You can help promote "Liberty Under God" in 2012 by voting for Charles Baum in 2010.I enjoy running for office because it gives me an opportunity to promote "Liberty Under God." I might not have that opportunity if the Libertarian Party loses its ballot status. Without that status, I might have to gather as many as 10,000 signatures to get on the ballot. The Libertarian Party must poll 2% in one of the two statewide races or it will lose its qualified status.
Baum is the Libertarian candidate for Missouri State Auditor. If he gets 2% of the vote, I will benefit in 2012 by not having to collect all those signatures.
Is Baum qualified? I'll vote for him. Here's a message from his blog:
Susan Montee’s website celebrates her experience as an attorney and CPA, which she feels makes her the most qualified candidate to be Missouri’s State Auditor.
Tom Schweich proclaims how he loves to do audits.
I readily concede that both Tom and Susan can do a better audit than I do. I would love to have them on my staff.
However, the State Auditor has a staff of 125 people, many qualified to do a great audit. In fact, many of the audits are not even done by Susan. She just oversees them.
Susan claims to have saved Missouri millions of dollars. However, there is no accounting of this, which is kind of ironical in that the State Auditor has no real verification that she has saved the state any money.
The State Auditor’s budget is close to $5,000,000 and we really have no accounting of whether or not it pays for itself.
What we need is an auditor that can actually save the state of Missouri money.
Accountants are good at doing accounting, but not usually that good at achieving action and results. That takes a different skill. What we need is an auditor that can aggressively carry out the recommendations in the audit. How many of Susan’s staff’s recommendations are carried out? We don’t know. She does her audit, makes recommendations and moves on to the next audit. No real follow up.
We live in a society that loves to create volumes of paper. In fact, we are overwhelmed by paper. In 2009, Susan had overseen 151 audits, thousands of pages all buried away somewhere read by almost no one, like the 2,200 page financial reform bill that no one reads and no one knows what it will mean.
What we need today more than ever is simplicity, action, and leadership, not more audits. If the state auditor's job is to do audits and provide transparency, Susan has done a great job; but if it is to actually save the state money I’m afraid she falls short.
Accountants are great at counting the number of trees in the forest, but often miss the forest.
Charlie is a native Missourian, born in St. Louis, who lives in University City with Carol, his wife of 38 years. The Baums' daughter, Jennifer, is currently married living in Minneapolis with her husband Justin and daughter Camille. Charlie earned his bachelor's degree in Business with a major in Finance from the University of Missouri - Columbia and earned his master's degree in Teaching from Webster University. Charlie is a Certified Financial Planner and a Principal at Renaissance Financial in St. Louis. He has also earned the designations of Chartered Financial Consultant and Chartered Life Underwriter over the course of his career. He has over 25 years of experience in the financial services industry and is regularly relied on to mentor new advisors who join his company. Prior to his work in financial services, Charlie was a junior high school teacher in University City. Charlie has served on the boards of the Family Support Network and the Crisis Nursery in the St. Louis area.
An argument can be made that his opponents are more "qualified" than Baum, but they aren't motivated like a libertarian is to shrink the size of government, and voting for them does nothing to promote "Liberty Under God."
Individual audits are supervised by an auditor-in-charge, who normally is a senior auditor. Audit fieldwork is performed by senior auditors, staff auditors and audit assistants. Approximately 150 persons are employed by the state auditor’s office. About 50 percent of the audit staff are CPAs. That figure represents a marked increase from earlier years; in 1974 only about 10 percent of the staff were CPAs. [MO Manual, 2005-2006]
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