It's not a spending problem . . . It's a revenue problem

We sat on the brink of closing down the Federal government and all we heard from the right side of the fence was "CUT TAXES--CUT SPENDING." So how do you manage to do both and maintain services?

We often hear from this same side that we need to either run government as a household or as a business. So let's examine what the tea party and the right is suggesting in that light:

HOUSEHOLD MODEL

Say you're running a household with both parents working and you're feeling a budget pinch. The first thing you'll do is to start cutting expenses. You'll forgo that night out at the fine dining restaurant, you won't buy that new car, you might put off a vacation. OK, cutting spending seems to be working, but then things get a little worse, you have to start cutting more. Now you cut out the trips to McDonalds, you put off some of the car maintenance hoping to get a few more miles out of it before something breaks, you deny the kids their high school yearbook. But it's not enough. So the father gets a second job to increase the family income. You DON'T, while cutting expenses, decide that the wife should quit her job and become a stay-at-home mom. That would be insanity.

BUSINESS MODEL

You have a small business, making widgets. You have a workforce which is costing you about 20% in wages and benefits and you're making good money. Because the markets expect you to not only make good money, but to have year-over-year increases (otherwise you become a takeover target), you need to increase revenues, but the business is slow and your market share is fixed. So you cut expenses. You begin by looking at your biggest expense which is labor. So you don't give increases and reduce staff, you then look at benefits and negotiate lower health care costs or reduce the retirement benefits. In a business environment you never consider deferring equipment maintenance. But as things get a little worse you need to cut even more. However, you see an opportunity to expand and need to purchase more equipment. Is this the time to cut prices? Your staffing is at minimum, your equipment is older, and you need to modernize. NO business ever reduces income during an expansion phase.

So why do we think that we can both cut costs AND taxes (revenue) at the same time we're in financial trouble AND we're fighting two wars? At no other time in history has any government ever cut taxes while trying to fight a war. If we learn nothing else from history, we should at least learn that the downfall of the great societies, Rome, Greece, etc. has been because they could not sustain economically while fighting expensive wars.

More on this subject in my next posting which will cover where we've come from and where we're actually at regarding revenues and spending.

NUMBER vs. VOLUME

I was reading the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin this morning and one of my MAJOR issues was there staring me in the face. Was it corruption in Pomona? No. Was it the dismantling of our history? No.

I was faced with this sentence in an article on page A3 by Canan Tasci on parking problems at Chaffey College: ". . . and that increases the amount of people trying to park on campus." Because the offending phrase was used in a direct quote I can't blame Canan Tasci, but it's usually OK for a reporter to clean up any obvious grammar problems. I'm sure that there was probably a "you know" or "like" in there that didn't make it into the quote (just speculation). The problem is that I've seen this type of thing in a LOT of stories in the newspaper (from some good writers) and heard in constantly in TV and radio news reporting. I guess copy editing is one of the victims of the changes in the news industry.

The grammar rule is that if you use a number word (few, fewer, more, less, number, amount, etc.) that a singular noun has to be an amount. You cannot have a number gasoline, but you can have an amount of gasoline so it would be "less gasoline," not fewer gasoline. When a noun is a plural, such a cows, you have a "number of cows," not an amount of cows. Amount refers to "volume" while number refers to (hold on) number. The same is true for less and fewer. Less refers to volume and is used on singular nouns (less gasoline, less cereal, less stress) and fewer refers to plural numbers (fewer cars on the road, fewer accidents on the highways, fewer pills I have to take for the stress).

One of the places where this first reared its ugly head was in grocery checkout lines. The sign above one or two of the lines began reading "10 items or less." The noun items is clearly plural, so it should have been "10 items or fewer" which just didn't sound right. Actually a better sign would have read "fewer than 11 items," but we don't want to go there. This has caused the whole, plural vs. singular noun numbers words thing completely out of whack. We now hear that there were "less people than last year," "less cars on freeway on Fridays," etc.

AT LEAST: Our own local Stater Brothers market does have a sign above the two registers at the south end of the store that state, "15 items or fewer."

This post is repeated on the M-M-M-My Pomona blog. I promise not to do that again.