GraniteGrok

The following piece is reprinted with permission of the author. While he might live in Florida, his words are universal, and should be given a hearing by government officials and elected politicians up and down the foodchain everywhere...

There is not now, never was and never will be a group of humans with a common responsibility who cannot function more efficiently than they do.

A family living frugally can always tighten their belts a notch more during adverse times. There isn't a small business that, squeezed in a recession, cannot cut its overhead. There isn't an international conglomerate which, under pressure, cannot improve its bottom line.

Only federal, state and local governments seem unable to perform this basic necessity.

If only governmental agencies would recognize that - regardless of size, importance or function - they can accomplish their current, assigned mission with just 95 percent or less of their current budgets. There would be no need to propagandize the public with threats of reductions in services or laying off vital personnel or postponing needed works.

That is true and attainable for any one of them as it is for you and me. Whether it is feeding our families properly and adequately, our homes' energy usages, educating our children, affording leisure or entertainment, needed repairs or replacement to our residences - we all can accomplish what is vital with a tad more use of simple efficiency.

I acknowledge that such a proposal is anathema to government authorities, who will swear it is impractical, imbecilic and impossible.

Nevertheless, a 5 percent cut will work as well in government as it does in our family lives and business operations.

To make this "5% Solution" work, it must be from the top down.  Department heads, commissioners, agency chiefs, et al, should call their staffs together and announce a program of austerity is to begin.  He or she should then implement that by taking a 5% salary cut and urging those who can to follow suit.  No stigma for those who do not; no brownie-points for those who do.   That should then lead to the determinitation to perform the group's function as well and, hopefully, better than in the past - and at a 5% reduction in its budget.  This should as attainable in government as it is in the private sector.
 
Attention should be drawn to the State of Florida.  We here (I have a summer home in Michigan, a state with substantial financial problems and in a recession for a half-dozen years past) are faced with a considerable shortfall in state, county and local incomes. Our governmental officials have accepted that and are at work to considerably reduce expenditures while trying to maintain services.  Other states should follow suit.

Wouldn't it be refreshing to find a government official willing to give it a try?

ROGER F. MORAN

Hobe Sound

Mr. Moran will join us Saturday on Meet the New Press radio to discuss this. It is a pretty sad indictment of our present out of control systems of government when these common-sensical ideas seemingly appear to be so revolutionary and foreign...