Government should run like Small Business

January 11th, 2009 at 09:31am Bob Trojan

After reading about the budget situation today, I thought I’d take a look and see what it’s all about.  Here is the City of Rockford’s 2009 Budget proposal on their web site….

http://www.ci.rockford.il.us/government/finance/index.cfm?id=1920

It look to me that the sum of all the departments, it total, are asking for MORE money than what they are currently spending.

In the economy that we are now facing, with business close-downs and layoffs, now is not the time to be asking for more money to spend.  The budget above asks for more money, so the answer should be: NO NEW MONEY, Spend what you spent in 2008 and not a nickel more.

Small businesses can’t just raise prices to cover new expenses, government shouldn’t expect to raise taxes to cover new expenses.

Small businesses have to compete for their products and/or services; government seems to have none.

Small businesses have to constantly look for productivity improvements to do more with less; government should face the same challenge,.

Small businesses who do provide medical benefits are requiring employees to share the monthly premiums; so should government.

Small businesses no longer have defined benefit retirement plans, employees have to fund their own; so should government.

When we run into budget shortfalls, we will often have employees work shorter hours until revenues pick up again.

So when I hear the cry…”we have to cut the budget”…what I really hear is that we asked for more than we are spending now and so we need to simply spend no more!

Let’s run government like we run our private small businesses.  When incoming revenues are slowing, you have to spend less, not ask for more!

Entry Filed under: Management, Economy