ASSETS VS. LIABILITIES

I thought of this subject because on more than one occasion I have heard someone mention the charitable work that is needed here verses in other countries. Many Americans believe that we give too much to others while not servicing those at home. I believe this is because most people don’t have the full picture. Collectively, third world countries are almost 2 trillion dollars in debt. During many of the disasters when we go in to help, these countries are given loans with exorbitant interest rates that they will never be able to pay off. Thus, part of Tony Blair’s plan of calling for a 100 percent cancellation of multilateral debt owed by 62 developing nations.

Most of my friends who have travelled to third world countries (I’ve even seen this in resort areas when we’ve ventured off to where the indigenous people really live) tell about the whole other level of poverty experienced in other parts of the world. One friend describes how appreciative a young boy was in South Africa who was given a mere pair of tennis shoes. Personally, I have been involved with public service in America since age 5. A few years ago, I worked with homeless children through an organization called Stand Up For Kids. I was in charge of arranging their monthly dinner parties at the beach and I walked “the beat” a few times handing out information. I am not kidding when I tell you those homeless kids were very particular about everything from food to clothing. They could be extremely demanding and at times not even thankful. It was a job you did because you hoped it might make a difference but there was no immediate reward. In fact, it was a little draining because you knew you’d be leaving them every night to fend for themselves. Los Angeles county only has one shelter that accepts kids without their parents. Unappreciative or not, they deserved a safe place to sleep. Most of them ran away from abusive homes. Still, it was easy for us to get excessive amounts of food and clothes on a regular basis. We even had to get a bigger storage bin because of all the items we received. America has plenty of ASSETS. But we also have plenty of LIABILITIES.

Webster’s dictionary describes a liability as “the quality of being something that holds you back.” Our biggest liability just happens to be our bureaucratic government. A grand example of this is California. We have not been able to raise national test scores in schools from near bottom in over a decade. The fifth largest economy in the world is only doing slightly better than poor states (and even given the culturally diverse student make-up, this is still unacceptable). I personally know how inept our leaders are because I helped organize a day of lobbying for my sorority chapter. It was on that day that I heard a representative tell us we had approximately 20 or so gang prevention programs (I can’t remember the exact figure) that had been active for several years. However, their organizers were never able to communicate effectively. So, we hired Civil Rights Attorney Connie Rice to evaluate them and give suggestions to get them to work together. Are you kidding me? No one ever thought about this before? Rice wrote up a massive roadmap for overhauling L.A.'s strategy but this is several years and billions of dollars AFTER the problem has escalated to the point where we've had a 44% increase of gang related crimes since last year in the San Fernando Valley alone. Some of these crimes have been committed against the vulnerable homeless kids who have no where to go at night. This is because, though most runaways travel to California (and Los Angeles county specifically) there have been very few steps toward figuring out away to protect these children. However, Santa Monica did pass a law preventing us from feeding them.

California is very much a reflection of America in general. Collectively, we have plenty of Assets. In this state particularly, we pay amongst the highest property tax in the country and our sales tax is nothing to sneeze at. But we, like much of the rest of the country, have an Asset Allocation problem due to our Liabilities—our leadership. We don’t need more money. We need more competence. And we need it NOW.