[Puppage]

All you have to do is take a look at the USPS and Amtrak.

[SonOfDarkSkies]

Great core assets, great potential value, BAD management...excellent takeover target!

[edpc]

It would be requesting a bailout from The United.....

Oh....nevermind.

[Little Ray]

Better off than it is a a government. The Federal Gub’mint has significant assents that are not balanced against debts. As private company, these would be balanced against its debts.
Of course, as a government, the Federal Gub’mint has very limited options when it comes to liquidating such assets so they can’t be used to offset the national debt.

[anniegetyourgun]

http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/15/markets/premarkets/

Meltdowns take many forms.

[Joe 6-pack]

If the US were a business, we would be out of business.

[Boiling point]

Unfortunately for us, the government is the only business that can manufacture new customers at the stroke of a pen and raise it’s prices significantly without loosing any of it’s current customers.

[greyfox]

It’s next to impossible to understand how these political boobs can go year after year spending and spending without
realizing their ultimate fate. You can kick the can down the road so far but sooner or later you run out of road, are these
people so myopic that they cannot see or understand this simple principle. We are not in “this” position because of prudent leadership. This hole has been dug slowly and carefully to a depth where escape is next to impossible. The Governor of Wisconson understands this and “they” want to crucify him for daring to bring some sanity to the problem. Obama has no clue about fiscal responsibility and seems t think there is no end to the public purse, which he now believes to be his very own to do with as he pleases.
The answer lies in hard choices and hard work, the welfare state will make paupers of us all, all except the elite and
the so called leaders of our society. Some, in our society, seem to have gotten the message, I only hope it’s not too late. We’re like the nuclear plants in Japan, the rods have been exposed, I hope there is enough water to cool them down
and ultimately restore them to manageable levels.

[Will88]

If the US were a business, firing all those responsible for our cooked books and manipulated statistics would be one of the first steps. Things are actually worse than they seem.

[NowApproachingMidnight]

Thanks for posting. I like the union slides:

* More government (federal / state / local) employees belong to
unions (8 million) than did private sector employees
(7 million) in 2009.

* Government employee union membership rate of 37% is 5x
higher than private sector employee union membership rate of 7%
in 2009.

* Private sector union membership rate declined 180 basis points to
7% in 2009 from 9% in 2000, while government employee union
membership rate rose 50 basis points 37.4% in 2009 from 36.9% in 2000.

[Poison Pill]

Meeker carefully lays out in an easy to grasp manner the incontrovertible facts about our federal government's deficit and budget crisis using as a framework the conceit of treating the U.S. government as though it were a private company

But it isn't a private company is it? If you treat an orange like an apple you still couldn't use it to make an apple pie.

[Jack Hammer]

Broke.