Thread: Obamas first bad decision.

Originally Posted by maplemaker

As a civilian pilot, I'll take just a bit of an issue with the FAA doing well. The FAA has privatized a lot over the last year, and things are improving because of it. The FAA is bloated and unable to account for its budget, and has been so for longer than I've been flying. It is also beholden to the large air carriers, and to such an extent that it has done damage to general aviation in some areas, and fixing the damage will take quite an effort. As far as traffic separation, I'll say yes, they do fine with that. The inability to modernize is because of an unwillingness to modernize, not because of a lack of funds or hardware. Like any government organization, they don't move with the times, because they can't move with the times. Sadly, like most, they want to blame it on lack of funds so they can justify the next raise in their budget; and so they skew reports and point fingers everywhere but at themselves (which seems to have gone from a petulant transparency to the national pastime over the last 16 years) without really giving any good explanation of what, exactly do they want, and where, exactly is their money.

Being a full-time soldier, I can bet I don't need to explain what else I think of the government's ability do to things well.

Let me point out one thing: Dilbert isn't written about government agencies. It's written about the private sector.

The larger an organization is, the more likely you'll find aspects of it that need fixing. That's true whether you're looking at government or a large corporation. The FAA is no exception, but as you've acknowledged, they do seem to keep planes from crashing into each other, so how bad could they be? My understanding is that the FAA has suffered mainly from political cronyism.

Throughout history, the military has been famous for its inexplicable inefficiencies. Read War and Peace. Military ineffficiencies give rise to such sayings as FUBAR, SNAFU, and the ever-popular "There's a right way, a wrong way, and an Army way." Although, I'll tell you: my father, the WWII master sergeant, would leave out the "wrong way" part. Yet they get the job done.

To say that the American government cannot do what other governments can is unacceptable. What makes us worse as a nation than, say, Denmark?

That, frankly, is what irks me the most about conservatives: their cynicism. The central message of conservatism seems to be "We can't afford to educate our children, protect our seniors, make health care available, protect our environment, clean up our cities, bring prosperity to our heartland --- yadda yadda yadda." The next thing they say, of course, is "We're the greatest nation in the world."

Any wonder they've just been tossed out on their ears?

j