You know, I keep putting up this observation from Mr. Obama from his inauguration; I keep waiting for it to actually happen:
The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified."
– President Barack Obama, Inauguration, 1/20/09
And now after almost 10 years, is the Government actually doing a better job of working? In this case, tracking those aluminum tubes filled with flammable liquids that brought us to war in the first place:
NEW YORK – The Federal Aviation Administration is missing key information on who owns one-third of the 357,000 private and commercial aircraft in the U.S. — a gap the agency fears could be exploited by terrorists and drug traffickers.
Ya think that can be exploited! One could debate whether or not Government should tracker general aviation (re: small planes can not do the kind of destruction that an airliner can).
The records are in such disarray that the FAA says it is worried that criminals could buy planes without the government’s knowledge, or use the registration numbers of other aircraft to evade new computer systems designed to track suspicious flights. It has ordered all aircraft owners to re-register their planes in an effort to clean up its files.
About 119,000 of the aircraft on the U.S. registry have "questionable registration" because of missing forms, invalid addresses, unreported sales or other paperwork problems, according to the FAA. In many cases, the FAA cannot say who owns a plane or even whether it is still flying or has been junked.
This is but one example of when Government takes on more and more tasks (leaving aside whether it should or shouldn’t), it starts to NOT do them well (even as we end up expecting them to do so). Is this a core component of the Federal Government (tracking planes)? Should it do it to a six sigma level? If so, what’s the incentive to do so? What is the consequences when it doesn’t?
