Watching Meet the Press is a pretty frustrating activity. The focus is always on Edward Snowden. But there are other issues. For example, there are tens of thousands of security personnel on staff at NSA and other fuzzy institutions like it. Maybe if there was nothing to leak, the problem of the “next leaker” would go away or at least be mitigated.

Maybe if Congress people got to work figuring in a public way what is and isn’t legal for NSA to be doing, rather than wasting further time on events like Benghazi and spending ubertime on electioneering, then the issue would be mitigated.

Maybe if all that money getting elected was channelled toward building more hospitals and hiring more care personnel, the VA issue would be better managed. I hear there’s a jobs problem in the US. I just don’t trust all this hand wringing about things that can be fixed with a little elbow grease and firing of the brain cells. Hm, seems simple enough to me: when there are fewer people at the checkout counter, the other checkout counter lines grow longer. The lines at city DMVs are long because there aren’t enough counters.

It’s pretty simple to see that when a body calls the doctor’s office for whatever necessity, there’s a schedule, and time is equal to space. Let’s say the doctor has ten patients per day. The next day the number doubles. Let’s say the next day, the number triples. Gee, what to do about that?

The fact of the matter is that public institutions have been run down and neglected, from schools to the VA for several decades. The potholes created this winter must be giving public officials nightmares. Identifying problems in this regard is easy.  We know the solutions, too. We just don’t want to pay for it.