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Changing American leadership from one President to four Presidents.

It's easy to see that the President of The United States has a lot on his hands. They have to handle foreign affairs, internal development, the economy, job creation, infrastructure, military and much much more. It all seems a bit much for just one person, right? In any company, one person would not handle all of these issues. It would be split up. So why not in government?

I think that we should break the roles of government up and have one person in charge of the economy and financial industry, one in charge of America's infrastructure and economy, one in charge of foreign relations and one in charge of social services like social security, medicare, etc. We need four people who are specifically focused on each one to devote 100% of their time on each area to make it the best it can be. Budgets would be split and managed independently of each other. The President currently has people assigned to each post, in a way, but our government lacks full leadership. We shouldn't be just about one person. How can we ever expect one person to handle it all and make it work?

What do you think? Do you think the current system works? Do you think we would be better of treating each area separately and letting them be developed independently of each other? Do you think our Presidential model is out of date? Do you think one person can handle it all?

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Topics: Foreign Policy finance government infrastructure military open government
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  • Anne Meeker

    • 0
    Jul 13 2011: My real concern with dividing current presidential power among four people is that their ideas and efforts wouldn't be unified. Administratively, it might make sense to split these duties among specialists, but practically, they're all quite inextricably linked; almost any combination of the duties you mentioned have significant impacts on one another. I think the only real reason for having one person at the helm of a major corporation, country, organization, etc., is to make sure that the overarching vision is solid in the way it combines all of these elements. As Jose mentions, the worst-case scenario for this kind of division is that the individual presidents end up competing with and demonizing each other at elections--I wish it weren't a possibility, but with the existing hostility in our political system? Ouch. It could get really ugly really fast.
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    Harald Jezek 50+

    • +1
    Associate
    Feb 18 2011: I agree with the previous posts and like to add the following:
    1) the president of the US is not the brain behind US politics. He is only the face representing the country as well as the policies. That said, it doesn't really matter (from the point of view how much work gets done) how many presidents there are. If anything, the system will only become much more complicated.
    2) as was mentioned in the other posts, I agree that a government should focus on the key pillars of society, which are health, safety, education and infrastructure (to some degree).
    Instead of having 4 presidents, I'd like to see lean, efficient and transparent governments.
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    Jose Fernandez Calvo 500+

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    TED AttendeeTED TranslatorTEDx OrganizerAssociate
    Feb 18 2011: Agree with Charlie, also professional independent bodies (like the Federal Reserve) take important decisions out of the hand of politicians that might be tempted to tweak the rules (like the interest rate) to benefit them at re-election time, instead of considering the long-time benefit of the country.

  • Charlie Kimball

    • +2
    Feb 18 2011: First off, you would never be able to get the support to amend the constitution to allow that.

    Second, In my opinion, a number of the things you listed should not be under the direction of the federal government anyway (social security, medicare, financial industry, among others that you didn't mention) They should either be managed at the state level, or only very minimally at any government level at all, if at all.

    Third, one of your basic premises is that businesses have multiple people handling all of the issues, but companies still have a single CEO.
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