I was recently on WSB radio, and I explained there the same thing I explained in my recent Atlanta Business Chronicle article.

We have to cut the rate of spending – the rate at which we’re burning money – in the government. 10 or 15% across the board – that’s every single department – is what’s going to be the beginning of necessary to start the process of recovery. And the road to recovery will be long, to take a line from someone else’s trite playbook.

The reason I’m bringing this up again is because I want to emphasize what the guys at WSB kept asking me about: the political aspect.

Party Politics is a Debt Party

Is it possible in a Washington as mired in party politics as ours currently is that we could get a sweeping cut in spending like I’m proposing without any exceptions?

Disappointingly, I think the answer is no. Things have become too politicized and though everyone there can say I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine, nobody can end his own itchy back. That is to say that even when our representatives are not scratching one another’s backs they still want to have their own causes funded – or not defunded as the case may be in my proposal.

But if we don’t start treating the government like a business and money like it’s real and debt like it matters and ultimately do what we do in turnaround – slash spending immediately without question, qualm or hesitation – we’ll be hesitating and backscratching all the way back to a recession.

Blind Man, Dark Room

I don’t want to overplay the recent AA+ downgrade and the impact that it could have – or more importantly the impact that the reasons it occurred is going to have – but at the very least it should serve as a wake-up call that we are not behaving effectively and our policy makers are not taking the appropriate steps.

Stop spending money, now, Washington.

I don’t want excuses, and I don’t want politics.

I don’t want to keep hearing things in the news like the trade deficit unexpectedly widened to 53.1 billion dollars. That just means that once again projections and statistics are off and we need a collectively more conservative approach (and I don’t mean conservative in a political sense – I mean it in a spending sense).

Cut 10-15% of all spending immediately. This is not political. This is personal – 315 million people personal. Let’s fix this before it gets worse.

How would you help cut spending and eliminate waste in government?