Michael Vaughan

On the last Thursday in March, the sun rose on the eastern horizon at roughly a quarter past seven. The high ridge line above the East Ogden Bench would cast its continuous shadow on the city for another hour. Daybreak revealed that an overnight dusting of snow had fallen on mountain peaks above Ogden. On the Weber State University campus, almost 3,000 students from around the world were enjoying a splendid Utah morning for the first time.

The occasion for their first trip to Ogden was the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) that WSU was hosting. Students from across the country and five foreign countries came to the WSU campus to share their research and artistic creations. That morning, the visiting students heard from the Nobel Prize winning geneticist Mario Capecchi. On subsequent mornings, the students would learn from the award-winning author Anne Fadiman and the noted ethnobotanist Paul Cox.

One of the hallmarks of the free enterprise system is failure.

Less than half of the businesses that are started in the United States will be operating four years later; the majority will have failed.

Records for the performance of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index over a 50-year period indicate that, on a given day, the stock market has a 53 percent chance of being up and a 47 percent chance of being down.

After Thanksgiving, I was searching for some gift ideas. A good friend who is an accomplished shopper suggested buying some gift cards from 25th Street merchants. This led me to revisit a column I wrote four years ago encouraging Christmas shoppers to purchase a few of their gifts from local merchants. Given current economic conditions, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the topic.

In the 1953 movie The Wild One, a group of young people occupy a small California town. Their purpose is ambiguous, but it is apparent that they disrespect authority and enjoy disturbing the established order. At one point in the film, a woman asks the group's leader, played by Marlon Brando, a question: "What are you rebelling against?" Brando replies, "What have you got."

Some have found similarities between Brando's attitude and that of the young people who have recently occupied Wall Street to protest. The comparison is understandable because the protesters' concerns include a long list of issues that seems to include anything "you have got." The list includes: corporate greed, political corruption, income inequality, unemployment, environmental degradation, foreign wars, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, and the fairness of the tax system.

The budget deficit has been the major news story for the summer of 2011. The eleventh-hour decision to raise the debt ceiling, Standard and Poor's downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, and the panic in the financial markets have occupied the headlines.

To begin to understand the budget problem you need to examine the major components of the federal budget. Based upon numbers compiled by the Office of Management and Budget: 20 percent of the budget goes to defense, 20 percent goes to Social Security, 21 percent goes to Medicare and Medicaid, 14 percent goes to "safety net" programs, 6 percent goes to interest payments on the debt, 7 percent goes to benefits for veterans and federal retirees, and 12 percent goes to a wide a variety of programs ranging from transportation to medical research.

As the federal government approaches the debt ceiling limit with Congress having no workable plan to either raise the ceiling or cut federal spending, I have been thinking about the humorist Will Rogers’ observation on the government. On more than one occasion, Rogers observed that, “Congress ain’t nothing but hired help.”

What if the electorate actually treated politicians like hired help? What if members of Congress, senators and the president were hired like most other employees? Would the quality of leadership improve?

On Friday, Weber State University will conduct its 137th commencement ceremony. In 1896, the first year WSU conferred degrees, there were three graduates. By 1921 this number had grown to slightly more than 100. In 2011, WSU will confer more than 4,000 degrees.

In the 19th century and for the better part of the 20th century, virtually all of the degrees awarded by WSU were conferred to residents of Utah. In fact, most degrees were awarded to residents of Weber County. On Friday, the majority of the degrees will still be conferred to Utah residents, but there will also be a significant number of degrees awarded to students from Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and other countries.