Yesterday, I wrote about Paul Otellini and his comments on investing in the US from the high point of being a Fortune 500 CEO. Big picture, you might say. Well, here is what it looks like up close, from the Washington Post, via Minyanville.
Read down a bit in the Minyanville piece and see what a guy went to engineering school to do in Elkhart, Indiana.
Here’s my theory on doing business with any government entity. They pass rules and regulations not to get anything done but to keep something from getting done. Specifically, government employees and manager come up with the regs that they come up with to keep them from getting in trouble. That’s all. That engineer is filling out mounds of paper for a stimulus project for no other reason than so a government clerk somewhere can make sure that all the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed because if that is done, then they really don’t care about the outcome.
It is this that led to the Bernie Madoff scheme. Harry Markopolos, the man who tried to stop Madoff but couldn’t get anyone to listen to him, eventually came to the conclusion that the people running the SEC were all lawyers who neither had the math skills to understand what Madoff was doing, nor the inclination to understand. They were merely concerned with making sure all the disclosure documents were properly filed. Which they were. How’d that work out?
How to drive businesses out of the US in three easy steps:
- Raise taxes
- Raise uncertainty
- Bury them with paperwork:
- “The United States, by contrast, has offered financing under the stimulus program, but the process has proved too cumbersome for the small company.”
Man, it works like a charm!
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