First let me be frank, I’m no expert in the National Budget. I continue to study the budget and how revenue is assigned to each department or branch. It is an overwhelming amount of information, and unless you are a true accountant or auditor it is really difficult to understand where and how are tax money is spent.

I served on a city council (appointed) many years ago. My alderman moved out of town and I decided to apply for the job. I wanted to learn, serve, and represent my town’s 4th ward. When I started to receive all of the information in my bi-weekly packets I was flabbergasted at how much information was present. The bureaucracy of a town just shy of 3,500 people is a little larger than I expected and we only had a city manager, secretary, and comptroller to manage it.

There are multiple revenue streams for a city. Property Taxes, Service Fees (Water and Sewer,) Sales Tax, and Hotel/Motel Taxes to name a few are the largest revenue streams. These revenues do not get lumped into one checkbook. There are multiple different funds and the revenues have to be spent certain ways legally. You can’t use Hotel/Motel tax monies to fix roads for example. Now imagine my confusion on my first meeting having to learn the whole bureaucracy. It was stellar! A mind boggling puzzle. It was so much fun to learn, though..

Now imagine this at the $4 trillion dollar budget level of the USA? Do you really think the Doge will have an understanding of what he’s looking at from a spreadsheet on a computer program? Does he have the context? Does he know where the cash is coming from? Or is he making leaps of faith based on bias? Just think about.

City bills all come with different codes based on the revenues and departments in question. I don’t remember the specific codes for my town, but the Police Department, Public Works, Administration (Manager, Mayor, Alderman, Comptroller, etc,) had higher number codes and then there were the lowered number codes for lesser known expenses related to sales tax revenues or other city provided services. Every budgetary expense was presented with the department number, the type of expense, and dollar amounts. The word identifiers were acronyms, abbreviations, or some other verbiage or adjective. I was always asking for specifics as I did not know what the acronyms stood for on a lot of expenses. The acronyms in the police expenditures looked like instrument abbreviations in a conductor’s score. Just think about this with a budget in the millions of dollars of how confusing this could be for a layperson with little financial education. Now imagine the Doge in a trillions of dollars budget. He is in over his head. As is most of Congress. I’m not going to pretend either. I would be in over my head, and I would hire a staff member with budget and auditing experience, pay them well too, to do the research for me on all bills coming to committee or the floor if I was a congressman.

I remember asking my fellow aldermen and the secretary/comptroller lots of questions. I avoided asking the mayor or the city manager these questions to avoid getting biased by their goals. Aldermen are a check and balance to the leadership provided by the mayor and manager. This experience was a rewarding one and it helped me plan, operate, and collaborate with city officials when I became the conductor of the Dixon Municipal Band years later. All of this information that I learned gave me a unique perspective on how Rita Crundwell swindled the city out of millions. Her system was really simple and the auditors overlooked it.

Nationally, Congress is the check and balance. The Doge is nothing more than an outsider looking at a very detailed bureaucracy and he is disliking the detail. He obviously wants simplicity, like his business model at his corporations. The problem is the nation is not a business and the budget is far more nuanced than he ever dreamed. Then we have the different computing platforms each department uses. If one is not familiar with all of the platforms, you will be confused.

All of these layers are there to protect the American citizen from coup de tat’s of the kind being exercised by the Doge. The Republican Party has used the excuse of the bureaucracy time and time again for why they all spend too much leading to a $36T debt. The real problem is extreme tax cuts for the wealthy that are starving the system for revenue. If we reinstitute the same tax rate as President Eisenhower, imagine what we could pay off the debt? This was how our interstate road system was built, amongst other things. If we eliminated private enterprise profiting off of tax money within government we could reduce spending. Medicaid and Medicare are being price gouged by Medical and Drug corporations and independent medical contractors. Imagine if we eliminate the need for profit in the medical field? Prices will go down. When you consider a budget, you have to analyze each specific area and look at revenue allocations, laws, services, expenses, and purposes. The Doge is not doing this. He is just slashing with no transparency or guidance. The conflict of interest with the Doge is that he is/was being investigated by multiple agencies of the federal government for violations of law. His goal is to save his ass, not save money.

I don’t care how smart the Doge thinks he is. He has a big case of Dunning Kruger bias when it comes to the budget. He is trying to stack the deck in favor of himself and we are just his future bankroll. None of us, including myself really have the expertise to operate or successfully manage the budget of this country. The prudent and smart thing would be to address only one department at a time to determine where redundancy is not needed, examine all revenues, and expenditures and cut accordingly. None of that is happening. It feels like the inmates are running our asylum from the Edgar Allen Poe story The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether. …and so it goes…