I am thankful for you. I’m taking the rest of the week off and a couple of days next week to recuperate from some much needed orthopedic surgery. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t in the countdown to a number of things.
First, we are waiting to hear from the Governor on who his pick is to replace the Senate seat held by Sen. Johnny Isakson. Cong. Collins is making a full court press to be the nominee and it remains to be seen if he’s overplayed his hand. I’ve learned in the last three years to refrain from making too many predictions, because when it comes to politics, nothing comes out as you would expect. If it did, Jack Kingston would be a Senator instead of David Perdue, Hillary Clinton would be president instead of President Trump and Casey Cagle would have beaten Brian Kemp in the runoff and gone on to be the 83rd Governor. There are always people who will tell you they know what’s happening, but in reality they don’t.
As far as the Senate appointment goes, people who are talking don’t know and the people who know aren’t talking.
Second, in a few weeks from the legislative session will kick off and Governor Kemp has rightfully asked for a cut in the budget for this year and next. It’s the right thing to do. The time to streamline is when times are good so when times are bad, there is wiggle room to help. Don’t listen to the naysayers and think the world will come to an end if you cut spending. It won’t. As I’ve outlined in other columns, start with reviewing every retirement and go from there. People are your biggest cost and if you reduce numbers after people have retired, nobody gets let go. With all the Baby Boomers retiring, it is a unique time to actually change a bloated structure without causing an uptick in unemployment numbers.
Finally, on the federal level, we are coming up on another false deadline. They look at it as a win that we funded the government until December 20th when in fact, it’s another example of why our budget process doesn’t work. We will discuss this in detail over the coming weeks.
So watch these three things and we’ll talk about them on Morning Talk.
