No Skin In The Game I

View as PDF - - - Print Article

Today we begin a multipart multi-week series about the American tradition, using a Warren Buffet management principle, where the average American no longer has or can develop any skin in the game. Whether this no skin life has occurred by design or through unintended consequences truly makes no difference.

This skin is important because the future of the nation is at stake!

In this series I will attempt to put this in a context you will not read anywhere else. As a consequence it is designed to challenge your preconceived notions about the past, the present and the future, both within the current noisy national debate, but also within the picture of the big bad world beyond the borders and the shores.

Today President Obama is speaking about his freshly revised budget view for fiscal year 2012 and beyond. For most conservatives this budget will show what Tea Party Congressman from Florida’s 22nd Legislative District, Lt. Colonel Allen West described as leadership of a Buck Sergeant (E-5). As you will learn later, since my military experience had much tighter enlistment criteria than West’s Infantry, we had some PFCs (E-3) with that leadership potential.

However a miracle did happened in the United States late Friday evening. Of course I am referring to the budget deal hammered out within the Federal Government. A couple of years ago I would have described this event as an evolutionary testament, in that the Republican Party had amazingly developed a spine.

That was then, and being a little older, and none the wiser, I would add the Democrat Party to this wonderful happening, and characterize it as both parties and the entire political class finally having some skin in the game.

Looking back at history, I really can’t come up with the last time that this happened. There would be those who would say that occurred when the Federals were shut down in the 1990s, but those were much different times. It was back then, a marginal huffing and puffing, and today nothing of lasting substance remains.

Searching my vast knowledge of history, it seems for as long as I can remember politicians have made promises to help the middle class, or the working person, or the wise consumer, when in reality they have, at best, ignored those promises, and given anyone who would help them get reelected, gifts, tax incentives, and special interest payoffs.

As we are now only beginning to understand as reality, for the last fifty years these political games have been carried out by designed inflation, loose monetary policy, and overly leveraged debt.

Tags: USA, Barack Obama, Congress, Great Society, John Kennedy, Collectivist Elitists, Laissez Faire Scoundrels, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Vietnam