One other thought about this matter of trimming "waste" from governmental budgets: It really annoys me that we can't get realistic about this; that few politicians have the electoral courage to not suggest they can balance the budget just by cutting fat and it won't be necessary to raise someone's tax or revoke someone's entitlement. It's depressing that such fibbing works and that candidates lose votes if they admit it can't be done. One of the things that was depressing about Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign to become governor of my state in the first place is that it was all based on that sort of tommyrot. When he wasn't recycling catch phrases from the Terminator movies, he was saying that the answer to California's money woes was to "Open the books." As if that meant anything.
I've long had an aversion to Fake Solutions — things that sound like they solve a problem but don't. I think a fake solution is worse than no solution at all. A fake solution makes you think something's being done when it isn't, and it derails the quest for a real solution. We have a lot of politicos who think that the way to get tough with a crisis is to say they're going to get tough with the crisis…and that's just about all they do.
You find Fake Solutions in every walk of life. When I was doing a lot of variety specials for TV, the process would usually commence with a meeting where everyone involved would sit around a table and say, "We all want to do a good show." The meeting might take two hours but really, that's all that would be said. No one would discuss how to make it a good show. We'd just say in so many different ways that we all wanted it to be a good show and we'd leave with the general feeling that we'd taken steps to make that happen.
Those meetings made everyone feel good for a while but that was the only positive that resulted…and it was pretty meaningless. On the negative side, the meetings made some of those involved feel like something was being done when it wasn't. And that can be dangerous, whether it's something important like a TV variety show or something trivial like the entire economy of the United States.