Thursday, January 08, 2004
Leadership Lessons
Newsday.com: Bloomberg calls for property tax refund in State of the City speech0 comments
This is how you manage a fiscal crisis:
- You cut what is cuttable. You eliminate waste.
- Then you raise taxes to cover the gap.
- You stand in, and take the heat.
- When the crisis passes, you lower the taxes back to where they were, like you promised you would. Then, you begin restoring services as is feasible.
Or, that's how a GOOD businessman, such as former CEO and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg handles a financial crisis. Perhaps that's why his personal stake from the successful company he created is worth billions.
Now, a BAD businessman, for example, President George W. Bush, takes a slightly different approach:
- First, insist on lower taxes for multimillionaires for the short term to give back the surplus funds at the Treasury.
- Then, as the economy slowly begins to cool, create a fiscal crisis of your very own to manage.
- You then insist on lower taxes for multimillionaires for the short term to address the fiscal crisis.
- You cut whatever governmental services you don't like.
- You cut everything you don't understand.
- You push through another round of lower short-term taxes for multimillionaires.
- You reward major corporations with massive government grants and contracts.
- When you run out of money, simply print more, and then borrow it.
- You explode the defense budget to eight times its previously bloated size.
- You then simply must cut every single service and program which you personally don't use to cover this further shortfall.
- You then push to make all of the short-term tax cuts for multimillionaires permanent, so the thorny problem of excess revenue never returns.
- You borrow more money.
- You blame every aspect of the fiscal crisis on a bloody attack which occured years before, which had much less to do with the fiscal crisis than your handling of it did.
- When the forces of natural, global economic cycles slowly begin to work their way through the economy and presage a return to economic normality, hold a press briefing, take full credit and proclaim, "What a Good Boy Am I!"
Perhaps this is why the president has a string of failed business ventures trailing along behind him.
Maybe that's why he needed his dad's friends to bail him out of the Harkin Oil business his dad set him up in, before he lost the fashions off his twins' back.
Maybe that's why the Texas Rangers baseball team continued its abysmal play during his tenure as General Partner, and why he needed his dad's friends to bail him out of the team before he lost the shirt off his own back.
Maybe that's why he ended up actually making money on each of these bailouts.
As he has noted countless times, President Bush has experience as a CEO.
Well, perhaps Mayor Bloomberg can run a company.
Maybe Mayor Bloomberg can run a city.
But President Bush can run a country, just like a company:
Into the ground.
posted by Gotham 3:33 PM
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