11-032

Easy as ABC

Americans fancy preparedness when it comes to things like Boy Scouts and lifeguards but as recent economic history has shown, our fiscal guardians are short a few merit badges when it comes to warding off monetary snafus on a national scale. An ounce of prevention is worth its weight in helium to Wall Street, so it’s high time I put my two cents into the pot (I’ll see your two cents and raise you ten shares of stock in Lehman Brothers).

It’s not for lack of bureaucratic oversight that our financial health languishes but lack of bureaucratic foresight, it would appear. The money men have enough to do making sure their golden parachutes will open. They can’t be expected to nit-pick over every imminent monetary disaster to come down the pike.

Here’s where we could take a lesson in preparedness from our neighbors to the Far East (or West if you take the red-eye from Cucamonga). For sheer pluck and clairvoyance, the Reserve Bank of India has it all over our Cub Scouts at the Fed. Not ones to be caught napping, the Indian government has established an Office of Pending Frauds. Why wait for the malfeasance to occur, they scoff. Let’s nip it in the bud! Just think what such a prescient plan could have done with Bernie Madoff. He would have been behind bars while the word ponzi was but a gleam in his beady little eye.

This all got me to worrying that the U.S. is liable to get behind in the race for bureaucratic dominance. We have been putting all our eggs in the petty bureaucracy basket (a recent command performance at the DMV reassured me on that count). We need to heave to and establish some real bureaucratic beauts. I have a couple of suggestions in case the powers that be are at a loss.

We could have a veritable alphabet soup of offices. The Agency for Anticipated Antics could ferret out hoaxes before they go viral on Facebook. Or a Federal Bureau of Instigation might keep Republican ringers from disrupting Democratic town hall meetings. We could certainly use a Ministry of Marital Malfeasance to prevent Congressional philanderers from preaching marital fidelity (at least while their mistresses are still on the government payroll or best two out of three falls).

I hope my ideas will be taken to heart, although I’m pretty sure we should leave the Internal Revenue Service as is. What service they provide escapes me but this is not the season to provoke them as they are overworked and apt to be peevish.