USA, Inc.

Late last month, the firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers published "USA, Inc.", a PDF book which, in its own words:

looks at the federal government as if it were a business, with the goal of informing the debate about our nation's financial situation and outlook. In it, we examine USA Inc.'s statement and balance sheet. We aim to interpret the underlying data and facts and illustrate patterns and trends in easy-to-understand ways.

Neither the company nor the report are to be taken lightly. USA, Inc. was compiled by longtime Wall Street analyst Mary Meeker, and it boasts NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, former Secretary of State George Shultz, and many other prominent businesspeople and politicians as contributors. The loaded report is comprehensive (long), insightful, and somewhat terrifying, but its true brilliance is in the wealth of easy-to-comprehend graphs and charts that it uses to display its findings. In short, it's a consultant's (and blogger's) dream.

If you had any doubts about the difficult decisions that our country faces (and has continually refused to make), this report should put them to rest.

Would you invest in this company?

If your employer's budget looked like this, how comfortable would you feel about your job security?

Not to mention, how sustainable would you consider these spending trends to be?

What I think is perhaps most notable about this report is just how capable these politicians and businesspeople are of assessing the problem when they view it from an appropriate distance--for some reason, many of them were incapable of doing the same when they held positions of greater power (with the exception of Bloomberg, who still holds a position of power and does tend to have a grip on the severity of the situation).

Maybe their voices were drowned out amid a chorus of fools, maybe groupthink is to blame, or perhaps there's another explanation that hasn't yet been proffered. Either way, we should certainly listen to them now. They know these problems from both the inside and the outside, and to ignore their warnings could be quite dangerous.

[USA Inc.]
(h/t Mish Shedlock)