I don’t know if it’s his liberalness (progressivity-?) or his lack of real world experience, but President Obama, like many (most-?) Democrats (and too many Republicans, unfortunately), confuses what government accomplishes with what it spends. If the sequester, or whatever, cuts the amount government spends, President Obama, and those who think as he does, seem to assume that government will accomplish less. The idea that good management might be able to reorganize how things are done in order to accomplish the same things, at a lower cost, isn’t something that would occur to him.
Just as bad, he assumes that, if the government spends more, then it necessarily accomplishes more, which is not true, either. In fact, it’s not true in any organization, private or public. And the bigger the organization, the less likely it is to be true, which is why it is so far from true in government. Except in the world of those who believe that the measurement of accomplishment is spending and that what counts is not what is actually done but what is spent doing it.
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