss of credible information sources, public health and geopolitical decline relative to rising powers all promise to change the very nature of life as we know it. 

Consider the following list of facts, and also consider the implications of these facts, which will all combine in the next ten years.

(click for larger image)

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Tags: Congress, education, federal budget, Geopolitics, government, health care, information, leadership

Posted in Cultures, Econ / Finance, Geopolitics, Outside the Fishbowl, US Politics, health care reform | 1 Comment »

The Nature of Change

More than 9 out of 10 patients do not change their lifestyles in response to their doctor’s recommendations.

More than 70 percent of corporate change efforts fail.

Humans hate change.

It’s a simple fact of life. There isn’t any easy way around it. In general, humans hate change.

That rule extends beyond individuals into groups of humans: families, tribes, organizations, companies, communities and nations. Humans hate change.

As individuals and groups, we tend to get locked into a way of doing things, a set of perceptions and a set of expectations. Anything that forces us to change anything about what we consider normal is usually resisted.

Even in the face of overwhelming evidence for the need for change, we will resist change. For example, the majority of people who suffer heart attacks do not make long term changes in their lifestyles to eliminate or limit factors that contribute to heart disease. In other words, even when it’s a matter of life and death, humans hate change so much they won’t change even to save their own lives.

There are university degree programs in change management; multiple national and global professional associations of practicing change management consultants; countless thousands of trained, certified and degreed change management practitioners and a cornucopia of books, videos, workshops and tutorials on implementing change. In spite of all this learning and all these resources, there has been relatively little improvement in change rates in humans or groups of humans.

Why is this so?

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Tags: change, change cycle, change management, human change, the curse of success

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Getting From A to B

As any school kid can tell you, the quickest way to get from point A to point B is a straight line.

However, life doesn’t usually work in straight lines, and just like driving a car, getting anything from A to B is usually a long series of slight corrections: a little right, a little left, repeat.

In doing so, you get from A to B with a minimum of time and effort.

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Tags: extremists, gerrymander, government, gridlock, House, ideologues, moderates, Senate

Posted in US Politics | 2 Comments »

Who’s Driving The Bus?

The federal government of the United States of America is divided into three branches: executive (the president and vice president), judiciary (Supreme Court and federal judges) and the Congress (the House of Representatives and the Senate). Of these three, two branches are elected, the executive and Congress, while the judiciary is appointed by the president and approved by the Senate.

The judiciary affects public policy, and therefore day-to-day life, only when a case is brought before it and the court rules on the case based on legal precedent and interpreting the U.S. Constitution. The president has a range of executive powers and can implement some policies and changes in regulations without any involvement of Congress, but for almost everything important, nothing happens with public policy (spending, laws, regulations and requirements) in the United States without Congress.

For instance, a president can propose policies and laws all he or she wants, but nothing happens until Congress both passes the law, and critically, allocates funds to pay for that law. As the saying goes, “Congress controls the purse strings.” No matter what a president does or doesn’t do, in the end, Congress determines how much money will be spent and what it will be spent on. Consequently, when you’re looking for responsibility related to government spending, the buck stops with Congress. The same goes for public policy in general. When you’re looking for responsibility for what’s going on the in the country and where the country is headed, look no further than Capitol Hill.

Since Congress creates and funds the laws of the country, it is primarily responsible for the state of governance in the United States. Congress creates and implements the public policies that determine the day-to-day realities of every person in the country. Congress’ leadership and vision, or lack thereof, determines the short-, mid- and long-term fate of the nation.

In short, Congress is driving the bus, and the quality of the job they do driving our bus determines if the bus makes it to the station or goes over a cliff.

So, who are these people driving the national bus?

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Tags: Congress, demographics, income, incumbants, lawyers, net worth, U.S. households

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Wanna get rich? Get elected!

Americans often have suspicions regarding their elected officials and money. Specifically, what are the politicians doing with all that money they are swimming in, and does any of that money stick to their fingers?

It’s difficult to not be suspicious when the 2008 elections rang in at a cost of $5.3 billion dollars. Candidates for the House of Representatives raised $1 billion dollars for the 2008 election, with the Senate candidates adding $500 million dollars. That’s more than $1.5 billion dollars to buy the seats of Congress.

The least expensive seat you could buy in Congress in 2008 went to Representative Marcia L Fudge (D-Ohio) who spent only $94,049 out of the $1,323,209 raised by the three contestants. The most expensive seat in 2008 was Minnesota’s senate seat, which cost $46,175,432, of which the winner, comedian Al Franken, spent $21,066,834.

In 2008 the 14,446 lobbyists who permeate the United States political system spent $3.3 billion dollars influencing the government. In the same year, Political Action Committees (PAC) with foreign ties contributed $6,456,465 to candidates and domestic PACs threw in $413,093,959 to purchase access and shape public policy. In addition, the so called “527” groups, named for the section of the tax code that created the loophole they operate in, threw in $439,210,000, every dollar of which was completely unregulated by the Federal Election Commission and subject to no limits.

When Americans ponder these billions of dollars flowing into the government, dollars whose only purpose is to buy influence with the people tasked with creating the laws and policies of the country, it’s only natural to be concerned. When Americans compare the challenges the country faces to the lack of logical, pragmatic and timely action on the part of Congress, they grow frustrated, especially when they sense connections between the lack of action and the sources of the billions spent to influence the members of Congress. To then look at Congress and see a group of people whose average net worth ranges from more than $4 million dollars for the House and $12 million dollars for the Senate, it’s not a big leap for Americans to wonder if any of the billions of lobbying, PAC and 527 dollars are ending up in the pockets of Congress.

Why isn’t anything done on Capitol Hill about the challenges we face as a nation? What does all that money buy? And where does all that money end up? Those are natural questions.

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Tags: 527, Congress, influence, lobbying, lobbyists, PAC, Representative, Senator

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Ever Bigger Boxes

In the posts Show Me Your Budget and Buying Boxes I addressed the components and priorities of the United States government budget and how we as a nation pay for that budget. What I did not address are the components of that budget that are on rapid growth curves and the implications therein.

Of the overall United States government budget, very few components are actually under the spending control of congress on an annual basis. The elements of the budget that can be varied year to year are termed discretionary; the elements that cannot be varied by congress are termed mandatory. The following graphic illustrates the areas of the 2010 budget that comprise the discretionary spending components.

(click image for larger size)

2010 Budget Discretionary Spending Components

As you can see, very little of the $3.6 trillion dollar 2010 budget is discretionary. Mandatory items are “hard wired,” under our existing system, they cannot be varied by congress or the president. Most of the “hard wired” nature of mandatory expenses is political. No politician in their right mind would suggest cutting Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. No elected or appointed official cognizant of their fiduciary duties would suggest defaulting on interest payments for the national debt. Consequently, mandatory programs tend to become permanent fixtures in the annual United States government budget; they form figurative “third rail” issues, much to hot for any elected official to confront. This fact doesn’t change regardless of which party controls the presidency or congress; nobody is going to alter mandatory programs unless they increase their costs as a populist appeal to the electorate.

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Tags: discretionary spending, federal budget, mandatory spending, national debt

Posted in Econ / Finance, US Politics | No Comments »

Buying Boxes

In the post Show Me Your Budget, I addressed the U.S. federal budget via an illustration that used proportionally sized boxes to reflect spending priorities. What I didn’t cover was how we pay for those boxes, both the overall box of the entire budget, as well as its constituent departments and programs.

When you get right down to it, as taxpayers, we purchase a set of goods and services from the U.S. government. In exchange for our taxes, fees and surcharges we get a campsite in a national park, an interstate highway system, a (supposedly) regulated financial system, an Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard, a Border Patrol, CIA, NSA, FBI, DEA, TSA and countless other three letter acronym agencies, federal standards for everything from allowable amounts of insect parts in hot dogs to airplane tire performance and too many other goods and services to include in this post. We take most of these goods and services for granted, as we do how those goods and services are paid for.

Every one of those goods and services comes from one of the boxes in the illustration. What we don’t think about is how we buy those boxes.

(click image for larger size)

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Tags: deficit, U.S. federal budget, U.S. government spending, U.S. national debt

Posted in Econ / Finance, Geopolitics, US Politics | 1 Comment »

Show Me Your Budget

In my book, How The World Works, entry 512 is Priorities vs. Budgets.

It reads:

“As a business management consultant I heard a lot about priorities. In the introductory meeting and group management team interviews, senior executives would drone on endlessly about the organization’s priorities. Top priority this and critical priority that; it was all I could do to keep my eyes from rolling back in my head.

If the senior executives started down that same path in my personal, one-on-one, interviews I would usually cut them off and say, ‘Don’t tell me about your priorities, show me your budget.’

People, teams, groups, tribes and organizations often make a big show of pontificating about their priorities. Very rarely does the investment of their resources reflect their stated priorities.

It comes down to fundamental honesty – honesty with yourself, with your team, with your organization, with your business. It is one thing to spout about priorities. It is another to live them.

Show me your budget.”

The same is true of countries. Their leaders and citizens often pontificate about the priorities of their society, but the truth is revealed in what they invest their resources in, especially their financial resources.

The New York Times posted a wonderful interactive graphic that illustrates the current 2010 budget and the proposed 2011 budget here: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html?hp

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Tags: federal budget, national purpose, US budget, US government spending

Posted in Cultures, Econ / Finance, US Politics | 4 Comments »

Fear, thy name is Ron Wayne

One of the little known facts of Apple’s history is that Apple wasn’t the creation of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Apple was actually founded by three guys: Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and Ron Wayne.

The equity split was Wozniak 45%, Jobs 45% and Wayne 10%.

Wozniak recalls, “Steve had 45 percent of this partnership, I had 45 percent, and Ron had 10 percent, because both of us agreed that we could trust him to resolve any dispute, and we would trust his judgment.”

So what ever happened to Ron Wayne, a guy who had 10% founding equity in Apple?

Wozniak relates, “I had no money and Steve had no money. We didn’t own cars, we didn’t have savings accounts, we didn’t have houses. So Ron Wayne figured they’d come after him for his golden nuggets that he kept under his mattress. (He actually tells me it was in a safe-but he was afraid they’d come and get his gold.) So he sold out. It was too risky for him, so he sold out his 10 percent of Apple to [us] for a few hundred bucks. Maybe $600, maybe $800, maybe $300-but   a few hundred bucks. And this was even when we had an Apple II designed and were heading toward future business. He was just scared that something was going to catch him.”

Apple’s market capitalization this morning is $181.7 billion, with a B. If Ron Wayne had stayed around (and assuming no dilution), his 10 percent of Apple would be worth $18 billion. With a B.

Fear, thy name is Ron Wayne.

Sources:

• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston
• Yahoo! Finance

Tags: Apple, fear, jobs, Wozniak

Posted in Business, Sci / Tech | No Comments »