Morning Fog

Outmoded Infrastructure - Those Overhead Power Lines

Sunday afternoon my little neighborhood experienced a heavy thunderstorm - unusually heavy winds and a violent torrent of rain, but still a thunderstorm - that passed through the area in less than 30 minutes but put out the electrical grid to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses for 10 hours (in my case) or even longer.   This was only the longest of three recent power outages, all of three hours or more, over the past two weeks.  Two were weather-related, the third was somebody driving into a utility pole.  

In addition, we've experienced at least two blips in the same period, of the sort that punch out the power just long enough to shut down computers and cause the waste of 15-20 minutes rebooting, logging in again, and the like.  I wish this performance were rare, but power outages occur where I live on the average of one or two a month.  The electric company's reporting number should be on speed dial, but by now, I have it memorized anyway.

The constant interruption of power supplies, even by fairly normal weather or routine traffic accidents, has several causes, but primary among them is simply our failure as a society to protect power lines by burying them.   Here as in other endeavors, a business's short-term cost considerations are allowed to overrule sensible public policy.  No one has found a way yet to deliver electric power wirelessly; until we do, it only makes sense to update our infrastructure to minimize the potential for disruption.

National Debt

"The National Debt and Washington's Deficit of Will" by Joel Achenbach is a pretty good look at issues surrounding our perennial national debt problem - how it develops, and the factors that make it so difficult to solve.  It's well worth reading.

As this article correctly points out, the real problem is more a political than economic one (politicians shy away from raising taxes); the long-term moral dilemma is burdening future generations; but the greatest danger of our failure to trim our profligate spending is that foreign governments and individuals may lose confidence in the solidity of our economy and stop investing in it.  All true, and worrisome.

To Achenbach's summary I would add three considerations he seems to have omitted.

First, although the problem clearly involves politicians who lack political will, there is good reason for their reticence.  That would be the voters, who by and large appear to believe that more and more government services can be had by paying less and less for them.  How can that fairy-tale mindset be altered?  Possibly through political leadership, as Achenbach hints, including better information efforts about what's at stake.  

Second, our political system for years has been dysfunctional when it comes to dealing with tough issues.  This has led us toward a lower standard of living and decreasing real incomes for a lot (let's say, a majority) of our citizens.  But the reality is that we won't deal with a problem until it gets into crisis mode.  That's why, for example, I have supported the changes President Obama has sought in health care reform, even while recognizing that much more needs to be done on the cost-control side.  Only a shock to the system is likely to jar it into action.

Last, Achenbach notes fears that foreign investors may quail at our failure to make difficult decisions.  That's possible, though wiser ones may rely, per my preceding paragraph, on our dealing with the problem just in the nick of time.  More to the point, the article ignores that for many investors, the political stability of the U.S. makes it an attractive place to invest even when there's noticeable turbulence on the economic waters.  This may give us a bit more margin than doomsayers predict.

The Commission headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, which has been charged with making recommendations on the debt by December 1, has its work cut out for it, but it's not at all certain even its best suggestions will have any impact.  Those weak-willed politicians who created it adamantly refused to accept any binding commitment to implement its ideas. 

Third World Superpower

I was born early in 1945, the dawn of what we might call the American Age: we emerged from World War II victorious, kicked off an economic boom that seemed it would last forever, saw in the promise of new-age technology endless improvements in health, education, and the general welfare, and came to believe that our active involvement in the world was essential to global peace and the spread of democracy.  Wow.

A lot of that is still true in various ways, but over time I've found my thoughts keep leading back to a nagging sense that we are losing ground in what we once conceived as an uninterrupted climb up the ladder of betterment in various areas of endeavor.  Despite our strengths, or maybe because of them, we tend to think that we can't learn from anyone else, and we ignore (or deny) clear evidence that on many quality-of-life measures, we lag behind our peers - i.e., other developed industrial democracies.

One glaring example is in health care.  Those who declaim that U.S. health care is "the best in the world" are just plain wrong, as many a statistic -- infant death, communicable diseases, access to medical care, life expectancy after adulthood, obesity, cost of care -- will demonstrate.  Fortunately, there is a growing consensus that our health care mess requires our attention. 

Unfortunately, the politics of getting that done demonstrate another weakness we share with less "developed" countries -- a broken political system more focused on partisanship than on achieving real results, and an oligarchy of rich folks and corporations running the country for their benefit rather than the people's.

But that's far from the end of it:  Our education system can't consistently produce kids who can spell, write a basic sentence, figure your change correctly, or locate the United States on a world map.   The middle class is losing its buying power by leaps and bounds. Our transportation infrastructure is crumbling and we won't invest money to fix it.  The number of people still living in poverty is ridiculously high.  And on, and on...

None of this is acceptable for a true "superpower,"  not when less-super powers often perform better on these yardsticks.  And I think some of the malaise so much in evidence today stems from our inchoate realization of that fact.

We can deal with these problems, but first we've got to be honest enough to admit we have them, rather than deceiving ourselves that they don't exist. 

A word about resources:  We often hear that we "can't afford" to deal with basic failings of our economic, health, social, or justice systems.  Not so.  This view is espoused by those actively seeking to turn us into a third-world nation.   First, a growing, recovering economy will quickly start to refill government and private coffers that seem empty now.  Second, we must give up our preoccupation with security hobgoblins.  Defense is essential; warmaking for no better reason than just to eliminate a dictator who once made a fool of our President's daddy is not.  Our military forces must be strong but they need not be constantly deployed.  We can play a leading role in the world through diplomacy, backed by the potential to apply force, at much lower cost.

It's a big subject.  I don't intend to analyze it exhaustively here.  But having outlined it, I've also created a category on this blog for it, and will come back to it from time to time.