This year’s Bakersfield Business Conference was host to many speakers who claimed to be business gurus or financial “wizards.”
Andrew Cuomo was a guest who preached that even the wizards don’t have any idea about the future status of the nation’s economy and that government should be run like a business.
Cuomo served as secretary of Housing and Urban Development during President Clinton’s second term.
“When I became secretary, I was 39 years old,” Cuomo said. “When I left four years later, I was 67 years old.”
HUD has always been under fire, he said, because money never seemed to get to where it was supposed to.
“The HUD position was a very tough position, I got the job because no one else wanted the job,” he said.
Cuomo claims to have been a successful HUD secretary.
“You have to remember how they define a successful HUD secretary, it could be that I was in there for eight years and I wasn’t indicted.”
On a more serious note, he said, most Americans have questions about the economy.
“The question anywhere you go, ‘What is happening to our economy?’ ” Cuomo said. “Where are we now?”
“The bad news is no one really knows,” he said. “When I was at the president’s economic briefing, the best economic people in the United States telling the president of the United States what was going to happen with the economy — they were almost always wrong.”
Cuomo stressed that the economy lies in the hands of the American citizens.
“We make our own future, we make our destiny … it’s within our control. All the trends are gone.”
When the government works together with the private sector, that is when communities and the economy thrives, he said.
Cuomo spoke about how in the past, all 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives would vote strictly down party lines on all potential laws. This didn’t accomplish anything then and it won’t accomplish anything in the future if that’s how the House is going to work, he maintained.
“They were more loyal to the party label than to the merit of the issue,” Cuomo said.
“Democrats were pro-worker … which meant they were anti-business,” he said. “How can you be pro-worker and anti-business? Where would the worker work? It doesn’t make sense.”
Instead of political bickering, both parties should work together.
On the other side, “If I was Republican, it meant I was pro-business, which meant I was anti-government, no I was pro-good government.”
“Make government run like a business,” Cuomo pleaded. “Make it efficient, make it deliver services.”
Cuomo ended his speech by commenting on what Americans can do to help the war on terrorism.
“No good things come from fear, and closing down, and constriction,” he said. “Yes, we were startled, and yes, we felt a pain like we never have before, but we are not closing down and we are not constricting. We are not operating out of fear, we are operating out of strength.”