Be Careful What You Wish For

An old trick in politics goes something like this; you view a political candidate as too strong so you attack that threat by pumping up the opponent's rival on the same ticket. Despite a successful attempt to brand Hillary Clinton as untrustworthy, many of her supporters don't seem to care and if a legal suit does not bring her campaign down, the likelihood is she will still win her party's nomination. To combat this, some pundits have taken to building up her rival, Bernie Sanders. Considering the fact that Sanders is a self-professed socialist, this strategy could easily backfire.

Like many socialists, Bernie Sanders supports breaking up big companies. Although no one likes a monopoly, I don't think waging war on corporate America is going to substantially improve my life. Likewise, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour may sound great to our youth until you realize what goes around comes around. Increasing the minimum wage would hurt many small businesses already struggling and in all probability, lead to inflation, more failed businesses and higher unemployment. Moreover, if you try to reduce college costs by levying a new tax on Wall Street, will that help the next generation or just lead to more transaction fees that we all end up paying for?

Of course there will always be some causes worthy of more progressive views. The AbilityOne™ program for example, helps people living with extreme disabilities and provides a way to support our veterans. However, even great ideas often go awry when over-regulation makes it nearly impossible for companies that support institutions like AbilityOne™ to maintain compliance with the program. In light of this, maybe the solution should not be to change the system but to improve it. Ergo, virtually all government agencies could use some overhaul to streamline services. The concept of the "emod" (electric modification) request for instance is outdated and could be eliminated entirely by simply adding a field to a GSA (General Services Administrations) schedule that marks with a code the exact change requested on each product. If the changes are all approved, accept the new schedule in SIP (Schedule Input Program), otherwise reject it. Similarly, why force vendors to upload all their graphics in SIP before the new schedule is 100% approved? This makes absolutely no sense and wastes both corporate and government resources that could be put to better use. It is this kind of disorganization and wastefulness that increases the program's costs and makes it hard to support even the best of causes.