If it fits, it ships
By Louis R. Avallone Friday, 01 October 2010 at 06:55
I know you have seen these commercials from the U.S. Post Office. You know the ones where the mailman happens in upon a bewildered, frustrated, and helpless set of small business employees? The employees who are lamenting the seemingly impossible challenge of comprehending both spatial relations, and using a scale to weigh items, and then pack them all into a box that is proportionately sized larger than the items being shipped? These are the commercials that explain, “If it fits, it ships, for a low, flat fee.” In one commercial, a small businessperson whines about how “shipping is a hassle, weighing every box”, while another almost tearfully confesses that “shipping is complicated”, as if she is being asked to develop a computer algorithm for multiplying fractions. Still, in another of these Post Office commercials, an employee groans that shipping “would be a whole lot easier is we didn’t have to weigh every box”.
Oh, goodness. Save the drama for your mama.
You see, I don’t know any small business employees that become so overcome with confusion, and near incapacitation, during such relatively manageable tasks as operating a scale, or using visual cues to decide if a box is too big or too large to contain an item for shipping.
No, no, no. You see, employees that work for small businesses are resilient and efficient. By contrast to the buffoons in those television commercials, small business employees are often more flexible, self-motivated, plan ahead, and deal more successfully with uncertainty every day, than many of our elected leaders exhibit in an entire term of office. And these same small businesses create over one-half of all private sector employment. This is largely why a recent Gallup poll revealed that Americans' faith in small business has grown, while their faith in big business has not.
You see, unlike the faint hearted folks in those Post Office commercials, small business employees generally have the street smarts to find creative solutions to achieve more with less, and the “can do” spirit to find a way, despite the day’s dilemmas…the least of which is weighing packages these days.
But this is how our federal government views us all: helpless and too dumb to know the difference. Example? We were told that the stimulus package would create more than 4 million jobs by the end of 2010. Instead, the unemployment rate peaked around 10 percent in late 2009 and is now around 9.6 percent.
How about in 2009 when the President signed the “Helping Families Save Their Homes Act”, following up to his “Making Home Affordable Program”, which provided $2.2 billion “to help combat homelessness, and helping to stabilize the housing market for everybody.” What really happened? Last month, one in every 381 U.S. housing units received a foreclosure filing and home seizures reached a record level, for the third time in five months.
Or maybe liberal Democrats in Congress think we forgot that Obama promised that he could lower insurance premiums $2,500 per family per year, right before the healthcare vote last March. But, just last week, Obama explained insurance premiums would be increasing per family instead, "We didn't think that we were going to cover 30 million people for free," he said (but that’s what he promised).
We aren’t too forgetful to remember the Obama promise that he "will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days." What really happened? Not only did the American public not have the opportunity, but most of our own legislators didn’t read the “Obamacare” legislation, which was only the largest expansion of gov ernment since the Great Society.
Then there was the press conference in 2009, where Obama that he would ban all earmarks. But the first spending bill he signed had over 9,000 earmarks.
Who can forget the administration’s so-called “Cash for Clunkers” program that cost taxpayers $24,000 per vehicle sold and, according to most economists, had no measurable, economic gain. It artificially boosted demand for automobiles during the program that was offset by declining automobile sales following the program’s conclusion. Total cost, for no measurable gain: $2.9 billion.
Obama promised that, under his leadership, “no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes," he said. But that’s not going to be true either because from the first day of 2011, the 15% top tax on dividends will rise to the top of income tax rate—39.6%. Hope you don’t have any life insurance or pension funds that are invested in stocks that also happen to issue dividends.
I mean, even Vice President Biden predicted just in April that the U.S. economy would be adding almost 500,000 jobs each month "some time in the next couple of months." What really happened? Last month, there were 54,000 jobs lost, and the highest level of jobless claims since November, 2009.
This administration’s rhetoric is off the chart. As the ancient Chinese proverb teaches, "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day." And as you can see, this administration cannot even claim the same success rate as a stopped clock, on the major policy initiatives facing our nation.
Unfortunately for them, the American people are smart enough to know when the rhetoric simply doesn’t fit. Thankfully, you see that now in one voting precinct after another. And for the benefit of those helpless and bewildered small business employees in the Post Office television commercials, when the rhetoric doesn’t fit, it doesn’t ship…and that’s at any price. Keep your chin up folks. It’s still morning in America.
