U.S. Debt Repayment Needs Business Plan

Most small businessmen have been told that they must have a business plan to be successful -otherwise if they are successful, chances are it is due to luck. Luck that they are operating in a good market for their product or service; luck perhaps that they have few competitors; luck that their product or service has high "price stability" and they can survive even in a weak market, etc. The kissing cousin in a business is the so-called business model that represents the key elements of a strategy that basically says how that business is going to make a profit. The business plan is the specific actions based on the business model that need to be carried out within a specific plan time period, for example, one year, three years or five years. We don't want to count on luck!

This morning, Stacy Curtin (in Recession Politics), wrote a piece on David Walker, the founder of “Comeback America Initiative," one of the fiscal watchdogs on the U.S. economy and fiscal public policy. The main observation is that although the U.S. President has made reference to the sorry state of the U.S. economy in his State of the Union address, he has failed to lay out a plan to achieve meaningful goals and strategies. I agree.

Although the President formed a bi-partisan commission to explore options and the commission actually developed a number of options, that is not sufficient. As the CEO of the nation, the President must set forth a set of measurable goals and objectives and specific strategies that he plans to undertake to achieve those targets. Otherwise, we as a nation have no way of measuring success or failure; and we as citizens have no way of determining our support or lack of enthusiasm or outright disagreement for the President's aspirations and strategies for the nation.

Walker, a former U.S. Comptroller General, is fearful that lacking a specific plan for debt reduction and deficit control, that the U.S. will indeed follow that path of Japan that just had its bond rating reduced by Standard & Poors. Just two years ago, the U.S. debt held by the public was at $6 Trillion, and as of the end of 2010, stands at $9 Trillion, according to Curtin. What few ideas the President briefly mentioned speak of "investments," a political-speak meaning more spending, and cannot be taken as a serious action plan to deal with the U.S. debt. What the public wants is actual results over time. What is the case now are a lack of leadership from the White House and a lack of communication to the public on what the game-plan really is. We don't want to count on political double-talk. We don't want to count on luck for something this important!

--Joseph Chavez, Denver, CO