2010-07-02

Young And Naively Stupid; If It Ain't Broke Leave It Effen Alone

Confession. When I was 13 and stupid I had a chance to have some fun in the hay with an experienced 16 year-old French-Canadian girl. She knew what she wanted. Me? I was young and confused. My friend had no such worries and made out like a fiend with her friend and made the best of his opportunity as we looked on. Awkwardly, I told her that would be us next week.

For true. I said that. Needless to say, I never saw her again. but it did teach me a few lessons.

One being seize the moment. The other was deferring an urge that must be met immediately to a later time was irrational.

Obama is me when I was 13 but in a political and economic setting.

The U.S. government spending patterns and projections as per the CBO.

The idea, at this point, he has to do this to "fix" things is pure bunk.

***

Want more analogies?

As usual I'll use a sports analogy.

A couple of years back a couple of useless sports writers were complaining about the excessive overtimes during the NHL playoffs. It was really off the charts. Not only the number of overtimes but their durations as well. Some were going three or four OTs deep.

I love playoff hockey OT. The NBA wishes it has half the competitive balance of the NHL.

Naturally, it wasn't long before someone came along and complained demanding the NHL make some changes to avoid long OTs. It was an overreaction to an anomaly. And really, how can anyone sit there and profess to be fan and demand for such changes? My feeling at the time was, let's see what happens next year before tinkering with the rules. To base it on one sample was misguided.

Guess what happened? The next couple of years saw far less OTs. In fact, those that went into OT were usually settled within the first ten minutes.

Had those writers and their myopic thinking had their way unnecessary rule changes would have been implemented thus altering the face of the game forever. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed and resisted the demands.

I see this in politics a lot. One group or persons solicit the government to make changes to laws "on our behalf" under the guise of "public interest" that often are based on too small a sample size. In special interest cases, that's all they need to push their agenda. Rather than using a "wait and see" and let's watch to see if a pattern develops, the perception of something bad is what drives special interest policy.

Not cool.

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