Mitt Romney, 2008 and likely 2012 GOP Presidential contender, went a little out on a limb and proposed some substantive and realistic economic policy initiatives.

This is huge in a climate where others in his party have just talked in broad sweeping plans like cutting taxes and spending, or have opted for pushing for dismantling Medicare and significantly altering Social Security benefits in ways that would be politically dead on arrival.

Among his proposals is a plan to permit businesses to write off in 2010 and 2011 the capital investments made in those years rather than over time.  This might well go a long way toward liberating some of the cash corporations are currently hoarding, and could amount to a potent stimulus to the economy.

He also wants to align corporate taxes with those of other developed economies, eliminating special corporate tax breaks that lobbyists have inserted over the years.  That could be a big rise in tax revenue by just plugging holes through intelligent tax reform rather than raising rates.

Further, he’s advocating for adopting an energy policy that will actually eliminate our dependence on OPEC and hostile states.  This is good for jobs, good for the climate, and good for national security.

Of course he still wants to maintain the Bush tax cuts and eliminate the capital gains tax, both of which are party staples.  And he opens with the requisite accusation that almost every action the President has taken has deepened and lengthened the economic downturn.  But that’s pretty tame stuff compared to what other Republican hopefuls are saying.

The key point being there are some actionable ideas here that Obama and the Democrats might be willing to work with the GOP on.  This is a constructive offering, and exactly the sort of thing that politicians should be putting on the table.  However, Romney’s not currently in a position to drive those proposed policies.  So it will come down to others in the GOP side of Congress to pick up on these ideas and push them forward.

Let’s see if anyone wants to play ball…

Monroe County, NY is one of several locations identified by NYPA, through its Great Lakes Offshore Wind Project, to potentially host an offshore wind farm.  Yet the reception by local communities has been less than welcoming.

In recent weeks the town boards in Greece and Webster have voted unanimously to oppose the authority’s project, and Monroe County legislators have been entertaining their own ban.

While any significant development project has its pros and cons, the ire against offshore wind farms in Lake Ontario seems mostly driven by NIMBY (not in my backyard).  There’s little opposition to wind power in general.  75% of respondents to a Rochester Business Journal poll said they supported it at least somewhat, and a majority strongly supported it.  And why not?  It’s clean, renewable, and cost effective. Further, a $1B project is bound to be a boon to the local economy.

Perhaps most importantly, it lessens our dependence on coal for electricity production.  While coal has a reputation as “cheap fuel”, there are many hidden costs in terms of government subsidies, pollution, and environmental impacts, not to mention the glut of health and safety issues plaguing coal miners.

However, Rochester is a long way from West Virginia.  We don’t see the strip mined hillsides here.  Sure, we still suffer from acid rain, but it’s way better than it was in the 1970′s, and we’re used to it.  Wind turbines are new, potentially local, and might be seen from your house.  This has fostered an understandable sense of fear in lakeside towns, but has also ushered in a groundswell of misinformation.

Conservative Examiner Willard Fox recently wrote about wind power and published “some of the negatives you may not have read about.”  Although in reality, you may not have heard about these “facts” because many of them are untrue or misleading.

For example, while wind power will not eliminate the need for conventional energy sources like coal and nuclear, it does lessen the demand on them.  This means the existing plants burn less non-renewable fuel, and fewer new plants need to be built to meet the ever increasing American appetite for power.  A concern is also levied against the need to build massive electrical storage facilities, which would be nice except that we don’t yet know how to store electricity on an industrial scale.  If we did, wind and solar power would be even more attractive options than they are now.  And concerns about power transmission and its impact on the county’s grid are the same issues that would arise if any power generation facility was built using any technology.  The value of cheap power to the community far outweighs the investment in the power grid.

The more valid concerns are when Fox cites the issues of noise, property values, and simply having to look at the wind farm looming on the lake’s horizon.   He says, “They [the turbines] produce a noise level of a car that is doing over 60 miles per hour.”   This is a good point, but keep in mind the proposal is to build the turbines over two miles offshore.  Would you worry about buying a house two miles from a major highway?  Probably not.  Further, studies have shown wind farms have no long term impact on property values.  Are they an eyesore?  Maybe, but you do get used to things.  Remember when cell towers were going to destroy the landscape?  Now you don’t even notice them.

The bottom line is that the country needs wind power and other forms of green energy.  It has to be located somewhere.  Perhaps it would be better to ask yourself if you’d rather live in the same town as a wind farm or a strip mine, a coal fired power plant, or another nuclear reactor?  Sure, it would be great if we could just make our energy needs some other community’s problem.  But if we’re going to step up to the plate, then a few windmills aren’t looking so bad now are they?

President Obama is desperately trying to convince the public his policies prevented a looming depression that would have devastated  our economy.  This is more than an uphill battle because as everyone is saying, you just can’t prove a negative.  That is, you have no way to show what would have happened if you hadn’t done what you did.

On Tuesday’s episode of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Olbermann offered a special comment on a different topic which contained an interesting insight.  President Bush had great success at proving the negative case that his policies prevented another terrorist attack (clip showing this point below).  Now Olbermann went on to blame others for this (full video available here), but there is a more interesting point to be gleaned.

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Ignoring the questions of whether Obama actually prevented a depression and whether Bush actually prevented another terrorist attack, let’s examine only the public perception.  The simple fact is, there were no more significant domestic terror incidents while Bush was proving his negative.  Consider instead what would have happened had there continued to be one or two attacks each year, resulting in hundreds of deaths each.  It may well have been that without the Bush policies those attacks would have numbered a dozen a year, but it wouldn’t have mattered.  He never would have sold his story.  He likely never would have gotten reelected.

This is the reason Obama fails to prove his negative on the economy.  Had we bounced in 3 months back to 2007 levels of unemployment and the Dow hit 14,000 again, then he could sell his success story.  But while he may well have prevented devastation, he did not keep us from suffering.  And as long as the pain continues,the public will not accept his proof.

While there is an ideological divide between Conservatives and Progressives, it’s not clear this is the fundamental chasm between the camps.  It may be rooted in their respective worldviews. After all, the end goals of both sides are aligned.  Everyone wants peace, prosperity, health, safety, and a good standard of living for their children.

However, the apparent difference in the paths to get to this end state are misleading.  Stereotypes say Democrats are for big government, social safety nets, and wealth redistribution.  They are pro-union and anti-business.  They are for protecting the environment and personal freedoms.  Meanwhile, the Republicans are all about small government, fiscal austerity, and low taxes.  They are defenders of capitalism and building businesses.  They stand for freedom, morality, and clean living.

Those are the stereotypes.  Yet the data doesn’t bear that out.  Republicans have grown government and deficits.  They created the Medicare Part D social safety net, and allowed passage of the Patriot Act restricting many freedoms.  Meanwhile, Democrats have cut taxes, stood against teacher’s unions, and pushed agendas like offshore drilling with dire environmental consequences.

It would seem the ideologies are not as rigid as we might imagine.  Rather, the distinction lies in how the two sides view rules.  For Conservatives, rules are all about absolutes.  Something is right or it’s wrong, good or evil, black or white.  All the while Progressives are lost in the gray.  Everything is conditional.

For Conservatives, business regulation is bad, raising taxes are bad, guns are good.  For Progressives, it’s not so much that those values are flipped, but rather there is a level at which they are appropriate.  Business should not be allowed to exploit citizens, taxes should be collected to cover expenses, and guns should be regulated to contain violence.  Yet here is where it gets tricky.

Progressives can’t even agree among themselves where these lines should be, and because of that are unable to walk in lock-step like their counterparts.  Further, the notion that these lines should be left open to future interpretation by activist judges makes Conservatives very nervous.  The result being that Progressives find Conservatives to be overly rigid and dogmatic, while Conservatives find Progressives to be wishy-washy and disorganized.

This dichotomy of worldview is the bright line distinguishing the camps.  It is why the right is so often accused of hypocrisy as it’s hard not to occasionally color outside the bold black lines.  And it’s why the left is so often accused of flip-flopping or compromising as the world they see is so highly conditional.

The ideological divide is not what keeps us apart.  It’s all about how we view the rules.

Politicians love to tout how they are just doing the will of the American people.  This is usually backed up by a poll of some sort showing a majority of their constituents are behind whatever it is they are proposing to do.

On the surface this seems to be the very essence of democracy.  Let the people decide.  There’s only one little problem with that… the polls would indicate that people are idiots.  Not all of them mind you.  I’m sure your bubble’s on the level, but there’s a non-trivial number of folks out there leaning more than a few degrees off of plum.

Consider that a recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted near to Obama’s birthday showed that only 42% of Americans could say they had no doubts the President was born in this country.  Another 29% went out on a limb and said he probably was born in this country, which still leaves nearly 3 in 10 Americans in doubt of a fact that is about as demonstrably true as it could be.

Obama’s Hawaiian birth is not a matter of opinion.  The documentation exists.  It’s been vetted.  Even the conservative Republican governor of the state vouches for its authenticity.  Doubting Obama is a natural born citizen is about as rational as claiming we faked the moon landings.  Yet the idea persists and has even grown larger to the point where a majority of us have at least some doubt.

Now consider, these are the same people being polled on complex and abstruse issues like how to salvage the economy, how to handle Afghanistan, how to reign in health care costs, and how to manage our energy policy.  These are same people to whom politicians are listening in order to make decisions about our future.

This would be like having a friend who insisted smoking improved his health and then seeking his counsel on how to manage your IRA.  If he’s delusional about the straightforward stuff, why would you trust his opinion on something complicated and important?

We live in a representative democracy for a reason.  True democracy, where everyone gets to vote on everything, is simply insane.  It assumes everyone has an equally valuable opinion.  They don’t.  I don’t ask my dentist for advice on auto insurance for the same reason I don’t care if my neighbor supports supply-side economics.  I want advice from people who know what they are doing.

The way our form of government is supposed to work is that we elect people to represent our interests.  That doesn’t mean they vote just as you would have if you were there.  It means they enact policy that is ultimately a net benefit to their constituents.  At the end of their term they are graded on the results.  Good performance is rewarded with another term, bad performers go home.

However, our current system of 24-hour news, video archives, and incessant polling has resulted in politics having become an unrelenting popularity contest.  The campaign never ends.  No one works for long term net gain.  Everyone is just trying to survive the next news cycle.  Witness the recent defeat of the 9/11 healthcare bill in the House.  Democrats allowed the popular bill to die rather than risk having to vote on Republican amendments they expected the GOP to offer simply as fodder to embarrass them during the 2010 elections.

The perpetual campaign has also enabled the corporate takeover of politicians.  They need the money to keep the campaign going, and deep corporate pockets are bigger cash fire hoses than individual $25 donations.

The solution is not at all clear.  Less transparency in government would mean less news and less polling, but would be hard to defend as a step forward and would likely usher in more corruption than it cured.  It seems the rational solution has to lie somewhere in the realm of politicians who need not sweat reelection.  Politicians free to act in our best long-term interest without fear of repercussion.

Might this be accomplished with term limits?  Perhaps.  But that only really frees up the politician once he’s in office on his last term.  Further, term limits eliminate the notion of senior politicians with lots of experience.  In some cases, that experience could be a good thing.  Maybe it’s something more like indefinite terms.  Let’s say a Congressman is elected to serve a minimum of two years, but will serve indefinitely until his constituents force him out with a vote of “no confidence”.  Then his term ends on the next election day and he can’t run again.

There are likely better ideas, but the key point being that we need to break out of the popularity contest model.  That was annoying enough when it was used in high school for the student council.  The stakes are much higher in this case, and politicians need the freedom to act long term rather than be puppets dancing on strings held by people who think the sky is green.