Donald Trump is a very, very different fellow. More importantly, he is going to be a very, very different president. How that becomes an "Emperor's New Clothes" story without anyone assuming that Trump is playing the character of the Emperor is fascinating -- in fact, it turns out that the rest of government is, but that's plot material.
If you hadn't noticed, Trump has been doing some "president things" lately, beginning with intervening in the move of a thousand-or-so employees at Carrier Air Conditioning in Indiana and, more recently, negotiating rather publicly with Boeing to cuts costs on the two planned presidential and vice-presidential aircraft and now with Lockheed Martin to cut costs on a fighter jet.
My best girl, often unintentionally the source of these essays, commented Friday on the Lockheed story as it was on TV. "Trump just looks at these things differently", she said. "He looks at them the way we would look at them, or any businessman would. It's about time."
She was, of course, right. [Note for "full disclosure" ... I receive a $30.33-per-month pension from Lockheed Martin, although I never worked for them; it's the artifact of Lockheed's acquisition of the pension fund of the former Singer Company 25 years ago. I'm pretty sure that $30.33 is not going to affect my ability to write about Lockheed.]
"The way a businessman would look at these things."
Of course. Why didn't we think of that? And that's the whole point of the piece. The USA has been suckered into believing that there was something essentially and innately different between the way a government operates and the way that an ordinary business operates, and it has turned us into lemmings who think government has to operate that way.
Hint: It doesn't have to.
Let us dispense with the fundamentals. Government is financially no different from a non-profit organization in that its fiscal goal is not to accumulate profit (surplus) for the purpose of distribution to "shareholders" as would a for-profit firm; any surplus is assigned to funds to be used in a subsequent period for the operation of the organization or execution of its services. Of course, our Federal government wouldn't know a surplus if it bit them.
While a non-profit has an obligation to its donors to maximize its services, Government has an obligation to its "donors" -- taxpayers -- to exercise fiscal restraint, precisely because they are not donors; the money provided is mandated by law to be seized from the citizen as taxes. A proper government respects that its funding was taken by law and not donated of the citizens' free will.
The law addresses this, beginning with the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, by allowing government to do only what it is granted the rights to do. That means that for the Federal government to go into debt to pay for services that it is Constitutionally not supposed to perform is fiscally and morally bankrupt.
And that, of course, is the point. Donald Trump sees government as those of us outside government should see it, but doesn't. For years, we saw government's right to do whatever it felt like as unfixable. That was until 2016 when a New York businessman with a lot of hair got us thinking that maybe government should respect a basic fact -- that its funding was not provided under free will, but through the confiscatory nature of tax law.
Government itself was the Emperor. The encrusted Executive Branch agencies, and the encrusted Congresses of years past, were their own tailor, spinning a tale that it was OK to borrow and spend beyond the taxpayers' means. We were the people, the lemmings who went along, afraid or unwilling to "say the concept nay" -- or in the case of the left, happy to use the fable to spend, spend, spend to gain and hold control of power.
Donald Trump will not allow himself to see government improperly. To Trump, the protection of the taxpayer's seized dollar is vital; we should not, as government always has, ignore price when you've confiscated the money to pay for it. He is showing that in his pre-presidential actions, demanding that fiscal sense becomes a first-tier rationale for spending decisions.
I am optimistic that Washington will not ruin Donald Trump but, rather, Trump will change Washington. If we are not pretty bloody close to a balanced budget by the end of his (first) term, I'll be disappointed, but also very surprised.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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