America Has a New CEO

In January Barack Obama will take over the executive position of what is akin to a large and complex corporation, the United States of America. In his campaign, he promised to go through the federal budget ‘line-by-line’. He’ll be sitting in the oval office come January, but will he really tackle our over-spending in such detail?

American CEOs Sign Off on the Bottom Line

In 2002, after a slurry of accounting scandals resulting in the fall of Enron among others, we got a new law: Sarbanes Oxley (SOX). This legislation aims to decrease the sketchy accounting practices of many companies caused their stock prices to collapse, resulting in what was at that time a huge loss of public confidence in Wall Street. (The stock market works better for the rest of us when executives don’t cook the books.)

Part of SOX requires that CEOs be held accountable for their company’s financial statements. They now have to sign a statement that the statements accurately reflect the financial position and performance. The buck stops at the corner office. It may seem like common sense, but before this requirement, many CEOs grasped at the excuse that they just didn’t understand all that accounting mumbo jumbo.

More Than a Promise?

A lot of people don’t think Obama will really go through the budget like he said he will. They say it’s not practical, it’s impossible even, to tackle the tens of thousands of line items in our national budget. But it’s not like he doesn’t have a staff. And he is our CEO after all.

What do you think? Should the executive branch of government really be responsible for our country’s bottom line?