Give President Obama a Break!

We’ve all seen the campaign promises and inconsistencies from his administration on video throughout the last year.  Those are facts that no one can dispute and will be dealt with at election time.  But I think there is a larger issue that is being overlooked.  The President called for transparency, it didn’t happen and mistakes were made.  It’s true he is in charge of our government and should be held accountable, but the American people need to understand that it is not entirely his fault.  He is our President, so I think all Americans should, in spite of any evidence to the contrary, give him the benefit of the doubt about wanting transparency until the next election.  We have to work together or our nation will fail, and a transparent government is a good start.

For many Americans who have not worked with the federal civilian workforce this may be a surprise or a shock.  In the federal government, it is widely known that outside of law enforcement and security, probably about 25 percent of the people, at the most, do all the real work.  The other 75 percent have jobs and that’s about it.  It’s an employment program – some insiders call it a welfare program, that’s all it is.  Anyone who works with feds knows this – it’s a privately held known fact.  Federal workers are paid more than their private sector counterparts and they produce much less.

So when the President calls for transparency in government he might be sincere but there are a lot of folks standing in his way.  Take Congress for instance – they are hiding things as we just learned about in health care reform.  The President said the other day that some of the provisions that got “snuck in” might have violated his pledge.  He said he would fix it, and that’s all we should expect.  He is our President, and we should take him at his word, nothing less.

However, the President has an even bigger problem than that.  For what I estimate to be the 75 percent of worthless bureaucrats populating the ranks of our government, well, they have a lot to hide.  They know what happens when we find out they don’t contribute anything productive at work.  And boy, I don’t have to tell you that they are sharp to criticize anything that does.  They use their position power to protect themselves from being revealed, and that is what we have to stop.

So the solution isn’t just to cut spending or to raise taxes or anything like that.  The solution is to remove the power from the federal government brick by brick.  The American people should go line by line in the budget and pick out programs they want and then decide – who does it – a government bureaucracy at the federal level, or somewhere closer to the people like the state, local or even the private side.

It’s not going to be fixed from inside the federal ranks and it’s not going to be fixed fast.  To make government transparent the people have to do it from the outside-in.  No blue ribbon commission of ex-Senators and Congressman or top bureaucrats can fix the problem from the inside.  There are too many strong forces with bullshit jobs and lucrative contracts producing little or nothing to hide.  The real fix is for the American people to elect officials who have the guts to make the tough choices and shed the pork.

We also have to look-in at the problem from the outside.  We need real transparency.  The President has called for it, so we should take him at his word.  It’s the only way anything will get fixed.