…Carly Fiorina. She announced her candidacy for President yesterday. She wasn’t present at the NRA Annual Meeting last month, but she did sent a video which is more than Rand Paul could bother himself with and many present wished Jeb Bush, Lindsay Grahamesty and the Huckleberry had done.

Carly Fiorina, 2016 GOP Candidate for President

She was applauded at the NRA meeting in Nashville as were all who spoke there. I should note the applause for Jeb and Grahamesty was more perfunctory. All in all, Fiorina’s topics from her video was complementary with those of the other conservative speakers.

Today she is making the rounds of the talk shows. She spent some time with Glenn Beck this morning and, I believe, she’ll be with Hannity this afternoon.

I was in the shower, listening, when she said something that I’ve heard no other candidate, certainly not Jeb, Grahamesty nor Huckleberry say. She said the government should be placed on a zero-based budget like the private sector.

What is a zero-based budget? It is a budget where every penny spent must be justified—every penny. No increase from last year. Every year, every penny spent, regardless of the project, must be justified. And if the expense cannot be justified, it is cut!

A business knows how much it can spend. It has a reasonable expectation of its income, and it knows every penny that will be spent. Spending cannot exceed income. Unlike the government, a business cannot arbitrarily print off a few billion dollars if the treasury is low.

I retired from Sprint a few years ago. One of the exercises we expected every Spring was budget submissions. The process was this. The board allocated funds for the company. The executives broke that down by divisions, then to departments, continuing down the the project and, in some cases, the individual.

Next came the project that the business side wanted done. From that point a winnowing process began between the business side that wanted products and the development and operational side who would build, implement and maintain those products. As each product was analyzed and and expensed, those projects went up the management chain to be justified. If the project couldn’t be justified, it was allowed to be resubmitted with a reduced cost or cut. The project cost also includes the cost of the employees who develop, test, implement and maintain the product.

When this idea has been floated before, one complaint is that the process ‘takes too long.’ Yes, it does take a while. Sprint built next years budget, this year. It took about a quarter to get it done and approved. But, during that quarter, we also performed our regular jobs. No missed delivery dates allowed just because we had to work on a budget. In addition, our product cycle from concept to development to production was often much less than a year.

When one is employed in the private sector, you quickly learn what ‘multi-tasking’ really means. It means you deliver all your projects on time and on budget—or you’ll soon be escorted out the door.

Carly Fiorina proposes to do the same to the Federal government. Just imagine the same rules applied to all departments and agencies of the US government! I wonder how well the IRS, EPA, FCC, the NLRB and many of the other departments, like Education and HHS would fare? I would not be surprised if many withered away or were consolidated, at a reduced level, into a governmental department.

I hope other candidates take up Carly’s idea. The country desperately needs it. I have no doubt our federal debt would not last long if Carly’s budgetary rules were imposed on the national government.

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Some interesting statistics are coming out after the Baltimore riots. One statistic that I saw said that over 20% of the employed in Baltimore, worked as government employees. Just image what that percentage would be if you included everyone on the welfare rolls. Are not welfare recipients paid by the government? They should be included, too. When you examine the demographics of Baltimore, you will find that half of the Baltimore police are black and most of the elected and appointed officials of Baltimore are black.

With those facts on the table, where is the white oppression? The whites aren’t in control of the city and hasn’t for over thirty years.

The feds have given Baltimore billions, yes, billions with a ‘B’! Where has those billions for education, jobs and infrastructure improvements gone? I wonder how much slithered into private political pockets.

Add to that mess, is this item I came across this morning. The Baltimore PD went to the DoJ for funding of a training program for their street officers. Holder turned them down—but Obama claims it’s all the ‘Pubs fault. One more lie by Obama and the democrats.