So you want me to single out certain people for shaming and others for praise? Well, OK, but the fallout is on you for pretending you can't just read down the list and easily ID them yourself, and instead asking me to play your game... 1) I believe most politicians are career politicians that haven’t run a business. If they had, the tax rate would be less, there would be less taxes, the cost of a LLC would be $200, rather than $800... ME: This is a common one on this thread… all us business owners think in terms of how we run our ventures to always look out for ways to cut costs, expand into new income streams, increase cash-flow and boost profits, etc. But the government is not a business, even though it is in the business of running our civic & political lives. But if you run a business, it is a profit venture, at least it should be. Contrarily, a government is not tasked with earning profit, it is tasked with providing public services, at cost. As a result, the goals of these 2 types of organizations are entirely different when one is not driven by the goal to maximize profits. As a “business” version of government, the tax rate would be raised to “what the market will bear”, so taxes would go up. And a good politician-businessperson would be constantly on the lookout for new sources of revenue, so there would be more types of taxes, not less. The cost of an LLC, it would also rise to a price where supply meets demand, and not stop at what government analysts determine is the amount needed to cover the cost of a program. This is not to say that government methodology is always the most cost efficient, or the most expertly administered (which is also a problem with many private businesses), but rather this is a comment on using the right tool for the right job. Run a government like a government (and yes, despite that, we still want more of a business focused accountability and urgency, but it’s still not a business). 2) Sorry, but I am no allowed to express my opinion without fear the FBI will surround my home armed to the hilt, while I am drinking my essential proteins early in the morning… ME: Do I really need to explain this one? 3) Our elected politicians are unqualified for their jobs. Seriously? ALL of them? No need to explain anything further on this one either. 4) Currently the US is lacking leadership and is the laughing stock of the world. Animals don't have the dumbest of the heard in charge. ME: Ironically, I suspect this simpleton was an avid Trump supporter as he qualified his statement with the word “currently”. Actually it was Trump that was laughed at as he addressed the UN where pretty much the whole world was indeed laughing at him. Since Biden’s election, the world has breathed a sigh of relief that sanity has returned to the US, and someone who knows what he’s doing is back in charge. This is readily confirmable in most international publications and news outlets. So the “world” is no longer laughing, but they may still be nervous about a return to demagoguery in our leadership. There really is no comparison with the Biden administration hitting the ground running and has already moved this country forward on things too complex for the Trump-mind to accomplish like the infrastructure bill, legislation to reduce inflation, reign in Big-Pharms with insulin cost caps and such, funding efforts to reduce the effect of climate change and the extreme weather it’s now brining us, and more. Most of the new expenditure costs are already covered to by parallel efforts to balance the budget and reduce the deficit, after Trump’s record breaking unfunded spending spree. Of course there’s more, but hopefully you get the idea. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are Biden failures too, and others that are so screwed up by the incompetence of prior administrations, that they may take 2 terms, or more, to fix. Like immigration, education, domestic manufacturing, homelessness, and making the tax system more progressive such that it bring back the middle class. 5) Most of our elected officials are in office for the money they get from the lobbyist. We need term limits and to get rid of the lobbyist. ME: Almost, but not really… Elected officials are not in office to get money from anyone, including lobbyists. That would be bribery, and a whole ‘nother topic. Actually, the way it works is due to how our political system is funded. They need campaign donations to get elected and stay in power. Sure, some/many may enrich themselves once in power with insider information (also illegal, but they don’t go after each other on this, do they?). The current financial system requires they spend a huge amount of their time fund raising, and then here come the lobbyists waving bags of money. Yes, basically lobbyists are the low hanging fruit of the process and can’t easily be resisted. This is the actual issue as to why our government is as dysfunctional as it is, because the wrong people are winning elections. If there was a good way for elections to be publicly funded, then the power of lobbyists retracts to a miniscule level, and now who gets the most votes is more based on citizen benefits over special interests. Whatever you don’t like about government and what it does, consider that nothing will truly change until “money” is removed from the process. At that point everything pivots to a truly representative government. Don’t hold your breath. Term limit are not the solution. They help in some respects, as we can jettison bad or corrupt politicians without having to figure out who to vote for. But what we see from where term limits have been in place for a couple decades now, is that we lose the knowledgebase of proactive politicians as they term out and we now leave all our public decisions up to neophytes, as no one is around long enough to really nail the job. Perhaps we need to take a more hybrid approach. What if every time a politician runs for re-election he/she has to win by a larger margin than they did in their previous run? This would eliminate politicians that were not serving the public well, and would require politicians to continue to improve their ability to be our representatives as well as be able to show concrete results from their own efforts that have benefited their constituents. Nothing will be perfect, even with pubic funding of elections, but I think the problems need to embrace more creativity and not settle for band-aide fixes. 6) I don’t feel our elected officials are doing any thing to help small businesses ME: I guess this person is pretending to be unaware of the Small business Administration, but I’ll bet they had their hand out with everyone else to get as large a chunk of that pandemic aid as possible. 7) Career Politicians have got to go. It was never meant to be a career. The people's best interest needs to be in first place. This country needs to be run like a business, you cant spend more than what you bring in. ME: Actually as you read down the list, there are a lot of people who say they want the government run like a business. I addressed this good-sounding but awful idea above, so do not need to repeat myself here. Sure, there would be benefits to doing some things more like a business would, but there is nothing in the current system that prohibits that in most appropriate cases. The government does not have to abandon it’s current system to embrace some good business practices. But when we see politicians not taking this route, we are reminded that these are the kind of politicians that win elections assisted by the campaign donations of lobbyists/special interests, and only changing to publicly funded elections will have a chance to change that. 8) I strongly believe we should repeal the 17th Amendment. I believe this would solve the majority of our problems and bring the others into focus for the balance of the population. People have become numb and think they can't make a difference any longer. We need something to wake them up. Me: The 17th Amendment restates the first paragraph of Article I, section 3 of the Constitution and provides for the election of senators by replacing the phrase “chosen by the Legislature thereof” with “elected by the people thereof.” In addition, it allows the governor of each state, if authorized by that state’s legislature, to appoint a senator in the event of a vacancy, until a general election occurs. Now that we all understand the OP’s claim, I have to ask, why would we want to reduce our rights to elect those that would represent us in the senate? If we go back to the robber-barron days, we see the corruption that the system of politicians appointing other politicians to the senate fostered. Is this a no-brainer, or what? 9) US Presidents, vice Presidents, Senators, and other politicians come and go every so many years, except those like Sleepy Joe who go on for 5 decades or so (no good could ever come from this) But the Buricrats live for ever and never had, or ever will be accountable to the people… (there was more, but it got even nuttier) ME: Clearly a guy who does not know his recent US history, but likes the idea he can use FOX News-like talking points to feel better about himself. The fact is for some politicians, he is correct, as he is for some bureaucrats, but the reference to “Sleepy Joe” is a clear sign of unsupportable bias. Biden is a classic example of the rare politician that can be in office for decades, obtain an extensive knowledge about how government works, how to get things done and how to negotiate and compromise to work out the best possible outcomes. And when in hind-sight some of those efforts resulted in negative unintended consequences, he has the ability to admit to mistakes and to take corrective actions. Why did Obama put Biden in charge of the Recovery Act as he took office with the economy in a tailspin from Bush’s incompetent economic policies? Because Biden knew how to get things done in Washington. And the way he did it not only saved the auto industry, the financial industry, and more, the Recovery Act actually paid for itself, so it was not a government bailout. It was genius, and could only be pulled off by someone with the know-how that comes from decades of being down in the trenches. Have you bought a US made car/truck since 2008? You can thank Biden for that. Did you finance it? You can thank Biden for that too. How much did it cost you, or anyone, once the dust settled and the economy was back on sound footing? Nothing. Not a penny. And now Biden is hard at work recovering an economy in even worse shape than after Bush’s Great Recession, but from an entirely different set of issues. It’s much more complex now, as the basic economy is still stable, but with global inflationary pressures from supply change issues, war, plague, the huge increases in the money supply needed to keep us and other countries going during the worst of the pandemic, and a highly toxic and divisive political environment here, and in many other countries too, the job is different this time and again requires someone with decades of experience to solve it. But, so far he’s done things Trump only promised, like the infrastructure bills, reducing medical costs, taking our place as a strong leader in the international community, and quickly coming to the aid of states devastated by recent extreme weather disasters. You don’t get that kind of a president by electing a novice. Frankly, that’s why Obama accomplished as little as he did. Perhaps Obama should have been VP, and Biden should have been president back then. The OP here is mainly taking aim at government bureaucrats, and many have become fat and lazy in their long tenure. Others are true stars, and to have them leave because they have been on the job long enough, would be to the determent of good government, and all of use. Clearly, this is a case of one size does not fit all. This issue is similar in its own context as the term limits argument, which is merely a band-aide fix that needed to get far more creative to solve the problem of bad politicians becoming entrenched in friendly districts. The employees of government, like in unions, like tenured college professor, like private company employees in strict employee-rights states, are hard do get rid of. But it can be done, and I think if there were more creative minds working on this, then these people might get their act together and be the public servant we expect, or be motivated to move on to some role they are competent in. But for the OP to suggest that these folks need to be accountable to the “people” is to fail to understand that they are employees, not your elected officials. They need to be accountable for doing a good job, but not by the “people”, just their “employer”, same as yours are to you as a business owner. 10) Now, here is an example of a good one: I've run a small business since 1987, and I have no complaints. My revenue has easily been 3 to 5 times what I could earn as a P.Eng working for a top tier automobile manufacturer, while paying less tax than all those years as a payroll employee. And I get to work for my choice of customers, and on my own terms. Any bad experiences with people simply means that I will not accept work from them. Politicians have never caused any noticeable benefit, or hardship for my business, and I never count on any of them for anything. Not part of my business model, or methods. ME: What else is there to say? If you run your business competently, you don’t need to blame others for your difficulties or failures. You adjust to the reality of on-going political decisions as a part of your plan for success. I’ll bet that a lot of these complainers are having the trouble they are due to not being the best business person, not focused on running a tight ship, and may not even have a product or service that is viable in the marketplace. So when we see this, it’s typically not so much the fault of government, but government sure makes for an easy scapegoat to avoid the pain of self-reflection.

OK, see above....