Are They Experienced?

If businesspeople ran their shops like our elected officials run theirs (ours actually), the business wouldn’t last very long at all. Too many politicians seem more interested in short-term political gains rather than the long-term prospects of whichever city, county, state or country they’re running. 

Too many don’t seem to know the value of real dollars, they seem to think of the tax dollars we send them as monopoly money.  

There are similarities and differences between running a business and running a government. In my opinion, one of the similarities is pretty simple: they shouldn’t spend more than they take in.

The biggest difference is, the taxpayer is always on the hook while the consumer can go somewhere else. If a stand-up comic isn’t that funny, a captive audience is a very handy thing to have; but unfortunately when it comes to government, the joke is always on us.  

When a businessperson makes a bad decision, they need to be able to recognize it, and know when to cut their losses. When someone in government makes a bad decision, their reaction is usually the opposite; they don’t admit it, and usually try a hair of the dog remedy. It seems to be common sense that you can’t drink yourself sober, you can’t spend your way out of debt and throwing good money after bad is never good.

When our government officials play a bad hand, instead of admitting a mistake and learning from it, they double down. Of course, they have some options the rest of us really don’t have.  Try getting into deep debt and telling your credit card company that you’re waiting for inflation to set in, so you can pay them with cheaper dollars.  

I’ve heard people say that the elected members of our government should have served in the military, so when they deploy troops they know exactly what it means to the service people and their families. Military service is an education in and of itself; it’s a great experience,  service people learn accountability, responsibility, leadership, and I believe everyone leaves the military with more backbone than they they had when they went in. But in my opinion, it would be just as helpful if our elected officials spent some time working in the private sector.  

They should learn that when they put pen to paper, it can have terrible consequences. I honestly think that some business experience would be extremely helpful to the people that hold office, even at the highest level. I don’t think very many of them have an understanding of the consequences of their decisions.  

George McGovern was a well know Senator and Presidential Candidate. By his own admission, his ideology and policies weren’t exactly “business friendly.” He seemed to think making money came easily for businesspeople. Usually, I don’t give the benefit of the doubt to these people; I really don’t think most mean well. But in hindsight, I think George McGovern might have; he just didn’t know better. He chose a career path where he didn’t need to exist by his own efforts. He did his job in the collective huddle of government.

He was apparently enamored with the restaurant business, so when he retired from politics he opened an Inn in Connecticut. It was just a bed and breakfast type place, pretty simple and straightforward. His little dream was called “The Stratford Inn.” Unfortunately, the dream didn’t last too long; even with his celebrity name (and all of that government experience) behind it. The Stratford Inn quickly went bust. George McGovern failed at running his B&B, but at one time, thought he should be running everything.  

McGovern wrote an opinion piece called “A Politician’s Dream: A Businessman’s Nightmare.”  It was basically an admission that as a US Senator, he really had very little understanding of business, even as he helped to write laws that each American business would live or die with.  By his own admission, he was clueless as he made the rules for others to follow. It wasn’t quite an apology, but it was an admission of ignorance. Even that was a breath of fresh air from a politician at his level.  

I’m not trying to say that any businessperson would be great in a political office (obviously that wouldn’t be the case) or any politician would be an incompetent businessperson; I’m saying that the people that make the rules should have a better understanding of what they’re doing, and that can’t be taught in a classroom.

If a person holding office doesn’t have business experience, they should listen to the people that do.  No one really understands running a business until they need to make payroll, need to come up with money to repair an expensive piece of equipment, need to come up with the taxes and insurance money by Friday morning, or has to dip into their own savings account to pay the power bills because they didn’t make enough to cover it that month. They don’t really teach curve balls in college, classroom theory ends when the bell rings and the keg party begins.  

When I evaluate candidates before voting, I really like to see some private sector experience, or I listen to see if the candidate at least understands it. Our economy, our jobs, our country starts at the level of small business, not at the Federal Reserve, Wall Street or the Washington beltway. Small business employ 3/5 of the American workforce. If we stopped stepping on the roots of our economy, they might actually grow into something.

For me, business experience, or at least an understanding of the private sector means a lot more than where a candidate was educated, what their grades were, how many letters are behind their names, how many babies they kissed or what bills they managed to push through some legislative body.  

I also look at the job they’re applying for as if it was a business. The business might have a budget of $70 million in the case of our small town, or $1,025,000,000,000 in the case of the Federal government. Which candidate do I trust handling that kind of business? Do you think that over simplifies things? Well, I think it’s better than the popularity contest most of us engage in.  

People running businesses need to spend wisely; they’re playing with their own money.  People that run governments should learn from that, but instead they borrow, spend, float bonds, go into debt, and actually look for places to spend rather than asking “do we really need this?”  

They have that luxury; they’re not playing with their own money, they’re playing with other people’s. They’re playing with ours.