One of the most dangerous things a columnist can do is admit his ideas come from others; but here I go. The Advocate (8-17-2011) attributed a letter to the editor to a gentleman named Roder (sic?)Russo. Mr. Russo works in the “oil industry” allegedly.

I don’t know Mr. Russo but I admire his ability to explain a complex subject with a simple declarative statement. Mr. Russo said take the $2.17T U.S. tax revenue, the Federal budget of $3.82T, the NEW DEBT of $1.65T, National Debt of $14.271T and the recent budget cuts of $38.5B and drop the eight zeros at the end of the numbered amounts. (Example: $2,170,000,000,000 becomes $21,700. Now view this as an American family’s [AmFam] budget. It gets interesting.)

AmFam has an income of $21,700. AmFam spent $38,200. AmFam put $16,000 on the AmFam’s credit card. There was a preexistent balance on that credit card of $142,710.  The recent budget cut can be viewed as a form of monthly minimum payment if you wish. This equaled $385. This indicates the “problem du jour” is not the national debt, deficit or lack of “revenue enhancements”. It’s caused by irresponsible spending.

My sincere thank you goes to Mr. Russo.

Barack Obama (B.O.) says we need to fix the economy. His way to accomplish this (with the agreement of Congress) is to establish a Super Committee of dedicated, intransigent ideologues of equal number from both political parties to assure a stalemate. This will also assure as much name calling, finger pointing and worthless rhetoric as is necessary to create issues cloudy enough for Obama to hide behind because he has NO plan (at this time) to repair the economy. He says we’ll get the new plan in September.

Why must we wait? And more to the point: where was this grand leadership hiding for the past three years? Oh yeah, I forgot. It was concealed behind the economic mess left behind by administrations going back to Alexander Hamilton.

B.O. is long on speeches and really short on substance. No. I mean more so lately than usual. He’s stumped across Iowa and the Midwest to (he says) listen to the people. He showed how well he listens when he was confronted on the Joe Biden “Tea Party Terrorist” flap. He shut down the conversation when the opponent wouldn’t capitulate and bow down to his regal high-handedness or something. His speeches proved especially pathetic. He patronizingly stabbed at being as “down-home” and folksy as possible. His latest initiative as a side-bar attempt at humor was: “get it done!” Anymore artifice and his calls for transparency would be realized. Everybody will see through him.

But some people can’t stop hoping for change. What that change will be, nobody can get a straight answer, but they keep hoping’ for change.

It’s fun to witness the witless trying so hard to criticize their opposition when the witless haven’t got a clue. Those clues are derived by trial and error. They’re developed by experiment, recordation of facts developing practical applications. You compare all this until you find the best program to put into action. This is the way products are developed for sale to anybody in any industry. The thing has to work or its failure will assure the loss of interest in both the product and its producer. (Now there’s a change to hope for.)

The problem is apparent when you analyze this modus operandi. 1) Work specifically off of theory. Practical examples of government that worked can be ignored because of the need for “change.” 2) When in danger of being found out as incompetent; create a crisis and blame the other guy. 3) Continue blaming the other guy until all other excuses run out, then-create new crisis to resolve and/or debate thus continuing to confuse the issues. 4) This is how you “Sound Presidential”.

Mr. Russo proved a point offered on 8-10-1787. Thomas Jefferson wrote:

“State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.”

Thanks for listening.