image: cs.usm.maine.edu
ABC Analysis
ABC Analysis is the name given for how to look at an issue, divide it into its component parts, and then try to solve it by starting with its most important element, and ending with or by ignoring its least important elements. It doesn’t win me many friends, but it gives me time to work on my golf game, and that needs a lot of work.
For example, suppose you were given the task of uncovering as much waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiencies in the U.S. economy as you can find. How might you begin the task, and where might you look? If you are like many of my relatives and others in my hometown, you would go straight to those who are unemployed and receiving public assistance. And you might find three individuals who looked healthy and able to work, but who were not employed. And you might find one person who cashed in $30 dollars of food stamps with a dishonest vendor for $15 dollars in cash who promptly bought alcohol or drugs with the money. And you might also find that the healthy looking individuals had never been employed in their lives. And you would be fuming mad. Moreover, these examples would likely become your main topics of conversation for the next 20 years whenever you could inject these topics into the conversations, which would be often.
But if you had been a bit more observant, and had listened to your third grade teachers with an attentive ear, and read your assignments, you might take a very different approach. You might then look at the billing practices of a few physicians across the country who have been overcharging the Medicare system by billions of dollars annually. And you might find scores of bankers and other lenders who took hundreds of billions of dollars in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) money from the federal government on the promise of helping their borrowers, but who diverted that money instead to other ventures that were highly profitable to them. You would not find anyone in these groups in the food stamp line, or in the ghettos. They would all be well-dressed, well-manicured, and living in the most exclusive parts of the city, flying in private jets, and staying the most exclusive resorts.
And then if you were really bright, and graduated cum laude from the third grade, you might look at the steady stream of dollar flows from the Federal Reserve to bankers, thence to their investment accounts and the accounts of their favorite corporate executives, all of which ended up in stocks, bonds, real estates, and commodities of the super rich. This money (now totaling $80 trillions), intended to create jobs for all those on welfare, and for those coming into the labor market, and for creating profits for reinvestments, and for research and development of new energy sources, and more efficient automobiles, and new drugs, and for reducing budget deficits, for rebuilding our infrastructure, and for creating prosperity for all 325 million Americans was being taken by the few at the top for their use and for their offspring—in perpetuity—with the help of the inheritance laws. And with just a bit of careful analysis, you would conclude that the money flows to this last group is the major cause of our lackluster economy, and the fundamental cause of poverty; and hunger; and suicides; and mental health issues; and crime; and incarcerations; and illiteracy; and illegal drug usage; and teen pregnancies: and shortened life expectancies.
I am neither a judge nor a preacher, but it is fair to ask: Which approach would you take, and why? If you have better method, don’t tell me—tell everyone.
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John
Ron
Love ya!
Jane