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.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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.

Sometimes the hypocrisy of the right wing makes me want to run screaming into the night.

Conservatives are ideologically bound up in the defense of the nation’s Constitution.  It is often portrayed as a sacred text of sorts that no one dare suggest is less than perfect.  During the 2008 election, when the tape of Obama saying in 2001 that he thought the Constitution was flawed was revealed, the political right went into an apoplectic rage.   And heaven help anyone who suggests the 2nd Amendment might need to be reeled in a bit in a world of high tech weaponry the founding fathers couldn’t have possibly envisioned.

Yet it is these same people who are trotting out proposals to repeal the 14th Amendment, reintroduce the original unratified 13th Amendment, and add Amendments to prohibit gay marriage and outlaw flag burning.  It seems that when they don’t like what the Constitution says it becomes a living malleable document.  But when Liberals find it lacking they are treasonous malcontents.

The recent push to repeal the 14th Amendment is particularly interesting.  The heart of the effort is to remove the right of anyone born on U.S. soil to automatically become a US citizen.  The thinking is that this would reduce the number of illegal immigrants coming into the country and having so-called anchor babies.  There’s reasonable rationale for this proposal.  Back when the Amendment was ratified in 1868, this was a different country.  We were still growing.  We were just recovering from a civil war that devastated our population.  In a very real sense, we needed all the new Americans we could get.  Further, back then international travel was a long and arduous process.  No one came here casually and had a baby as they were passing through.

Times are different now.  Traveling here is a trivial matter.  And we are not at a point where we need a huge influx of citizens.  A higher barrier to citizenship might be very appropriate to our current situation.  Mind you, I’m not advocating for this one way or the other.  I’m just saying this idea bears some thoughtful debate and consideration.

However, it strikes me that the same situation exists with the 2nd Amendment.  The world that passed that clause was one in which a local militia of farmers with muskets might reasonably thwart a professional army.  It made sense to keep an armed population as a check against the potential power creep of a fledgling government.  But that time is gone.  Our government is mature, and the notion that your neighbors and their pistols and hunting rifles would be more than a minor annoyance to a modern army are laughable.  If we’ve learned anything from the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s that deterring a well equipped military requires RPGs, automatic weapons, stinger missiles, and high explosives—stuff that’s illegal for us to own even with the right to bear arms intact.  (It’s also worth noting it most importantly requires an invading force with a moral imperative to not kill civilians.  Otherwise, all the C-4 on Earth wouldn’t help.)

I’m not trying to make a case here to repeal the 2nd Amendment, just that it is every bit the anachronism the 14th Amendment is.  You can’t reasonably be all about repealing one based on that reasoning and cry that anyone considering the other is trampling our sacred text and should be run out of the country.

The Constitution was intended by the founding fathers as a living document.  Those guys understood they couldn’t plan for everything, and so they built in a mechanism to adapt it and change it over time.  I understand and agree that the changes should not be capricious.  The process should be arduous, and is.  And this is all something the Conservatives agree with, except when they don’t.

Fire up the fear machine, let’s all tremble over the scourge of multiculturalism.  Frosty Wooldridge is a journalist whose stock in trade has become raging against illegal immigrants in particular, with a wide enough swath to slap immigrants in general for good measure.  Making the email rounds lately is a piece he wrote back in 2009 titled, “How Immigration and Multiculturalism Destroyed Detroit“.

The essay is a scary depiction of the demise of what was once one of America’s great cities.  I lack the ambition to fact check all of his data, but he offers a fair bit.  And while I suspect he’s directionally correct, he’s clearly playing a little fast and loose with his numbers.  In one paragraph he laments that Detroit has become “a majority black city with 67 percent African-Americans.“  In the next paragraph he states:

Detroit plummeted from 1.8 million citizens to 912,000 today. At the same time, legal and illegal immigrants converged on the city, so much so, that Muslims number over 300,000. Mexicans number 400,000 throughout Michigan, but most work in Detroit.

So, 67% of 912,000 is about 611,000 Blacks.  Therefore, of the 301,000 remaining, 300,000 are Muslims and some number that constitutes “most” of 400,000 are Mexican.  Um… that don’t add up.  Even if you assume some overlap because of African-American Muslims, it’s still some funky math.

Still, Detroit is a shambles.  On that I suspect we can all agree.  Yet the larger point of the article is not to convince the reader Detroit is a mess, it’s to assert that it got that way because of the influx of immigrants.  Now we could argue about whether this constitutes racism, or classism, or some other form of discrimination, but I think there’s a clearer point to be made.

Indulge me in a smaller scale analogy.  Let’s assume you live in a typical middle class neighborhood.  You and all your neighbors are all employed by the local plant, and life seems pretty good.  That is, until one day when the plant shuts down and you’re all out of work.  One by one, people trickle away because they can’t afford to live there.  Many houses are abandoned because there are no buyers anxious to move into a town with no jobs.  Over time, the abandoned houses are overrun with feral cats.  The cats multiply and before long the neighborhood is full of them.  Does it make sense in this scenario to blame the demise of the neighborhood on the cats?

I’m not remotely suggesting that immigrants are the equivalent of feral cats, so please don’t get carried away with the analogy.  The point being, that Detroit lost its major industry.  The city blight and the exodus of the historic population was a direct result of the unemployment, which the article repeatedly screams about as if somehow the immigrants caused it.  Unemployment soared, housing costs plummeted, people fled to greener pastures.  In essence, a population vacuum was created, and it doesn’t seem too surprising that immigrants (and poor ones at that) were attracted to this apparent void.  It was an easy and affordable place to settle for very little down.  Unfortunately, once they got there the realities of unemployment hit them as well, but unlike their predecessors, they could not afford to escape the situation.

Now any group, impoverished with little to no way of getting a good job and securing a future, will inexorably degrade into the urban hell that is modern-day Detroit.  Corruption, crime, drugs, illiteracy, high drop out rates, is any of this a surprise?  And not because they are immigrants, but because they are poor and hopeless.  Had this happened to a group of Christian white bread good ‘ol boys, the result would have been about the same.

What’s happened to Detroit is a shame.  But there is no evidence I can see for blaming it on the Blacks, Muslims, and Mexicans living there.  If anything, it was destroyed by the greedy rich white guys who drove the industry in the ditch and then bailed.

This article is fear mongering, pure and simple… and yeah… racist to boot.

A new survey released Monday shows that over 85% of teens admit to driving while distracted.  In other news, the Pope announces he’s Catholic, and the woods are full of bear poop.

While this survey focused on teens, I doubt the adults would fare a lot better, so it’s perhaps unfair to single them out.  Although as the most inexperienced drivers and the most cell addicted, they are likely at greater risk.

One interesting point was the difference between people surveyed as drivers and those surveyed as passengers.  As drivers, they came up with lots of rationalizations about why their sideline activity posed little risk.  But as passengers, 38% claimed that another driver’s distractions made them scared they were going to get hurt.  This is a point I’ve tried to make to my son who’s now learning to drive.  As the driver, it’s not enough to keep your passengers safe, but you also have an obligation to make them feel safe.

Ultimately though, I think this is a losing battle.  It would be easy to blame all the distractions of modern life and the desperately brief attention spans of our youth for these risks.  The natural inclination is to pass tougher laws against this sort of behavior.  But for every person you scare out of sending a text while driving, another is now trying to text from their lap rather than the steering wheel so that the phone is not visible.

I think the larger problem is simply the current technology state of our cars.  There was a time when driving was a challenge—no power steering, no ABS, manual transmissions, manual chokes, giant land cruisers that cornered like a double-decker bus.  Ahhh, those were the days.  Not that I pine for them much, but driving back then required more of your attention.  As the years have passed, driving a car has become dirt simple.  Turn the key, point the wheel, press the gas.  Cars have become almost impossible to stall, difficult to skid, and frankly pretty idiot proof.  That is, right up until the point of imminent danger.

Driving today is endless hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.  And while our technology has made the endless hours ever more boring, the bits of sheer terror are alive and well.  Whether or not you are a good driver has everything to do with how you handle the moments, and fleetingly less to do with how you handle the hours.  But if you’re distracted during the hours, then the moment will be upon you before you can react.  And that leads to lots of twisted metal, and bloody body bits.

I don’t think any amount of legislation or education will ultimately stop people trying to do something to relieve the boredom.  I do think the natural course of technical evolution is likely to create cars that increasingly reduce and maybe eliminate the terror.  Structured roads, auto-pilots, and other advances will one day pretty soon free us to be as distracted as we like.  The vast amount of time we spend in cars will be where we all are passengers.  You may still drive out of your neighborhood and into the parking lot at the other end, but the stretch in between on the public roads will be a hands-free driving experience leaving you free to text, read, or watch TV.  Just like you’re doing now, just with less terror.

I miss the rational right of center political voice that balanced the liberal leaning left.  I miss the party that had a plan.  Granted, the plan was generally business friendly and fiscally conservative, but it was the appropriate counterweight to the Democrats proposals to empower and support people and protect the environment.

There was a collective recognition of the natural ebb and flow of politics.  Power shifted back and forth between the parties, but both sides sought compromises as best they were able, and ultimately cooperated at least to some degree to solve problems.

That train left the station about a decade ago, and it ain’t comin’ back.

The GOP seems ever more focused on political power for it’s own sake.  They take it personally when they lose at the polls and they want retributions for those rebukes.  The result has become a party whose only apparent function is to demonize the Democrats and impede progress.  They have become the neighborhood kid who owns the football.  And they are not letting anyone play with it unless they get to be quarterback.  If they aren’t in charge, then no one has fun.

They correctly recognize that the coming 2010 and 2012 elections will in large part be determined by the economy.  If the economy remains stalled and unemployment remains high until 2012, then they will do well at the polls.  If the economy recovers, then they are toast.  As a result, they are committed to doing everything in their power to assure we are all still suffering two years hence.

In case that sounds far-fetched, consider what John Boehner told the Christian Science Monitor when asked what his top three priorities would be should the GOP retake the House and he becomes Speaker.  Boehner’s plan (and by extension, the GOP’s plan) is to repeal the healthcare bill, make sure no sort of energy reform is passed, and extend the Bush tax cuts.  In essence, the plan is to erase the Obama administration and go back to where we were in 2008.  Then sit there until it all gets better.

Still not convinced?  Consider the increasing calls from GOP mouthpieces to open investigations or even move toward impeachment of Obama.  If that’s not loony enough for you, consider the Iowa Republican Party platform.  Note, this is not some Tea Party fringe group, but the statewide party platform.  Among other things it advocates for ratification of the original 13th Amendment to the Constitution.  The original 13th was not the repeal of slavery, but a never ratified proposal to revoke the citizenship of anyone accepting a title of nobility from a foreign government.  Why are they advocating this?  Because there is a belief that Obama’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize can be used to revoke his citizenship and oust him from office.

This is insane, and it is not remotely helpful.  Following eight years of Clinton witch hunts that finally nailed the guy on lying about a tryst with an intern, the Democrats turned the other cheek and declined the opportunity to pursue Bush and/or Cheney for launching a war on fabricated data and then repeatedly violating the Geneva Convention and international laws regarding torture.  As a response, the GOP is now pledging to start the witch hunts anew on Obama if they are restored to power.  The olive branch meant nothing.  And next time it likely won’t be extended, meaning we can likely look forward to Democrats becoming less cooperative and more openly hostile to the next GOP administration.  Lovely.

Is this the world we want to live in?  These are supposed to be political parties not warring factions.  These are supposed to be statesmen, but they are acting more like a teenage girl whose BFF just dissed her on Facebook.

Two days before I was born President Kennedy issued a challenge before Congress to put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of that decade.  With six months to spare, an eight-year old me watched fuzzy images of astronauts stepping onto another world.  Mission accomplished.  In 2005 dollars, the Apollo program was estimated to have cost $170 billion.  It required the unwavering bipartisan support of Congress across four elections, and the support of three Presidents.  Add to that, the space program was commensurate with one of the most unpopular wars in US history, a time of great social unrest, and also the dawn of one of the most sweeping social entitlement programs.

Today’s question is, do you think we could possibly pull off a moon mission scale project today?  That is, if we set forth a national project that was financially non-trivial and wouldn’t see results for eight or ten years, even if that project had more direct tangible benefit to our collective welfare than Apollo, could we sustain the required momentum?  I fear the answer is, not a chance in hell.

It would seem that as a country we’ve lost our collective ability to plan more than a short time into the future.  This is most evident in politics where everyone is playing for the best leverage in the next election with little regard for what’s best for the country.  Our leaders look to polls and surveys to see what the popular position will be.

Industry isn’t much better.  Long term investment is down.  It’s all about how to maximize share price and next quarter’s balance sheet.  Executives are mostly looking to make a quick name for themselves so they can hop to the next multi-million dollar job.

And consumers aren’t immune either.  How many are putting off buying that new flat screen or living room set rather than saving for their kids’ college or their own retirement?  How many buy houses they have no hope of paying off?

What led us to this state is less certain, but it would be hard to argue that we are here.  Is our desire for immediate gratification driven by marketing messages?  You can have it all, now.  Why wait?  Alternatively, perhaps it’s the inundation with media and information.  There’s so very much to process in the here and now that’s it’s difficult to think about the future.  Or perhaps it is the uncertainty of the future itself that fuels our short attention span.  The world is changing so very fast that glimpsing the world our children will live in is very difficult.  There are so many possible futures that it’s just easier to live in the now and let the future fall where it may.

I don’t personally think it seems so bleak.  It’s not clear what has driven this change, but as long as we are this short sighted, we are unlikely to ever return to the hay-day for which we pine.  We desperately need some sort of collective vision of what we can become.  We will never be of one mind, but we can be of one goal.  At the fuzzy level, we are.  We all want this to be a great and prosperous country.  But that’s not an actionable goal.  It’s about as useful as your kid declaring that when he grows up he wants to be rich.

If history has a lesson for us it is that we respond to competition.  We rallied together against the Nazis.  The fear of communism drove enormous growth in science and technology, and in large part was likely the underlying driving force behind Apollo.  We have enemies now in Al Qaeda and the Taliban, but they are not useful as competition.  We need something larger, something that demands more of us.  I’m thinking China.  Economically, China is the largest looming threat on the planet.  Not that they are evil or anything, or that we even need to hate them.  But they may well be in a position a decade hence to just buy us for petty cash.  We could do with a healthy desire to beat them at that game.  To rebuild our own economy, infrastructure, and industrial base to out compete them in the global market.  This is a challenge worthy of the people who put a man on the moon.  And wouldn’t it be nice to be a part of something productive again?

Now, if only we had a Kennedy to inspire us…

Here’s a plan, let’s outsource a large portion of government jobs as a way of creating private sector employment.  Let that sink in for a moment.  Wait until you get the uncontrollable urge to smack yourself on the forehead… then go ahead and give in a good whack.  There you go.

Yet this is Cal Thomas’ latest proposal.  Now I grant you that I almost always find Thomas to be wrong.  In fact, I was having a little trouble coping with a column he wrote a couple weeks back on Law and Marriage because I thought he raised an interesting point.  I figured I must be missing something.  But rarely does Thomas put forth an idea which is is so demonstrably wrong as his plan to outsource government jobs.

Let’s follow the dollars here for a moment.  Taxes are collected.  Out of those taxes, money is budgeted to pay for a government service.  The government service contracts with a private company to fulfill that service.  The private company hires someone to do the job.  Connect all the dots, and that person’s wages are being paid with tax dollars.  Yet somehow this counts as private sector employment?

Keep in mind, this is the same crowd who would strictly oppose those same tax dollars being spent for that same purpose if the same person was hired by the government rather than the private company to do the job.  They would also oppose those tax dollars being given as a grant to a private company to do a function.

What if the government were to cut out the middleman and just buy the company and run it for the purposes of doing the job?  That’s textbook Socialism, and is so wrong Cal Thomas would just stroke out.

If you’re an advocate for small government, then fine.  But you can’t get there by outsourcing government jobs to the private sector.  Those are still jobs being paid for by tax dollars, and additionally, taxes are paying for the profit the private company has to make as well.  That’s not to say outsourcing is always a bad idea.  But you can’t count it as private sector employment.  Geezsh!