Why don't we hear the word "efficiency" more? About the only place the word comes up is regard to gas mileage. If a car gets more miles per gallon, it seems that we all accept that as "more" efficient. The problem is that you can seldom define "efficiency" based on just one parameter. What if we had two cars to compare and one cost $5,000, got 30 mmpg and had 100,000 more good miles in it and the other cost $45,000, got 35 mpg and was good for about 200,000 miles. This is a little like the cash for junkers program. The question is, which is the most efficient? When Obama, never took any advanced math or science, analysed this problem, he only looked at the mpg and not the total cost. When you look at the total cost and do a little 4th grade math, you find that the $5,000 car is the most efficient.
The reason that I use the above example is that we are all familiar with it and 99% of us came down on the wrong side. That just might be because the USA ranks 25th out of 30 in science and math. If you see where I am going, you have already concluded that the USA is toast. That might not be true, but it is going to require us to start using our brains and get back to basics.
Now what are these basics? The most important one is "efficiency". Take WWII compared to modern warfare. In WWII, it took several hundred bombs to distroy a factory or bridge. We never did distroy the bridge in North Vietnam. They could get materials across the bridge the full length of the war. Now modern bombing is much different. I takes only "one" bomb to take out a bridge. Now that is efficiency by a factor of hundreds to one. For some reason people understand that farmers are much more efficient now then they were just a few years ago. Most people don't know anything about farming, so why do they come to this correct conclusion in regard to farming? They don't seem to come to a similar conclusion for our school teachers, or the federal department of education. Why is that? They don't understand the concept of efficiency. When the cave man came up with the club, he became a much more efficient hunter for food. His efficiency was rewarded with a meal and he went on form there. How is it any different today. It used to take months to cross the USA from East Coast to the West. Now it only takes a few hours. That is efficiency. It used to take days to get a message across the country and today it takes only seconds. That is efficiency. Now what would this place be like today if we had not made our total systems more efficient? It would be a little like Africa is today.
When the Republicans take over the house in a few weeks, they are going to cutting cost. The reason that they will have to cut costs is that many of the current expenditures are not "efficient". It is like the cash for clunkers. We have to stop spending money, which is like the blood of this nation, on things that do not pay back. When I say, "pay-back" I mean that they payback with interest. Would you put money into something where all that you would get is you same money back in 25 years. Our government has been putting money into things that we will not get our money back from in a million years, much less pay any interest. Notice all the attention given to mortgage rates. A very small change is big news. Why is there not the same focus on government spending? When I administeed big multimillion dollar budgets, I required the proposals to be ranked in terms of the interest that they earned and I had a cut off at about 12% below which I would not go. About all you will see coming out of our government is some kind of "benifit ratio". They assume that if it has a ratio above 1.0 that it is good and should be funded. They never look at alternative places to spend the money or to reject the idea totally.s Look at the big stink when the new Governor of New Jersey stopped the tunnel project. He said that it was not worth the money and he was right. How about the high speed train from Tampa to Orlando? What value is that? There was even on proposed between Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin. There is no limit on the stupidity of polititians.
Now think about it. Isn't this all about efficiency? Each time we spend money or the blood of this nation, it would improve the efficiency of the country and it should do it while paying back interest. Look at any project funded by our government and see if you can find where they calculated the rate of return or interest returned to the tax payers? Ask you congress men and any polititian that you can what rate of return we should expect for our tax money. If we kept the money and invested it, we would be asking about the rate of return, so why not our government?
The bottom line is that we as a nation are so dumb when it comes to math and science that we let people who are dumber than us spend our hard earned money stupidly. That has to stop.
