Good Morning to all of you people out there in semi-sanity land; your King of Simple News is on the air.

How many of you saw the Danny DeVito / Gregory Peck movie, Other People’s Money? It was a good film and worth watching. Other people’s money, or “OPM,” is a difficult phenomenon to fully comprehend.

As just one example, I was on the board of a large company for about five years where I observed the behavior of the average director when they get 50 miles away from home and are stewards of Other People’s Money.

Nothing was too good for these guys and gals so long as they were spending company money. The Radisson Suites, four star dining, and first class travel were standard fare. If a vote were taken to donate say $50K to a telephone museum somewhere in Nebraska, nearly everyone was in favor. I say nearly everyone, because I wasn’t.

These same directors when spending Their Own Money, or TOM, were somewhat less generous. In fact, when on TOM, I would see them driving the old Buick though the McDonalds drive-up after leaving Motel “6”.

So were my fellow directors unusually two sided in their behavior? Not at all, I’d say they were about as normal as humans are likely to be; OPM is a powerful influence.

The human mind can justify about anything, given a little time to do so. After voting to raise our meeting or per-diem fees, I would often hear such comments to my counter vote as, “It only represents 1/10^th of 1% of what this outfit takes in per hour.” Or, just after we would vote on giving the General Manager another coat of gold paint on his parachute, the same rational was stated, “His salary and benefits represent a very small fraction of our income.”

To these ill conceived arguments, I always made the same statement, “Waste and corruption are not divisible into any number that will arrive at a positive sum.”

The powerful influence of OPM exists at every level of our society, from our churches, to our educational systems, to the management of the smallest corporations. The big banks and large corporations are in a league of their own in the area of OPM distribution.

However, there is no greater example of the intoxicating influence that OPM has on human behavior than that of government. The higher up the governmental ladder you go, the more generous the distributors of OPM become; which brings me to my point.

The Framer’s of our Constitution understood OPM and therefore attempted to limit the power of the Federal Government’s ability to collect taxes, which if you’ll remember, was a problem among other things in 1775; a problem that precipitated the Revolutionary War.  

During our current difficult times, I hear many say that taxes of every nature will have to be raised while benefits are lowered. But then, those elevated taxes would go to the very government that created nearly every economic problem that America is experiencing. So is it sensible to feed even more money into that same government?

What would our government do with the increased revenue of Other People’s Money? Would they spend it wisely? If history is to be a guide at all, the answer to my question is not no, but HELL NO.

The fact is, as the productive private sector have lost their jobs, their homes, and their dreams, the primarily unproductive government sector has hired month after month; adding 33,000 jobs in January alone.

In all reality, America represents a failed economic system. Growth-based-debt-capitalism has serious issues when that system can no longer grow; mainly, the debt(s) both public and private automatically march higher to the tune of compounding interest while the income necessary to fund that interest stalls.

Giving ever increasing tax dollars to our Federal Government has not solved our problems and it never will. America badly needs a massive paradigm shift; we need to consider an entirely different approach. OPM is a hopelessly incurable disease.