John H. Merrill: Doing more with less
Just last week, Forbes reported that President Donald Trump has reduced his payroll and saved American taxpayers more than $20 million. He reduced staff, eliminated excess spending, and still, government continued to operate more successfully than it has in years. While his predecessor spent 8 years filling the Executive Branch with political employees, friends and cronies, President Trump is actively reducing his office budget and returning money to the taxpayers. Here in Alabama, I have followed that same philosophy. Reducing overhead and staffing costs and increasing efficiency. Since January 19, 2015, the Office of Alabama’s Secretary of State has set new standards for excellence in efficiency and cost savings in state government. In total, we have saved more than $2.8 million dollars for Alabama taxpayers by reducing staff and increasing efficiencies, just as President Trump has done at the federal level. We reduced our office staff from 49 employees to its current staff of 36 employees. We reduced the wait time for business filings. When we arrived, those filings could take from seven to nine months to complete. For the last three years, we were able to condense that time to same-day processing. We have also introduced automatic business filings that are available to every county, which our office pays for at no expense to the county of origin. We no longer receive a general fund appropriation from the Legislature because in 2016 we asked them to zero our office out of the general fund budget making us fully self-sufficient without using general fund tax dollars. We no longer operate at the speed of government, we operate at the speed of business! We have done all this with less money and less people. Simply put, we’ve done more with less and have made it easier and quicker for new business to form in our state. It can be done and it should be done throughout all sectors of our State and Federal government. The swamp in DC is full of wasteful spending that is propagated by endless debt hike politicians. Government should not be in the business of creating GOVERNMENT jobs. They should be in the business of creating an environment where the free market creates private sector jobs. It’s not enough for government to operate like a business, we also must force it to operate at the speed of business and that means doing more with less, so taxpayers have more, not less. We’ve done exactly that in the Alabama Secretary of State’s office and we encourage all sectors of our government to do what we have done and what President Trump has done. Cut waste and do more for the taxpayers without spending so much taxpayer money. John H. Merrill currently serves as Alabama’s Secretary of State. He was elected in 2014 and reelected in 2018. He is currently seeking the Republican nomination for the United States Senate.
John Giles: Qualifications? Meeting a payroll
Governor Guy Hunt once told me, “John, before anyone runs for office or becomes a journalist, they would be well-served to have met a payroll first. What a profound statement and I agree 100 percent. If you have kept up with my resume, I worked for the Hunt administration in economic development during the late 80’s early 90’s. I worked primarily in the area of Small Business and later with all exiting business and industries. My father was a small business entrepreneur and that mantle passed down to his family. My father taught all of us what it meant to meet a payroll. We all fully understood and appreciated what Governor Hunt was saying. For those who have not had that opportunity, let me share with you what has to happen before you can write a payroll check. First, you have to have a product or service. Then, you have to get in the market place and find your niche among a field of competition. You have to convince the buyer you are qualified to deliver, best in the business and your price has to generally meet your competitors. After getting the order, now you have to deliver as promised, satisfy the customer, invoice and then collect. In addition, one must price the invoice with an adequate margin to meet your overhead, expenses, maintain raw materials and finished inventory, carry accounts receivables, payroll and payroll taxes, and then guess who is last to get paid. Entrepreneurs are often over glamourized, they really work to keep their team employed and in most cases, the last one to get paid. I can tell you from personal experience, on more than one occasion; we had to put our paycheck in the drawer, while paying employees and other obligations first. Entrepreneurs often go to bed and wake up in a sweat, frequently can’t sleep from the financial, physical and emotion load of carrying a business. This same owner is often faced with a tsunami of problems that seem to be insurmountable, and somehow finds a narrow path of escape from total disaster and business failure. At the end of the day, this small business person is responsible for the engine of our economy, and creates 75 percent of all of our new jobs. Prayer, vision, work ethic, tenacity, grit, tough, mission oriented, making one dollar do the work of three dollars, negotiating skills and not having can’t or quit in your vocabulary are the traits that embody a small business entrepreneur. Most people cannot handle this kind of sustained pressure. For an elected official who never met a payroll, it puts them at a great disadvantage in solving problems and getting projects completed. Often, without the skills to find solutions or make very tough decisions, a non- business background officeholder quickly find themselves outside of their expertise. All too often they are tempted with very weak solutions throwing taxpayer money at problems, like raising taxes, toll roads or legalizing gambling, all of which are very regressive ideas. Another example, let’s build bigger prisons rather than fight recidivism. Being successful in business also requires a high level of common sense, which is generally not the order of the day in government solutions. Rarely does a journalist have a small business background, which means they have never met a payroll. Most come from academia where research projects are theory based and not applied real time research. Journalist by most polling data, generally vote Democrat and typically lean leftward in rationale and on issues. As I have written before, journalism and editorial opinion departments have merged, which is unfortunate. In my experience over the years, if you have an elected official offer an idea as a solution like, raising taxes, passing gambling, open borders, free healthcare and college, adding illegal immigrants to the entitlement rolls and allowing them to vote and the like, generally journalist are drooling all over these ideas as if they are a stroke of brilliance. One recent example, Obama’s economic development plan was summed up in two words: Green Jobs. The media treated this notion as astounding. Common sense knew at the outset, this was a flawed concept. Wind energy, solar, and electric cars are not cost effective, so the market potential for these ideas are in the deficit before you wake up in the morning. Government subsidized plants promoting these concepts catastrophically failed on a flawed theory, not applied science. Let’s discuss academia for a minute. I have often proposed that we need corporate business minds running academia, not academics, particularly as College and University Presidents along with Superintendents of Education. You can hire academics to run your educational programs. Education is like any other enterprise, you are in the people business so they have to be led, have budgets, need long term strategic plans with measurable outcomes and who better to address this kind of leadership than a business professional. If you do not have a PhD. behind your name, you can forget about being a university president. Motivating people, being goal oriented, raising funds, selling programs to the public, leadership, making tough decisions and so much more are second nature for a business person. Academics in this environment are at a great disadvantage, because of not having the hard core problem solving skills earned from recession injected experiences, there is just no comparison. As a side note, lawyers often find their way into public office. There are two kinds of lawyers, strict constructionist constitutional originalist (Conservative) and those that believe the constitution is a living, breathing every evolving and changing document (Liberal). Ambulance chasing plaintiff trial lawyers (Liberal) generally are those if elected or appointed as judges practice judicial activism. We do not need these types in any public office. On the other hand, strict constructionists (Conservative) generally make great judges and compliment the business minds in the legislative process, keeping ideas constitutionally driven. Business people have to finish the project or service to get paid; non-business minds are
