Normally my posts tend to be reality-based and fact-oriented.
Today, by contrast, I’m having a hard time dealing with reality, so I’m going to blather about the current state of affairs in the U.S.A.
I will eventually get around to those I-bonds. But it’s not exactly a direct route.
Business 101: Scope of authority should match scope of responsibility.
Your scope of authority is the stuff you have control over. Things you can change. Decisions that you get to make. That sort of thing.
Your scope of responsibility is the stuff you’ll be held accountable for. Financially, legally, morally, socially, or whatever. It’s all the stuff that, if it goes wrong, you take the blame and/or penalty. And if it goes right, you get the praise and/or reward.
If you’ve ever taken a class on how to manage a business, you’ve almost certainly heard some version of the maxim above. In an ideal business — and maybe in an ideal world — each person’s scope of authority and scope of responsibility would coincide.
Where scope of authority exceeds scope of responsibility, you get irresponsible decision-making. The decision-maker doesn’t have to care about the consequences of the decision.
Where scope of responsibility exceeds scope of authority, you get stress. A classic case might be where a customer screams at a waiter over the quality of the food. It’s not as if the waiter cooked it. But the waiter is held responsible for it.
This is really not much deeper than saying that you should be held accountable for your decisions. And, conversely, that you shouldn’t be held accountable for things outside your control.
Boaty McBoatface: This is what happens when you violate Business 101.
Source: Wikipedia
You can read the full saga on Wikipedia or the New York Times.
Briefly: About a decade ago, an arm of the British government (the NERC) decided to make a major investment in a nearly $300M polar research ship. That ship has the serious mission of measuring the effects of climate change in the earth’s polar regions.
As the ship neared completion, it required a name. And so, to gin up popular support, they decided to choose the name of this new capital vessel via internet poll.
Hijinks ensued, in the form of the most popular name, by a wide margin, being Boaty McBoatface. The name was, in fact, suggested as a joke. The guy who suggested it eventually sort-of apologized for doing so. But it won handily.
In the end, the NERC reneged and gave the ship a properly serious name (the RRS Sir David Attenborough). But they did name one of the autonomous submersibles the Boaty McBoatface. As shown above, courtesy of Wikipedia.
This was a classic violation of Business 101. The scope of authority — the right to name the ship — was handed to an anonymous internet crowd who bore no responsibility whatsoever for their actions. Meanwhile, the people responsible for paying for and running the ship had, in theory, no control whatsoever over the name.
This is hardly the first time that a seemingly serious internet poll led to a frivolous outcome. But it was such a stunning backfire that “McBoatface” has now become a verb in its own right, per the Wiktionary:
Verb Boaty McBoatface (third-person singular simple present Boaty McBoatfaces, present participle Boaty McBoatfacing, simple past and past participle Boaty McBoatfaced)
-
(neologism) To hijack or troll a vote, especially one held online, by supporting a joke option. [from 2016]
Did we just McBoatface the U.S. House of Representatives?
In the U.S., an election is an anonymous poll in which those casting votes bear no individual responsibility for the consequences.
It’s hard for me to see much difference between that, and a typical internet poll. Other than the fact that it’s difficult to vote twice. And that some people actually do take elections seriously.
I guess it’s a bit pejorative to suggest that the current chaos in the House of Representatives has occurred because we McBoatfaced the last election. Still, you have to wonder about the people who voted for candidates whose sole promise was to be loud and disruptive, and do their darnedest to interrupt the normal business of government. Did they think that would be fun prank, the same as the McBoatface voters? Own the libs, or whatever. Or was that really their serious and thoughtful goal?
At least their candidates seem to be carrying through on their campaign promises.
What people are getting backwards about the current situation.
Here’s one that kind of cracks me up, but kind of doesn’t. You hear a lot of people saying that the lack of a functioning House is OK, because the Federal government already passed a budget for FY 2023. They won’t have to face that task until this fall.
I think that’s backwards.
Rephrased: Senate Republicans saw this predictable train wreck months ago, and so worked with Democrats to pass the current (2023) FY budget. That’s presumably because they already knew (or strongly suspected) that the House wouldn’t be capable of doing that.
Re-interpreting today’s events: The predicted chaos has come to pass. I’d have to bet, then, that there will be no new budget for the next fiscal year, and no increase in the debt ceiling.
The currently-funded fiscal year (2023) ends on 9/30/2023. So that’s a known. Even then, I believe that entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare) remain funded. It’s only the “discretionary” part of the budget that is not.
But as to when, exactly, we hit the debt ceiling, nobody can quite say. Consensus seems to be mid-2023.
At that point, the Federal government will continue to make what payments it can. So, likely, Social Security checks will continue to go out. (Figuratively speaking — I don’t think they’ve mailed out physical checks in decades.) Other payments will not be made.
On lock-picking, McBoatfacing, and I-bonds
Source: Covertinstruments.com
Which brings me to my final speculation. Everybody is working under the assumption that, eventually, this will all get straightened out. Somebody will figure out some way to rein in the House of Representatives so that they can do their required business.
By contrast, I keep asking myself, what if this is as good as it gets?
What if the house is permanently McBoatfaced?
Back when I was a kid, we had joke Presidential candidates. Comedian Pat Paulson was one. There was a movement to elect the fictional TV character Archie Bunker as U.S. President. And so on. But everybody knew they were jokes, or that they were fictional characters.
Enter Representative Santos of New York. Line, meet blur. The people of that district definitely elected a fictional character. They were simply not aware of it at the time. To which we can add a handful of Republican house members whose sole platform appears to have been being mad as hell, and stating their unequivocal unwillingness to go along with anything required to conduct the business of government. I guess we all now know they weren’t kidding.
A couple of days back, a friend asked me to see if I could open a couple of old suitcases that had belonged to her grandmother. Luckily, I happened to own the Covert Companion (r) tool, pictured above. The version I use has a few tools to help with what are called “low skill” attacks on locks. (“Low skill” being an accurate description of my lock-picking ability). Because I happened to own those crude little pieces of steel circled above, I had relatively little problem opening the simple warded locks on those suitcases.
But if I hadn’t had the tools, I’d have been helpless. The only way to open the suitcase would have been to destroy it. It’s a case of any tool, no matter how crude, being better than no tool at all.
Right now, I’m not seeing the tools in hand to fix the U.S. House. Not even the crudest tactic that could possibly resolve the current impasse, let alone get the place functional going forward. And, unlike those old suitcases, nobody has the power to destroy it, to achieve some end. The House works the way it works, or doesn’t, until such time as it works well enough to change the way it works. Which can’t happen. Because right now, it’s not working.
Which finally brings me to I-bonds. Is it smart to own I-bonds when the House is broken?
I’ve owned these for decades. In fact, they are so old that they are going to quit paying interest just a few years from now. Pre-tax, they pay just a bit more than the rate of inflation. Most of the decades that I have owned them, they’ve paid little more than zero. But now, as these things are reckoned, they are paying pretty well, compared to the alternatives.
But that high rate of return means nothing if you can’t spend it. And of all the people the Federal government could choose to stiff, in the event of a permanent failure to fund the government or raise the debt ceiling, I’d bet that small bondholders would be right at the top of the list. (N.B., I-bonds are marketed at small savers, with a purchase limit of $5000 per person per year.)
In any case, my conclusion is that if the House is permanently McBoatfaced, I might be wise to cash those I-bonds before we hit the debt limit sometime this summer. Otherwise, I just get the feeling that the longer this goes on, the longer it’s going to go on. Combined with the feeling that maybe this is as good as it gets. That there is no tool for fixing it.
And that if everybody has their hand out, to the Feds, I’m going to end up at the back of the line.
I told you I’d get to I-bonds eventually. It just took a while.
