Budgetary Control Quotes

The European Union has effectively become a sovereign power with the authority to impose budgetary rules and structural reforms on member states outside democratic procedures and without democratic control.

Every American should be able to expect certain standards, freedoms, benefits, and opportunities form a twenty-first-century health system. If they are willing to participate and be responsible, they will gain: •Improved health; •Longer lives with a much better quality of life; •A more convenient, understandable and personalized experience -- all at a lower cost; •Access to the best course of treatment for their particular illness and their unique characteristics; •A system that fosters and encourages innovation, competition, and better outcomes for patients; •A system that truly values the impact that medical innovation has on patients and their caregivers as well as on society as a whole; •A government that facilitates and accelerates extraordinary opportunities to improve health and health care; •Continuous but unobtrusive 24/7 monitoring of their general health, chronic conditions, and acute health problems; •Access to the most modern medical knowledge and breakthroughs, including the most advanced technologies, therapies and drugs, unimpeded by government-imposed price controls or rationing; •The chance to increase their personal knowledge by learning from a transparent system of information about their diagnosis, costs and alternative solutions; •A continuously improving, competitive, patient-focused medical world in which new therapies, new technologies, and new drugs are introduced as rapidly and safely as possible -- and not a day later; •Greater price and market competition, innovation and smarter health care spending; •A system of financing that includes insurance, government, charities, and self-funding that ensures access to health and health care for every American at the lowest possible cost without allowing financing and short-term budgetary considerations to distort and weaken the delivery of care; •Genuine insurance to facilitate access to dramatically better care, rather than the current system, which is myopically focused on monthly or annual payments; •A health system in which third parties and government bureaucrats do not impede the best course of treatment that doctors and their patients decide on; •A health system in which seniors, veterans, or others under government health programs receive the same quality of care as their children in private markt systems. Big reforms are required to transform today’s expensive, obsolete health bureaucracy into a system that conforms to these principles.

A good rule of thumb for targeting the right stakeholders is to look for the person who has control of the budgetary resources allotted to resolve the pain point you solve. Or, alternatively, the person who spends meaningful amounts of time (i.e., labor resources), day to day, resolving that pain point.

Time credits can be complicated since they aren’t guaranteed and can be awarded or denied seemingly at the whim of corrections officers and circumstances beyond any rational control or prediction. However, there has been a long-standing pattern in Illinois of people sentenced to a year in prison actually serving only sixty-one days. To explain this, there was a rumor about obscure accounting bureaucracy. Apparently, state government budgetary months were rounded to thirty days. Once a prisoner was in for any amount of time longer than two months, the Illinois Department of Corrections (or maybe the specific institution) was eligible to, and in fact did, receive funds from the State to feed and house that person for a whole year. Therefore, the hustle by IDOC was to get as many nonviolent inmates as possible who were sentenced to one-year terms (primarily low-level drug possession convicts), kick them out on the sixty-first day, and take the money and run. It was so common that defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges all over the state routinely stretched ethical boundaries to dangle that number to defendants as a plea incentive.

In the world of physics, when two spatially separated events occur at the same time, the question of whether they are absolute is a function of witnesses’ time frames, a phenomenon known as the relativity of simultaneity. The marriage of CAA and TPG arrived at a time when the CAA partners were still grappling with a radically changing media landscape and trying to get their own house in order financially. People believed TPG had summoned a series of budgetary reviews, but just as Noah started work on an ark before even a drop of rain, some financial controls were put in motion before TPG had to request, or insist upon, a single one. One affected area, expense accounts, may sound trifling, but not in the representation game. So it was that modifications in CAA’s travel and entertainment policies brought about changes in the culture as well. One example: For years the opulent St. Regis Hotel in New York City had served as a virtual dorm for CAA agents traveling on business. No more. New regulations were put in place prohibiting midlevel and junior agents from bunking there. Limits were also placed on dining allowances for midlevel and junior agents no matter what the city.