Do More for Less

Have you ever watched Dr. House's show on Fox? To some, the guy is a lunatic, and to many fans he is a brilliant physician. He saves his patients by trying tests or procedures that could possibly kill the patient. What works to his favor is that the patients are always in a bad enough condition that they would be dead if not for these drastic measures. Lucky for Dr. House, the aid script writers are always on his side and it always works out to his favor and the patient is healed after a few brushes with death.

The current economic crisis has the same feel of watching House. We are waiting for the show to end happily to continue our normal programming. The government is playing Dr. House with the economy and our lives as the patient: taking actions hastily without much thought and with the qualifier that no one knows better how to handle the situation, but inaction could be fatal. We can take a wishful thinking approach and hope for a good ending to the show or we could play an active role. The ending of this show is not written by a paid script writer. The ending will be up to us. The implications of a bad ending are a lot more than a few minutes of emotional disruption. So I do not see how we can just sit back and watch the show as it unfolds.

We cannot just take a holding pattern, waiting for someone or something to fix the problems. We cannot weather this storm by hunkering down in the trenches, doing the bare minimum wishing for the storm to pass quickly. I hope I am wrong, but I do not see this except as the prelude to the real storm. We need to rediscover the spirit of sacrifice and innovation. What made America the great country it is was hard work and open arms welcoming talent from all over the world. The solution to our problems will be found in a school, a lab or a factory not in a shopping cart.

We need to believe that we must and can "do more for less" instead of adopting an attitude of passivity. Instead of cancelling plans to improve how we do business because of budget cuts, we need to stretch our dollar and our time to make these plans a reality. We need to remind the leaders on the national, local, and institutional levels that the American people know how to make the good times not just how to live them. They need to lead and make the tough choices not the safe ones that will turn out to be the wrong ones on the long run.