The United States of America, Inc.

I'm an idealist. A polyanna. I'm one of those annoying people who hope that somehow things like "logic" and "the goodness of people" will prevail over everything else in this world.

I should know better.

I've worked in large corporations in several industries - entertainment , retail, software, food - and they all have one thing in common... the larger a company gets, the dumber it gets. People in charge find more convoluted ways to get a simple thing done. A phone call turns into a teleconference. A brainstorming session leads to three hours of tangents and bullshit. What starts out as a simple letter to ask a question becomes something that has to be reviewed by five departments with legal language that makes me wonder if we've just sold our building.

Ladies and gentlemen, we live in The United States of America, Inc.

I know that government inefficiency is nothing new. But I've never seen it more prominently displayed on a national level than I have this week. What brings this on, you ask?

THIS:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/19/bonus.bill/index.html

"House Passes Bill Taxing Wall Street Bonuses"

Okay, let's get this straight. Our government gave a bunch of money to companies with crappy business practices. In doing so, the Senate and the White House approved the loophole allowing the bonuses - which they all at first denied, until Dodd and Geithner were confronted and forced to admit this was a conscious effort. Their explanation? They worried about lawsuits if the bonus clause didn't have the loophole. Their solution? Slap a 90% tax on it - which, of course, will also be subject to scrutiny and might possibly be illegal. And now Pelosi stands proudly at the podium once again with that smug "Look what I did! I'm fighting for the LITTLE PEOPLE! ME! ME! ME!" expression like she's some kind of genius.

Sigh... they make it so complicated.

My husband took all of ten minutes to come up with a solution - if this was such a freaking concern when hammering out the bill's terms, why didn't they just ask what the bonuses would be and then deduct that from the total amount of the bailout? The companies can honor their executives' contracts but they lose bailout money (ooooh - consequences!). My husband thought of this and he's never even run for public office, although that decision alone probably makes him smarter than anyone in Washington.

Why must government take the roundabout way to fix things? Is it too much to ask for these people to just THINK A LITTLE BIT ABOUT WHAT THEY'RE DOING? WHY MUST THEY MAKE ME GET ALL SHOUTY WITH THE CAPS LOCK?

You know, years ago at one of my jobs we were submitting a proposal that needed to include documentation, so the potential customer could see how we write our product docs (content, style, etc.). The potential client wanted us to snail-mail everything on paper. In rushing the proposal, our company's project manager/marketing deptartment asked for five copies of nine different user documents.

Aside from a little overkill it sounds reasonable, right? Except that several of those docs run over 200 pages (double-sided, no less). When printed, this results in about 6,715 pages of hard-copy docs. To give you a visual, a ream of paper that you'd put in the tray of a copier is 500 pages; an entire box of that paper contains 10 reams. This much documentation would equal more than 13 reams of paper. In the mail. Not only would that have cost a bunch of money to send, but what does that say about your company? If you were reviewing proposals for someone to work for you, how would you feel if you got two boxes of paper in the mail? In today's electronic age?

Being my pollyanna self I figured that I could let them know in advance just how much paper it would be. Surely if they heard it from me, the tech writer who actually sees the documents every day, logic would prevail. But their reply was "Print them out anyway and we'll decide from there." So it wasn't enough to give them numbers or even verbally draw them a picture. They had to see the mountain of waste, because there's no way they could have been wrong. And no company I was with before or since is any different, no matter how well-intentioned they are.

This is what has happened to our goverment. They've gone corporate. They don't listen to the everyday people that might not be specialists but have, oh, I don't know, a bit more insight. Nope, we have to take a knee-jerk reaction to public outcry and get it done NOW.

News flash - the economy didn't tank right away; it didn't even take eight years to do it. This recession has been in the work for decades, a combination of natural economic cycles, the wrong kinds of government intervention and terrible greed and stupidity in the business sector. And it's going to take years to improve. If cancer creeps through your body slowly for years and you ignore the symptoms or your habits that might contribute to it, would you expect a doctor to be able to remove it with one surgery? Nope. You'd start with surgery if it were possible, but you've also got chemo, radiation, lifestyle changes, all sorts of treatment. You can't rid your body of it overnight.

Patience, people. And logic. Unless they start taxing that, too.