I’m serious. By maintaining the free flow of information, journalists do an invaluable public service for the American republic. We the people need an accurate, up-to-date portrait of the country to make informed decisions on Election Day.

As Thomas Jefferson once put it, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

The news is not simply another industry, and the invisible hand of capitalism cannot fully capture the true value of high-quality journalism. Neither does the profit of a university indicate its ability to educate its students, nor does the profit of a newspaper signify its ability to cover important news stories.

The news industry, for that reason, should be looked at as a public good, just like education and research.

It is in that light that last week’s House vote to defund National Public Radio should be seen. It would be crazy to imagine an elected official proposing the end of federal education funding. Voting to defund NPR is just as crazy.

The one danger that comes with public subsidies for journalism is that government-sponsored journalists might not be critical of the politicians who sign their paychecks. The public wouldn’t agree: PBS is more trusted than any other news network, and NPR is well trusted too.

In fact, it seems most Americans hold less trust in CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and other news networks precisely because they are for-profit. The race to the bottom in pursuit of audiences for ads discredits news networks even more than association with Washington does.

If an informed American public is something you believe in, NPR deserves more funding – not less.

The idea had more holes than Swiss cheese. Would we have heartlessly kicked out the currently enrolled sons and daughters of teachers? If we only prevented new enrollments, wouldn’t that mean that budget savings would only accumulate several years down the road, after the economy and tax receipts had already recovered?

More often than not, the disagreements are in the details. Democrats and Republicans agree that an Iranian nuclear weapons program would threaten our national interest. Indeed, one of the few bills that passed the last Congress with overwhelming support from both parties was an Iranian sanctions act. Among mainstream wonks on both sides of the isle, differences only clearly come into focus when it comes to the toughness of anti-Iran measures.

Contrast this with the national health care debate, a situation where conservatives and liberals had (and continue to have) diametrically opposed understandings of the role of government.

Debate of American foreign policy therefore occurs within a relatively limited range. If the liberal versus conservative fights on health care, gay marriage, and other social issues range from black to white, then foreign policy debates range from light gray to a moderately lighter shade of gray.

However – and you knew there was going to be a however – the course of action best for the country on the international stage is sometimes less than clear. Sometimes, as was the case in the debate over whether or not to invade Iraq, foreign policy discussion ranges from not just black to white, but monochrome to rainbow.

Bahrain at a crossroads

(Screenshot: http://maps.google.com)

We are facing one such arbitrary situation today in the numerous revolutions springing up in the Middle East. While it is clear that Washington should support nascent democratic movements in countries that the U.S. has very little connection with, such as Tunisia and Libya, the best course of action with respect to our totalitarian allies is much less obvious.

Bahrain, particularly, is the most significant American ally in the region facing serious unrest right now. The Bahraini protests have been the largest in the Arab world, proportional to the total population; 100,000 showed up for recent demonstrations, out of a total population of only 500,000.

Though just a tiny island off the coast of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and its King host our Navy’s strategically-important Fifth Fleet. The ships there maintain surveillance on Iran and protect the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-sixth of the world’s oil passes daily.

Thankfully, Bahraini anger has not been directed at the United States… yet, but who knows what could happen if the King is overthrown? Bahrain, like Iran, is majority Shiite and has the potential to quickly fall under Iranian sway.

Even more dire, if we were to refuse to steadfastly back the Bahraini government and it falls, unrest could spill over to neighboring Saudi Arabia. Oil and gasoline prices could spike dangerously high.

The American nationalist / foreign policy realist in me sees the choice between supporting the revolutionaries and supporting the status quo clearly: losing Bahrain would be unacceptable.

Yet, I cannot manage to convince myself that this is right course. It’s the videos of jubilant protesters, only a few years older than me; it’s the images of the bruises and the blood-stained shirts from police brutality; it’s the hope that maybe, just maybe, a Bahraini revolution could be good for America.

In all honesty, I have not been able to convince myself that either supporting the regime or supporting the protesters is the right approach. As always, I would love to hear your opinion in the comments section.

By the time you are reading this, the Bahraini government may well have fallen. But that’s not the point. Is supporting these dictatorships, in general, the right thing to do? And, more importantly: is there something greater than the national interest at stake here?

Israel and Egypt fought four wars before signing a peace treaty in the 1970s. Hosni Mubarak, the president who was just deposed, worked with his predecessor to become the first Arab state to recognize Israel.

It is for fear of a breach of this treaty that the events in Cairo have many Israelis worried. However, the Egyptian military has promised that it will honor the agreement.

Israel should not worry. In fact, Israel and the international community – especially the United States – should take this opportunity to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all.

This is the ideal moment to complete the peace process. The dictatorship of Egypt, the country at the heart of the Arab world, has just fallen. Solving the Israeli-Palestinian issue will complete this Middle East revolution.

For the Israeli leadership in Tel Aviv, too, there is reason that now should be the moment for peace in the Promised Land. Although the new Egyptian government will not violently oppose Israel, there will be elections in six months, and you can bet your milk and honey that it won’t be nearly as friendly as Mubarak was.

Equally important, the Israelis have never had a more reasonable Palestinian authority to work with. Salam Fayyad, the wonkish Palestinian prime minister, has done more to build a Palestinian state than any suicide bomber could have dreamed. And it’s worked: 2010 was Israel’s most peaceful year in a decade, and the skyrocketing Israeli economy shows it.

Palestinians, at least in the West Bank where Fayyad has authority, are enjoying the fruits of economic development as well. Under the Fayyad plan, unemployment has been reduced by a third and the economy grew faster China’s last year  with 11% annual growth. (I wish Washington could create that kind of growth.)

Fayyad’s plan is to have a de facto Palestinian state in place by the end of the year. Israel should prefer to make a deal with a weaker Palestinian state now, rather than with a full-fledged nation later.

Most importantly, the United States has a stake in this. The old expression in the Mideast peace talks is that “The United States can’t want peace more than the parties themselves.” That is simply not true. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the heart of our involvement in the Middle East. Most Islamic terrorists, including the leadership of Al-Qaeda, point to the Palestinian cause as justification for their violence. On top of that, much the Arab world feels resentment toward the West because of the conflict.

If we resolve the issue this year, we can concern ourselves less with the possibility of terror attacks and oil supply disruptions and focus more on creating jobs, strengthening our schools, and winning the future.

The US must get the ball rolling in peace talks, and we need to demonstrate that this is it. If Israel will not make the concessions necessary for peace, Washington must be willing to cut off the billions of dollars in aid we (hopelessly) pour into Israel each year.

The outlines of the final Israeli-Palestinian peace accord have long been known; the difficulty is in getting the two sides to sign on the dotted line. This is the opportune moment to do so. The US just has to prove that we want it.

Congress has all of Wayland’s inefficiencies, but cannot ultimately get its act together, unlike us. This is due to an important structural difference: the current set of rules governing Congressional procedure, especially in the Senate, prevents progress.

I hesitate to even write about such a technical issue because it is just so damn boring – but it is this kind of boring stuff that is very important for the future of our country. We can have the biggest economy, the strongest military, and the smartest students, but without good policy from Washington funneling this power in the right direction, we are nothing.

Congress cannot create useful policy without smart procedural rules, and the current rules are anything but smart. While the House manages to function, the Senate is the Town Meeting on steroids.

When the Senate was created, it was crystal clear how bills were supposed to be approved: if a bill received what nowadays would be 51 votes (or 50 votes and a tie-breaker vote from the Vice President), it passed. Today, a bill has to jump through flaming hoops – most importantly, the 60-vote threshold of the filibuster – just to be debated, let alone vote on.

Thankfully, in the past two weeks there has been a bipartisan consensus to remove some of these hoops. Before, a single hostile senator could anonymously block legislation by placing a hold on any piece of legislation. Similarly, the legislative process could be gummed up by a single senator demanding that the Senate grind to a complete halt so that an amendment to a bill (which can stretch into the hundreds, even thousands of pages) could be read aloud.

Both of these practices have been abolished by a bipartisan agreement of the new Congress. In return for giving up these tools of obstruction, the Republican minority in the Senate was promised by the Democratic majority leadership the opportunity to offer amendments to new bills.

And, surprise, surprise: since the new rules were agreed to, the Senate has become a little less dysfunctional. Democrats brought to the floor a sorely-needed aviation bill, and Republicans offered an amendment to the bill that would have repealed health care reform, which was quickly rejected. Our republic lives!

Before we get too excited, there is one rule that has not been modified. The filibuster, the scourge of Senate efficiency, remains wholly intact. The filibuster requires 60 votes, rather than the constitutionally-mandated 50, for a bill to be passed. The filibuster is the true culprit in the crime of Washington gridlock.

Let me be unequivocal: the filibuster must be weakened, if not eliminated, so that whichever party is in the majority can more easily pass legislation. We are living in a fast-changing world, and Washington needs to be able to respond quickly. More than that, we need to reform our laws now.

In fact, filibuster reform was debated as part of that bipartisan set of rule changes. Tom Udall, a freshman senator from New Mexico, has been appalled by Senatorial dysfunction since his arrival. He proposed a modest reform – the 60-vote requirement would even remain – that would merely make the filibuster more inconvenient.

Under Udall’s proposal, senators would be required to remain on the floor of the Senate to filibuster a bill, in the spirit of the original filibuster style, rather than being allowed to fly back home while the Senate is frozen.

Udall’s proposal was voted down, 46-49. Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown voted no; perhaps even more pathetically, Senator John Kerry copped out and didn’t even vote.

The filibuster must be reformed. Senator Udall’s proposal would be a good place to start.

When President Obama gave his State of the Union address back in January and called for investments in clean energy technology, little did he realize that such investments would be the country’s top priority only a couple of weeks later.

At the time of the State of the Union, Obama’s calls for green technology investment seemed like just another one of the speech’s feel-good proposals to help “win the future,” as Obama described it.

Even though the President was not very serious about prioritizing such investments – not nearly serious enough, as we now realize – newly empowered Republicans, along with politically-vulnerable Blue Dog Democrats, verbally ripped into even his pathetically meager proposal.

“These ‘investments,’ as the President calls them, include everything from solar shingles to high speed trains,” wrote Sarah Palin at the time. “The only thing these ‘investments’ will get us is a bullet train to bankruptcy.”

Since then, we’ve only seen just how wrong Palin and her fellow clean energy critics were.

The day before the President’s speech, Tunisia ousted its long-time dictator. Soon after, the revolution spread to the heart of the Arab world, Egypt. Even before Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak was forced to flee Cairo in early February, protests began to flare elsewhere in the Middle East: demonstrators in Jordan, Yemen, and Syria were only the beginning.

We, of course, all know how it ended up. The Egyptian Revolution was to the Middle East what the fall of the Berlin Wall was to the Soviet Union. In the end, it was not the suicide bomber that brought down the Saudi Arabian monarchy; it was the unemployed college graduates who lit themselves on fire to protest corruption and oppression.

As Arab regimes are toppled left and right, and especially with the ongoing chaos in Saudi Arabia, oil prices have skyrocketed north of $200 a barrel and show no sign of falling any time soon. Economists fear that $6 a gallon gasoline is sending America back into recession.

Perhaps the worst part of this crisis is the knowledge that it completely, 100% could have been avoided. Congress is (still!) debating legislation to subsidize and support clean energy technology that will make the US completely energy independent.

Why didn’t Washington invest in clean energy before? Why, four decades after the first oil shock, hadn’t the US government forced a transition to a domestic, clean source of energy? Why, in January 2010, only weeks before the crisis, were mainstream politicians and American corporations doing everything in their power to prevent the government from weaning itself off its disastrous oil addiction?

If only we knew then what we know now. We could have – and should have – heeded the President’s call for clean energy investments before the crisis struck.

In Washington, the nation might not be so lucky.

If the newly elected Congress has promised to do one thing, it is to cut government spending. The Pledge to America that Republicans put out before the November election called for at least $100 billion in spending cuts, and many commentators are calling for more drastic reductions.

The philosophy behind this policy is the idea of “cut and grow,” as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor put it. This conservative economic policy – erroneously, I believe – states that cutting the government across the board can actually help to grow the economy.

For evidence that this policy almost always fails abysmally at creating growth, let us look to the United Kingdom.

Britain, which voted David Cameron of the Conservative Party into power in a May election last year, is engaging in the most drastic budget cuts of any of the world’s richest countries. Services are being cut, public servants are being laid off, and taxes are being raised – the whole shebang.

When explaining this austerity program to the British public last year, Cameron and other UK conservatives preached that reducing the size of the state (getting those meddling bureaucratic hands out of the people’s affairs) would spark economic growth.

The preliminary verdict is in: in the final three months of 2010, the British economy actually shrunk. Even our anemic recovery hasn’t seen the total size of the American economy shrink.

(To be fair, the Wall Street Journal reports that intense snowstorms hurt the British economy, but it notes that even without the snow, the economy would have still shrunk or remained constant. If economic growth doesn’t pick up speed in the first three months of this year, the United Kingdom will be back in a recession.)

Leading Republicans are planning to import this economy-killing austerity to the United States. On February 14, budget cutters have scheduled a vote on slashing spending. If this plan is approved, barring some outside economic miracle, you and I will be able to empathize with the economic pain of the British people.

Now, is sovereign debt a very serious issue that needs to be dealt with? Undoubtedly. However, the time for deficit-cutting is not now. Coming out of a financial crisis like we are, the government needs to step in and power the economy until growth is sustainable enough for consumers and corporations to create new wealth and new jobs.

Washington needs to learn from the failures of London. Until the economy is back on track, government spending should not be reduced. If there are reductions and the economy consequently becomes damaged, like Britain’s is today, Wayland may not be as fortunate in the future when it comes to trying to pay for the school budget.

Even with last week’s snow storm, climate change continues its global rampage. In fact, the same day school was closed, NASA released a report showing that 2010 tied 2005 for the hottest year on record.

Those snow days? Sorry to be a killjoy, but they are only likely to become even more infrequent.

“It was the 34th year running that global temperatures have been above the 20th-century average,” wrote the New York Times. Ten out of the ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1998.

Despite the continual stream of new data showing rising temperatures and the growing volume of evidence that humanity is responsible, the likelihood of any climate change or green energy legislation is only dimming.

Less than a month after Election Day, House Speaker John Boehner fired the first shot in the new Congress’s war on climate change. The House Committee on Global Warming was abolished, and its responsibilities were transferred to the Energy and Commerce Committee.

The Energy and Commerce Committee is now chaired by Michigan Republican Fred Upton. Upton is the standard conservative climate change denier. In a recent op-ed, he wrote that he is “not convinced” that “carbon [dioxide] is a problem in need of regulation.”

To be fair, Upton is the lesser of two evils. Rep. Upton’s challenger for the chairmanship of his committee was Joe Barton. Yes, that Joe Barton, who apologized to BP for the “shakedown” of the company following its massive oil spill in the Gulf.

Upton or Barton in control, it is now almost certain that there will be no serious global warming legislation in the next two years. This could be catastrophic, and brings me to James Buchanan.

Buchanan was president of the US from 1857 to 1861, the very last years before our country ripped itself apart in the Civil War (1861-1865). Today, he is widely held to be among the worst presidents ever. It’s not that he failed in his attempts to hold the country together – it’s that he didn’t even try.

The global warming deniers who refuse to take action today – and, let’s be honest, that means mostly the Republican members of Congress – are the James Buchanans of global warming.

Future historians will look back and marvel that one of America’s two great political parties ignored decades of scientific evidence and refused to move to prevent catastrophic climate change, a strategic concern of not just America, but of humankind.

From Asia, we learned that China is close to completion of a new type of missile which could be used to take out moving American aircraft carriers patrolling the Pacific, and that Beijing is rolling out a shiny new stealth fighter.

While China rockets towards achieving parity with American military power, the US feebly limps forward. In Washington, Defense Secretary Robert Gates unveiled his proposed budget for next year, which included nearly $80 billion in cuts over the next five years and tens of billions more in cost-saving measures.

How can China afford to develop these new systems, while the US, the global hegemon, can’t even afford to maintain its current level of defense expenditures? To quote the political operative James Carville, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

China’s economy is incredibly robust; the last time US economic growth rates even briefly approached those of China today was in the 1950s. This expansion has put China on track to surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy in the next two decades.

It also explains how China can afford to rapidly build up its military and to make its huge infrastructure investments like the Beijing Bird’s Nest that was on display at the 2008 Olympics. China’s high economic growth has provided the Communist Party in Beijing with a war chest of new tax revenue that it is spending with gusto to transform the country from the equivalent of a Sony Walkman to the equivalent of an iPhone in terms of its infrastructure, military, and social services.

It started in the first month of his presidency, when he included $300 billion in tax cuts in the stimulus without extracting any Republican concessions in return. He followed earlier this year by announcing a three-year freeze in non-security discretionary spending, a goal of Republican so-called deficit “hawks”. (They now insist on cuts to the 2008 level of spending.)

During negotiations over climate change legislation, Obama gave in to Republican demands for expanded offshore drilling, incorrectly assuming that conservative support for such legislation would then grow. Republicans gave nothing in return, and hope for climate change legislation has since collapsed. In an ironic twist, only a few weeks after the president’s announcement, an oil rig exploded in Gulf of Mexico, beginning what would become the infamous BP Gulf oil spill.

Only last week, Obama conceded to yet another Republican demand, again without eliciting any compromises from the other side of the aisle, when he called for a temporary pay-freeze for the federal work force.

Besides being an ineffective negotiating tactic, the pay freeze announcement is bad policy.

Capping government worker pay does not change the amount of work that the government must carry out; it merely changes the quality of the work. By refusing to pay federal workers what they deserve, the nation will lose the high quality thinkers that we are in desperate need of at this critical point in our history. (And where do those talented college graduates go? To work in the bowels of Wall Street.)

The Clinton administration is a case study for what happens when the federal government tries to do the same job with a less effective workforce. Clinton cut the number of federal workers substantially, but the smaller workforce couldn’t handle the workload. This led to a massive surge in the number of private contractors employed by the government. Spending on contractors more than doubled in the six years following the end of the Clinton administration.

Remember Blackwater, the trigger-happy private military contractors that quite possibly committed war crimes in Iraq when they lit up a plaza full of civilians in 2007? These are the private contractors that government work is being outsourced to.

Not only are such private contractors at least as expensive, they don’t necessarily provide higher quality service and more importantly, are totally unaccountable. Blackwater, for example, got off scot-free for that 2007 murder of 17 Iraqi civilians. They’ve since changed their name to Xe Services to avoid the negative publicity.

Besides resulting in increased dependence on private contractors, the pay freeze will not come close to making a dent in deficit. The savings over the next two years would be $5 billion, not even nickels and dimes when the combined deficit of the next two years will be in the range of $1-2 trillion. On the other hand, extending the Bush tax cuts for the highest income levels, a top Republic priority, would cost over $100 billion in the same time frame.

And, contrary to popular belief, federal workers are not overpaid. Federal workers do take home larger salaries than the average American, but this is only because they are older and more educated than the average American. In fact, when compared to private-sector counterparts with the same level of education and same work experience, the federal workforce is underpaid.

According to all reports, Obama is on course to again concede to Republicans, this time on the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. The President needs to get his act together and to drive for hard negotiations with his opponents instead of continuing to unilaterally throw bones to the other side.

Federal workforce pay would be a good place to start.

A mere condemnation of the act would certainly be criticized as a weak response, and rightly. Such a severe national security breach would justify a stronger response.

Why, then, is the Obama administration not responding more strongly to the illegal WikiLeaks documents leaks?

WikiLeaks, a wiki for secret information, has recently dumped three massive document caches online. This week, the site has released hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables. This latest release is fresh on the heels of nearly half a million documents related to the Iraq and Afghan wars.

The government classifies information for a reason. Do we want Iran knowing our negotiation strategy regarding their nuclear program? Would it be reasonable for China to know the operational structure of the US Pacific Command? Does it make sense for the Taliban to know the details of our counter-insurgency strategy?

For US foreign policy to function, in other words, some information cannot be made public. We cannot have groups like WikiLeaks publishing information whenever they feel like it. WikiLeaks is not looking out for the best interests of the United States.

The Obama administration cannot let WikiLeaks get away with these damaging disclosures. Thus far, however, the response has been weak.

You could practically see the president’s blood boil as he noted that he was“concerned” by the releases; his top national security adviser, James Jones, went even further, stating that he finds the leaks “irresponsible.” If a firm stand is not taken now, it will set a precedent for future leakers and our foreign relations could be harmed further.

WikiLeaks is not a foreign country. We cannot call in cruise missiles against Julian Assange, the shadowy founder of the group. What we can do is launch a cyber-attack to take down WikiLeaks.

I’m no lawyer and cannot judge the legality of this action. The CIA, however, would seem well-positioned to carry out this action. The CIA carries out clandestine actions and seems to have no problem “covertly” dropping a couple tons of TNT into Northwest Pakistan every other day.

We have the capability to do it effectively. The Stuxnet worm, widely believed to have been created by Israel, has recently inflicted substantial damage on Iranian nuclear facilities. If Israel, whose defense budget is 1/45 of ours, can hit Iran’s crown jewels, the United States can take down a single privately-funded website.

I could be sympathetic to the concern that this could set a precedent that could lead to a militarization of the Internet. The United States, as far as the public knows, has never used our cyber capabilities offensively. Nevertheless, as long as the tactic is used sparingly, I believe it could be an effective tool in the American arsenal.

Additionally, China is known to have launched multiple cyber attacks against our government infrastructure. Despite this, the web has not turned into a battleground. Nothing suggests that one attack by Washington would lead to a cyber World War III.

And after all, if WikiLeaks were a country, we’d be starting up our aircraft carriers. In comparison, what’s the worst that can come of a cyber attack on http://www.wikileaks.org/?

Sadly, now that Obama has a chance to make tangible progress on this front, his efforts are being stymied.

You’d think that everyone would agree on the imperative to reduce nuclear weapons. Nuclear arms control treaties have been signed by JFK, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr.

So why is there so much opposition to the proposed New START treaty?

The treaty would reduce American and Russian battlefield nuclear weapons from 2,200 each to 1,550 and would restart the verification process, allowing for inspection of Russian nuclear facilities and increased dialogue between Washington and Moscow.

The treaty is not a strategic policy change in the slightest. The New START treaty is only one in line of arms reductions treaties between us two former Cold War foes; George H.W. Bush signed the START I and Bill Clinton the START II treaties. And, with 1,550 deployed battlefield nukes, we could still destroy the world many times over after New START is approved.

Nevertheless, the treaty is central to achieving several foreign policy goals. First, by restoring the verification process, we can make sure that none of Russia’s nuclear warheads end up in the hands of a terrorist organization.

Second, if the treaty is blocked, our efforts to improve relations with Russia could fall through. Not only are better relations with a Russia a virtue itself, but we need Russia to counter China and Russia’s support to maintain sanctions against Iran.

Third, fewer redundant nuclear weapons means reduced costs maintaining our arsenal. We don’t need 2,000 nukes that are ready to be fired at five minute’s notice; we probably don’t even need 1,500. Reducing this government waste is an easy way to make a dent, if a tiny one, in our deficit.

Those opposed to the treaty argue that they have not been given enough time to review its terms. President Obama, however, signed New START seven months ago. On top of that, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry has held 21 hearings on the treaty and postponed debate six weeks to give senators time to review the treaty.

Obama has even thrown opponents a bone, promising $84 billion over the next ten years to modernize the nuclear arsenal. While this is of questionable necessity, it is unquestionably a tactic made in the spirit of compromise.

Securing this modest advance in arms control will not doom the United States to nuclear holocaust. It will instead secure the foreign policy of the country in several significant ways. What more do opponents want?

Because scare words like “deficit”, “debt” and “red ink” are thrown around in such a political fashion, a lot of misinformation exists surrounding this very serious issue.

The most harmful piece of propaganda on the deficit has emerged from obstructionists in the United States and from conservatives in Europe. During a time of economic weakness, they say, cutting the government’s short-term deficit will boost economic growth.

This dangerous belief is patently false; in fact, the opposite is true.

First, let us define some terms that are often incorrectly used interchangeably. The deficit is the difference between government revenues and government expenditures each year. The national debt is the accumulated amount of how much the country owes, or the difference between government revenues and government expenditures since America was founded.

Second, let us distinguish between the two types of deficit. This is key.

The first type of deficit, the long-term deficit, refers to each annual shortfall over the next several decades. This is the more harmful type of deficit because of its economic and national security implications.

The long-term deficit is driven primarily by health care costs and, to a much lesser extent, Social Security. Take a look at that graph in the above link. It makes dramatically clear how it is Medicare and Medicaid, not any other part of the budget, that is bankrupting us. Without public health insurance reform, the deficit will not be conquered.

The second type of deficit is the short-term deficit. This deficit, $1.2 trillion this year, is caused by the economic havoc of the past three years. Economic conditions play a central role in deficits, as out-of-work Americans pay fewer taxes and receive more government support (e.g. food stamps and unemployment benefits).

This is the deficit that, for some bizarre reason, conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic are targeting. In Britain, the Conservative Party is cutting 500,000 government jobs over the next five years; France is raising the retirement age; Germany is increasing taxes; in the US, the Republican Pledge to America promises to slash spending in the next Congressional session over the next two years.

Republican Representative (and potential presidential candidate) Mike Pence complains about “runaway federal spending on steroids,” while Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty proclaims, “It’s reasonable that government should tighten its belt.”

“It’s time for government to tighten their belts and show the American people that we get it,” says Speaker-to-be John Boehner.

“Government should have to tighten its belt,” agrees President Obama.

“The federal government needs to tighten its belt,” says one of his advisors, Valerie Jarrett.

“Congress must tighten its belt,” adds Steny Hoyer, the Democrat’s second-in-command in the House.

With the obesity epidemic continuing to grow, you think we’d be looking for ways to make that belt feel a little less tight.

Ba-dum-ch.

Despite all this rhetorical grand standing, neither party as a whole can claim the anti-deficit mantle with a straight face. Of course, there are a couple of individual politicians that truly deserve the title of deficit hawk – Republican George Voinovich of Ohio, for instance.

However, they are scarce, becoming scarcer, and hardly have any influence on Capitol Hill. Voinovich is retiring next year.

For most of the post-war era, the Democratic Party was never about reducing the deficit. The Democrats were the party of big government and high taxes to pay for big government. Republicans, on the other hand, opposed big government and supported low taxes.

The problem for both parties was that Americans hate high taxes but love big government. Since the end of the Cold War, we have seen the two parties converge on this position: big government spending and, at the same time, low taxes.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama made low taxes favorable on the left; Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush made high government spending popular on the right.

Fiscal insanity, in other words, is now bipartisan.

“But wait!” contend readers who voted for Scott Brown. New Republicans and the Tea Party will stop Obama’s profligacy in the next two years and put America back on track to prosperity.

Let’s take a look at the numbers.

The budget of the federal government during fiscal year 2011 is about $3.7 trillion, which results in a $1.2 trillion deficit. The three biggest areas of the federal budget are defense, Social Security, and public health insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP).

The Republican “Pledge to America” promises to cut $100 billion of non-military discretionary spending in the party’s first year in power. That means cuts to everything but defense, Social Security, and public health insurance. Subtracting these three biggest areas leaves roughly 17% of the budget left to cut.

$100 billion in cuts to non-defense discretionary spending would result in 21% across-the-board cuts in everything else in the budget: education, research, veterans’ benefits, administration of justice, and more. “Non-defense discretionary spending cuts” won’t be getting us anywhere.

What about earmarks? Even according to the most generous estimate from a right-wing think tank, earmarks make up only $17 billion. Our deficit this fiscal year, you’ll remember, is $1.2 trillion.

But what about Obamacare? Surely we can save money by cutting that big government monstrosity.

Lost in the partisan screaming is the fact that, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, health care reform will actually save us $100 billion over the next decade and $1 trillion over the following decade. Taxes on generous health plans, an independent panel to recommend cost-saving measures, and Medicare reform will save us more money than the Republican plans ever would.

In fact, President Obama may be one of the few people in Washington serious about cutting the national debt. He has proposed a three year freeze on non-defense discretionary spending, signed legislation reforming military acquisitions and proposed an end to the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

This brings us back to the Republicans who claim to oppose the deficit. Making the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, a move the vast majority of Republicans support, is fiscal insanity.

When push comes to shove, new Republican legislators will act like the old Republican legislators, who supported and carried out two wars and a massive expansion of Medicare, but refused to finance them. They refused to raise taxes or cut spending to pay for them, adding to the national debt.

“Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term,” said the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.

Like I said, no one actually cares about the deficit.

To be fair, congressional Democrats are no better. Members of both parties voted against the creation of a deficit commission. On top of that, Democrats still support making the Bush tax cuts permanent for those who make under $250,000 a year. This, too, is madness and is not remotely sustainable.

Both parties are going to need to come to their senses to restore fiscal sanity. Right now, if current policy does not change, America will default. Growing health care costs will sink us in a few short decades, if not sooner.

There is only one way to prevent this: reform government health care obligations. There is simply no other way to prevent massive debt accumulation and default.

Long term cuts, not short term cuts, are needed now.

In the experiment, Pavlov would ring a bell before serving his dog dinner. At the sight of a juicy steak, the dog’s mouth would water. After hearing the bell and subsequently seeing the food over the course of several days, the dog began salivating merely at the sound of the bell.

Pavlov’s dog demonstrated what is now known as “classical conditioning”, the process of learning by association. Through repetition, Pavlov’s dog unconsciously learned a reaction – salivating – to a given stimulus – a bell ringing.

Pavlovian responses seem to have caught on in American politics. Thanks to 24-hour pundits and the 30-second sound bite, certain keywords elicit conditioned responses.

National debt? Bad! Free market principles? Salivate! Government regulation? Bad! Founding Fathers? Drool!

While knee-jerk reactions to each one of these ideas have been harmful to America, one is particularly irrational: the fetishization of the Founders.

This Founder worship is particularly rampant among Tea Partiers. It is evident not just in the name of the movement, but in leading Tea Partiers’ writings.

In Glenn Beck’s latest novel, for instance, the protagonist memorizes the works of the Founding Fathers and, by the end of the novel (spoiler alert!), is about to begin a revolt against the government to “restore” our founding principles.

In an op-ed last week, conservative thinker Peter Berkowitz, explaining “why liberals don’t get the Tea Party Movement,” wrote that American university system has failed to teach college students (who are, of course, all socialists) the founding principles of American constitutional government.

I think it’s time to clear up this misconception. The Founders were not always right. When they were right, the lessons quite often do not apply today.

First of all, the vast majority of the Founders were racist, misogynistic, slave-owners. If we really want to return to our founding principles, we would have to return to the days when not even the entire adult male population could vote.

On top of that, the Founding Fathers held policy beliefs that today would simply be incompatible with America’s current position as an international superpower with an economy nearly three times the size of our closest rival.

Washington and Jefferson warned against “entangling alliances”; even the most extreme Tea Party loyalists are not advocating American withdrawal from NATO.

Should Washington promote protectionism, as favored by Alexander Hamilton?

Would government censorship of the media, as carried out by John Adams, be acceptable today?

In short, using the Founders to condemn an opponent’s policies is not a valid avenue of attack. As our population ages and developing countries challenge American supremacy, we are at a turning point in our history.We need real debate, not shallow, fallacious criticism.

Too many high school and even college graduates leave the American educational system without learning some of these fundamental skills. One ability in particular appears to be in short supply: long-term thinking. Quick satisfaction, in other words, is being prioritized over sustainable growth.

Short-term thinking is why the financial industry (and its lapdogs in Congress) is calling for less regulation only two years after a once-a-generation financial crisis that was caused by deregulation.

Short-term thinking is why self-described “deficit fighters” want to increase the deficit $3 trillion over the next decade.

Short-term thinking is why Congress has passed neither climate change legislation nor a clean energy bill.

A failure to think about the long-term brings us today to Massachusetts, where it appears that short-term thinking could emerge victorious over long-term thinking on Election Day this November. I’m referring, of course, to Question 3.

Question 3, a ballot initiative, would slash the state sales tax more than in half, from the current rate of 6.25% down to 3%. The initiative was proposed by Carla Howell, a Wayland resident and persistent “starve the beast” activist. Howell was also behind the 2002 and 2008 attempts to “starve” the government by eliminating the state income tax.

Howell suffers from the same lack of critical thinking ability that afflicts many of those on the national political stage. While at first glance a tax cut may be seductive, Howell and her supporters have not done the long-term math.

The non-partisan Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation (MTF) has done the math. In a report entitled “Question 3: Heading Over the Cliff,” the Foundation outlines how the tax cut would increase the state deficit by $2.5 billion by reducing revenue by the equivalent of 5% of the state budget.

Approval of the initiative would result in “across-the-board cuts of approximately 30 percent in virtually all state programs, including local aid, higher education, human services, prisons, courts,” and more, the Foundation writes.

According to the (blatantly partisan) Vote No on Question 3 campaign, this would result in Wayland alone losing over $737,000 dollars in local aid. This would mean devastating cuts to not only the town administration, but also to the Wayland school system. Remember last year’s budget cuts debate? Question 3 would cause a repeat of the depressing experience.

Even if you are not the parent of a student in the Wayland public school system, carefully consider the long-term consequences of Question 3. Especially if you live in Wayland, you have a very important reason to vote against Question 3 as well.

There is only one difference between Wayland and any of the other scores of suburbs in Massachusetts: Wayland’s record as a town with a fantastic public school system. It is what brings new families to move here and is certainly the reason my family moved here years ago. Most importantly for those who live here without children, it is what drives property value in our town.

Question 3, with its consequential budget cuts, would drastically weaken our reputation as a strong educational town. That, in turn, would make Wayland a much less vibrant town and quite possibly weaken housing prices.

So, let’s summarize. If across-the-board budget cuts don’t bother you, consider the effect of Question 3 on Wayland’s educational system. If cuts to our educational system don’t trouble you, consider the effects of the initiative to your home’s value.

Education is what makes Wayland and Massachusetts as whole special; don’t let Question 3 ruin that. Ignore the short-term pleasure. Think about the long-term.

“Japan Caves In on China” was on page A13 of the Saturday Wall Street Journal. It should have been a front page story.

The story, in case you missed it, started on September 8th, when a Chinese fishing boat captain was detained after his ship allegedly rammed into two Japanese naval vessels in waters off a disputed island chain that, while uninhabited, is in an area rich with fish, oil, and natural gas deposits.

What normally might have been an embassy-level incident escalated as China harshly escalated tensions and unleashed a furious diplomatic blitz.

State-controlled media in the People’s Republic added fuel to the flames, accusing Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan of intentionally seeking to damage Sino-Japanese relations. That was just the beginning: Beijing suspended diplomatic talks on energy cooperation and reduced visits to Japan by Chinese tourists. Perhaps unrelated, yet still suspiciously timed, was the arrest by Chinese authorities of four Japanese for alleged espionage.

The scariest piece of retaliation? China, which mines 93% of the world’s rare earth minerals, halted all shipments of the metals to Japan, whose auto industry in particular is reliant on the metals for advanced electronics.

Japan, given its two-decade long economic stagnation and aging population, has been loath to be aggressive on the international stage, especially towards the rising Great Power that is China. At first, the country took an unusually firm line, refusing to retreat. In the end, however, Tokyo could not take the heat, and released the captain unconditionally.

This is but the most recent example of China’s increasingly belligerent “diplomacy”. Despite international pressure, and the threat of American sanctions, the communist country has refused to end both the manipulation of its currency and the state subsidies that make its exports artificially competitive. Beijing has also pushed ahead with the sale of two nuclear reactors to Pakistan, even though it violates international guidelines.

Geopolitically, China has also become increasingly confrontational in its local sphere of influence.  The country warned the United States not to attempt to mediate territorial disputes, like the one that resulted in last week’s flare up, between the country and its neighbors in the South China Sea – effectively China’s equivalent of the Caribbean.

As China moves towards dethroning the United States as the world’s foremost superpower, this arrogant aggression will become commonplace, a development that will be good for neither regional stability nor economic growth.

Some believe that China can be integrated into the international system as a “status quo power” whose emergence will not lead to significant disruption. There is no basis for this belief.

China is going through the same period of development as was the US at the turn of the 20th century. The period receives little attention in American history, probably because it was the period when the United States was a brutal imperial colonizer. We overthrew governments and claimed islands throughout the Pacific (see: Philippines, Occupation of) and turned much of the Caribbean and Latin America into American protectorates.

Why would we expect China to act any differently than the United States during its transformation from middling power to superpower? Is Beijing more principled and ethical than the US? Less nationalistic? Less concerned about regime survival?

If anything, China today is more of all the above than Washington was. In other words, Americans should expect an increasingly aggressive foreign policy from the communists in Beijing, resulting in less regional stability and more resource warfare.

Hope exists. The full headline of the Wall Street Journal article noted above? “Japan Caves In on China; Looks to U.S.” (Emphasis added.)

As China’s economy grows in size – it recently passed Japan to officially become the second largest economy in the world – and its military grows in strength, the rest of the world, and its neighbors especially, are getting nervous and looking to the United States for help. This is our chance to contain China.

The US must maintain its strong relationship with Taiwan and Japan, especially, as they are our two “unsinkable aircraft carriers” in the region. Other nations are nervous as well: Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea, and Singapore have all expressed concern over China’s growing power.

Maintaining a balance of power in East Asia is the single most important step the United States can take geopolitically to decelerate China’s rise and help to maintain our preeminence over the international system.

Without good domestic governance here on US soil, however, it will be for naught. These domestic issues – tax reform, education reform, energy reform, and prison reform, among other things – will be addressed in this space throughout the year. Stay tuned.

I predicted in January of this year that Democratic losses would not be significantly above average midterm losses for first-term presidents. Now, that prediction looks, to say the least, optimistic.

According to election forecaster Nate Silver, whose estimates synthesize fundraising, multiple polls, and historical trends, there is nearly a two in three chance that the Republicans will take control of the House. Until the nomination of an extreme Tea Partier in Delaware last week, there was even a one in four chance that conservatives would take the Senate.

So, it’s a good time to ask: what happens when Republicans win in November?

Frankly, I’m worried. Conservative opposition to President Obama has surpassed even the level of pure hatred displayed by liberals in 2006 and 2007 towards President Bush at the height of the Iraq War.

From accusations of socialism, to insinuations that Obama has lied about his religion, to the laughably ridiculous “Kenyan, anti-colonial” view that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich believes the President holds, there is just something about the President that an extremely vocal segment of conservatives absolutely hate.

We’ve seen this uncontrollable rage exhibited in many ways, but perhaps the most pernicious is the unprecedented level of obstruction by congressional Republicans. Using arcane congressional mechanisms, the GOP has managed to delay, weaken, and block Democratic attempts at progress.

Hundreds of critical government positions have not been filled because of conservative “secret holds”, stacks of bills have been blocked by the filibuster (a maneuver that is not in the Constitution and that was not common until the Republicans were forced into the minority in 2006), and countless hours have been wasted.

If these obstructionists control the House, will anything get done? The question is no exaggeration. Some Republicans have recently spoken of a government shutdown if they take power in November.

The worst part is that we’ve seen this movie before, and yet we are still barreling towards a sequel. After Republicans won in a landslide in 1994 midterm elections, Newt Gingrich duked it out with President Clinton for years in ferociously partisan debates.

There actually was a government shutdown. The Republican-controlled House spent 140 hours taking sworn testimony over whether the President had misused the White House Christmas card list. The Clintons were accused of complicity in the death of a deputy.

We can expect more of this insanity if Democrats lose the House. According to Glenn Thrush of Politico.com, if Republicans take power, they plan a “wave of committee investigations” into manufactured controversies like those we saw in the ‘90s.

Finally: what is it exactly that the Republicans have to offer?

They have yet to present any new policy, any alternative to Obama and the Democrats. In 1994, the GOP presented its “Contract with America”, which explained what the party would do with its newfound power. The policies of today’s Republican Party can be summed up in one word: “No.”

No to the President’s agenda. No new regulations to prevent a new financial crisis. No legislation to prevent climate change. No aid for the chronically unemployed. No aid to cash-strapped states and school districts. No progress.

Is this really what America wants?

Well, I’m an optimist. The silver lining of going back to school? The return of The Basil Report!

The 2011 Basil Report – the last year of the Report – will be an exciting one. In November, Republicans may take control of one or both houses of Congress. The next several months will determine whether or not the United States falls back into recession; continues to grow at a snail’s pace, practically a quasi-recession; or manages to produce robust growth. The Iraq War is entering the history books and the Afghan war is heating up.

Beyond these headline topics, I’d like to take a look at some of the most serious issues facing America in the coming decades. The United State’s deteriorating educational standing worldwide. The vanishing blue-collar middle class and the increasingly two-tier economy. Climate change and the possibility of peak oil. The growth of suffocating debt that will come with a graying population. Most importantly, the decline of American hegemony and the rise of China, India, and multipolarity.

We begin with a look at the current state of the economy. Get ready for the best year of the Report yet.

The State of the American Economy

There have been bottles upon bottles of (figurative) ink spilled over the current economic mess that we in the United States and the rest of the developed world find ourselves in. I don’t need to add another article to the heap of those that already exist. However, I would like to add one thing: perspective.

There is no denying it. America’s economy, as the President recently put it, has been driven into a ditch. The broadest measure of unemployment has been hovering above 16% for 15 months and the more standard rate around 10%; monthly job growth can’t even keep pace with America’s growing population, let alone reabsorb the unemployed. The average duration of unemployment is distressingly high.

Gross domestic product growth is eye-wateringly weak and, with the end of the stimulus, probably won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Housing sales have just hit another record low and prices could still drop further. Manufacturing, maybe the closest thing to a bright spot in this recovery, has been hit with nearly a month of bad data.

However – here’s the perspective – as hard as it is to believe, it could have been worse.

Yeah, you’ve heard the Obama administration trumpet this same message as the President and his team scrambles to minimize losses in the November election. The thing is: they’re right.

The Obama administration, the lame-duck Bush administration, and, perhaps most importantly, the Federal Reserve took extraordinary, historically unprecedented steps to save the financial system and prop up the economy.

Some have forgotten just how close the United States and the world came to total economic meltdown in late 2008 and early 2009. (Others, for political convenience, have chosen to ignore it.) As a result of the disastrous deregulation policies that began with Presidents Carter and Reagan and continued under presidencies of both parties, the world was brought to the brink. Great Depression 2.0 would have been no exaggeration.

The collapse of the housing bubble

Let’s go back to the most immediate cause of the crisis: the collapse of the housing bubble. As home prices came crashing down and subprime borrowers who took out mortgages they couldn’t afford defaulted on their debt, the financial industry lost billions.

One after another, the Big Five stand-alone investment banks on Wall Street were brought down.

Bear Stearns – saved with government aid.

Lehman Brothers – allowed to fail, with disastrous consequences.

Merrill Lynch – sold at the auction block.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs – the only two investment banks left standing – were infused with massive loans by outside investors and forced to convert to commercial banking.

The crisis spread to other commercial banks. Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JP Morgan were brought to their knees. The fire sale of Wachovia. The failure of Countrywide and Washington Mutual. The poison spread to the rest of the American economic system and around the world with lightning speed. AIG. GM.

In short, we were peeking over the abyss, with the ground beneath us crumbling.

Bailing out a sinking ship

Extraordinary action saved us. Trillions of dollars were pumped into the economy by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, a Great Depression scholar. The Obama economic team injected nearly a trillion more in tax cuts and spending.

This was completely unprecedented. The last time an economic crisis of this magnitude hit (read: the Great Depression), the Federal Reserve and Washington actually tightened their belts. The bold action this time around halted economic freefall.

That is no conjecture. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 3.3 million more Americans would be out of work without the Obama administration’s stimulus.

According to separate independent analysis by the financial company Moody’s, the stimulus and bailouts combined prevented 8.5 million further job losses, an economy 6.5% smaller, and deflation (the “flation” that’s even scarier than inflation).

In other words, we should be incredibly mindful of and thankful for the emergency policies enacted by the late Bush administration and the Obama administration. However, as I wrote at the beginning of this piece, in this “quasi-recession” of extremely low economic growth, things are by no means rosy.

Still, it could have been much worse.

A democracy requires several characteristics to function well. Thursday night’s Town Meeting did not have any of them.

The first characteristic of a healthy democracy, and the most vital, is voter participation. Without participation by a significant percentage of the populace, the best interests of the people will not be promoted.

Thursday’s Town Meeting had a miniscule voter turnout. According to the town, just under 9,000 citizens are eligible to vote; 305 citizens participated on Thursday, a 3.3% turnout rate.

That is utterly appalling.

Ten times that number of Waylanders participated in Tuesday’s town and state elections. 91% of eligible Wayland voters participated in the 2008 presidential election.

Following citizen participation, a democracy needs educated citizens, so that when they do participate, they can make informed decisions.

Many of the voters at Town Meeting, I’m afraid to say, did not exhibit this quality during one of the most important votes of the night. During the vote on item 13 of the capital budget, Network Meters Reading System, several speakers played off of fears that had almost no basis in reality.

The line-item would have allocated $625,000 for the development of an electronic water meter reading system to be used throughout town. According to the director of the Department of Public Works (DPW), the cost would have been more than recuperated by making the town more water-efficient and eliminating the need for manual inspections.

This was not enough to convince voters. Due to speeches given by several fear mongers, the item was removed from the budget. Why? Fear of radiation.

Despite expert testimony to the contrary, it appears that the majority of voters believed that four one-second bursts of electromagnetic radiation each day would have caused health complications for Wayland residents. Sure, it could – if the electronic signals that would have been sent out by the water meter readers constituted of ultraviolet rays, x-rays or gamma rays.

But they wouldn’t have been. The signal sent out would have been a low, safe frequency – as the director of the DPW clearly explained. The meter readers would have been 6,000 times safer than your cellphone.

Finally, a strong democracy must be structurally sound and efficient. Thursday’s Town Meeting was anything but efficient. After more than four hours of debate, not even five articles were finished, out of a total of nearly 30 articles.

These issues should be addressed to maintain the integrity of Wayland’s centuries-old democracy.

The majority of these issues fall on the shoulders of the people themselves. It is the responsibility of an American citizen to participate in our democracy and to be educated about the issues facing it, just the same as it is a responsibility to pay taxes.

Making Town Meeting more efficient is a thornier problem. However, this year, an article has been proposed that would strengthen Town Meeting: Article 22. The article, introduced by Alan Reiss, would bring electronic voting to Town Meeting, speeding up the event as well as protecting the privacy of voters.

Participation, education, and efficiency. Democracy requires these qualities to succeed. However, despite these sometimes burdensome requirements, democracy is the best hope for any society.

Perhaps Winston Churchill put it best: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried.”

First came the news from Arizona, where the state legislature passed and Governor Jan Brewer signed a strongly anti-immigrant law. The law, which is meant to crack down on illegal immigration, instead effectively mandates racial profiling and racism, raising the question of the law’s constitutionality.

The same week, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham backed off his endorsement of a climate bill that was weaving its way through the Senate after majority leader Harry Reid decided to schedule immigration reform before a climate change bill, for election year reasons.

Immigration reform is badly needed; the continuing existence of 10 million illegal immigrants is unsustainable. Since deportation is not merely infeasible but impossible, it is likely that some form amnesty will have to occur.

However, it is not illegal immigration that brings me to your computer screens today. It is legal immigration.

The United States, as the (overused) saying goes, is a nation of immigrants. Immigration has fueled our economic growth throughout the centuries, and is one of the many reasons that the United States enjoys the global dominance that it does today.

Immigrants are often our most driven and entrepreneurial citizens. It takes a fair bit of courage and willpower to uproot oneself and move to a foreign country, and it is for this that immigrants are often so motivated. Furthermore, immigrants bring with them essential connections to their homelands that can be used for networking.

Contrary to popular belief, or, at least the popular belief in Arizona, immigration does not hurt the economy. Increasing the population of a region does not make that region poorer; Wyoming, a sparsely populated state, is not significantly more or less wealthy than Virginia, a more populous state.

If John moves to the United States, he is going to create additional demand for many goods – food, health services, construction, etc. – thereby creating more jobs, which makes the economy bigger.

Sadly, the environment in the United States has become disturbingly hostile to immigration.

If we want to remain the dominant economic and political power in the world, we are going to have to encourage more immigration, particularly of skilled workers. Congress has a chance to make this happen as it debates immigration reform.

One of the best ways of going about this would be expanding the H-1B visa program. This visa allows American firms to hire foreign scientists, engineers, and other skilled specialists. Currently, there is a cap of 65,000 H-1B visas that are given out each year. This number should be expanded.

The cap is far too low and outdated. The visa was first introduced in 1990, and while the American population has since grown 20%, the cap has remained constant.

Before the recession, the Citizenship and Immigration Service would hit the 65,000 annual cap within days of opening the application process. Those that did not apply fast enough often could not come to the US; that is a terrible waste of valuable minds.

With competitors like China, India, and Brazil fast on our heels, we need all the advantages we can get. We need expanded legal immigration.

But he’s got this financial reform thing figured out.

Maybe it’s the fact that he’s retiring this year and doesn’t need the money from special interests, but Dodd’s financial regulation reform legislation that is making its way through the Senate is not just good, it’s smart.

To understand why, let’s take a trip back to the 1930s and the Great Depression. Banks were collapsing like a house in an earthquake. In 1935, to help stabilize the banking industry and prevent future financial crises, Congress created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the FDIC, to insure bank deposits and to wind down failing banks.

This greatly enhanced the soundness of the American economic system. Depositors knew that, even if their bank failed, they would still get their money, albeit from the federal government instead of their bank. Financial markets were pacified by the knowledge that the FDIC could go in and wind down institutions that pose systemic risk before the institutions brought down the rest of the financial industry.

That worked great for many years; after all, there were no dramatic financial crises for the next several decades.

However, capitalism, in its relentless search for a bigger profit margin, found ways to take greater risks — and, temporarily, bring in greater profits — by circumventing these regulations. Non-bank institutions, a shadow banking system, developed and became huge and interconnected. Some of these institutions, as we now know, became “too big to fail.”

When these mammoths were about to collapse in the dark days of 2008, the government had very few options to prevent them from failing, for they did not fall under the jurisdiction of the FDIC.

The Treasury could organize a fire sale, backed up by taxpayer funding, as in the case of Bear Sterns. This, of course, puts taxpayers in the unacceptable position of accepting enormous risk. Washington could explicitly nationalize the institutions, as in the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Nationalization, however, is not preferable in a market economy like ours. Or, Washington could take the advice of most Republicans and Tea Partiers: let ‘em fail. We did try that, with Lehman Brothers. Credit markets froze and the financial system nearly fell apart.

Now, back to the FDIC. If Washington had had the power to wind down these failing financial institutions – if the FDIC had had the power to wind down non-bank corporations – the death of intertwined leviathans like Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers would not mean the collapse of the entire financial system. The government would have had the ability to sweep in, reorganize failing companies, sell off the good parts of the company, and liquidate the rest.

This power, “resolution authority”, is given to the federal government in the Dodd bill.

In the words of Billy Mays, “But wait, there’s more!”

The bill would take steps to regulate derivatives, the exotic financial instruments that acted as a catalyst for the crisis. It would also create a consumer protection agency to ensure that consumers know exactly what they’re getting when they buy that adjustable-rate mortgage. Finally, standards for the big three oligopolistic credit rating agencies would be tightened.

Resolution authority, however, is the single most important aspect of the legislation. If we don’t want another financial crisis in six or seven years, the government needs to be given this power.

The Republican threat of filibuster, however, is standing in the way of reform. Call Scott Brown, and tell him to vote yes on the Dodd bill to strengthen American economic security.

The solution offered by Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo and supported by Governor Deval Patrick is most definitely not.

Under legislation filed by Speaker DeLeo last week, two resort casinos would be built in the state along with 750 slot machines at racetracks. The bill has been approved by the Joint Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies – without a public hearing, interestingly enough – and will be debated by the House in upcoming weeks.

There’s no doubt expanded gaming would help close the budget gap in the short term. Licenses for the two resort casinos would be sold for $100 million a piece, and $15 million at each of the four racing tracks where slots would be built.

But what about the long term?

Casino proponents point to two benefits of the legislation: new jobs and more tax revenue. Let’s put both of these myths to rest right now.

Casinos will not create new consumer demand. They will merely shift demand from other local businesses to the resorts. Money that would otherwise be spent on small businesses would instead be lost to the quick spin of slot machines. Jobs, then, will simply move around as well.

And these aren’t even the “well-paying jobs” that proponents expect. The average pay for a casino worker is less than $26,400, or 120% of the poverty level for a family of four, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Gaming dealers, who make up more than 50% of casinos workers, earn on average $16,310 – far below the federal poverty level of $22,000.

As for tax revenue, the idea that a limited number of casinos can be revenue-positive over the long-term is a pipe dream.

First of all, tax revenue will fall from the businesses that are hurt by competition from casinos. Secondly, casinos will steal revenue from the state lottery. According to United to Stop Slots in Massachusetts (admittedly not a nonpartisan group), casinos could lose the state 10% of its $4 billion lottery enterprise.

Beyond this, that the benefits of increased gambling are wildly exaggerated, this legislation would create a huge new social problem.

Gambling is not healthy. Gambling addictions can tear apart families and ruin lives. According to the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling, some 250,000 Bay Staters are problem gamblers. With expanded gaming, this number can only go up. Besides the social and emotional cost, this has an economic cost, in the form of increased demand for state rehabilitation services.

Finally, is gambling really how the state wants grow the economy? Gambling is not a growth industry (especially if the number of casinos is limited). The state should not be investing its future in gaming; we should be investing in the industries of the future. The state is already one of the leading biotechnology hubs in the country; investment in renewable energy is rapidly growing.

Does the legislature really want to establish gambling as the hope of Massachusetts?

The good news is that global investment in renewable energy has weathered the worldwide recession strongly, according to a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Investment in the United States alone has doubled over the past five years.

The really bad news? American clean energy investment is falling behind that of other countries.

The even worse news? China’s taking the lead.

In 2009, China led the world with total investments of $34.6 billion in renewable energy. We, in second place, invested a meager $18.6 billion – and that’s including stimulus funds. (Though, to be fair, China had a massive stimulus of its own.) Furthermore, American investments in renewable energy are growing at a slower rate than that of other countries.

This is unacceptable. If there’s one industry that you can bet will grow dramatically in this century, it’s renewable energy. We have to run out of oil and coal eventually, and clean energy is the best replacement candidate.

Besides, it’s not all economics. Energy is vital to both our national security and our strategic position in the world.

Our current dependence on oil and other fossil fuels ties the United States to nasty regimes (Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, etc.). This dependence forces us to prop up totalitarian regimes (I’m looking at you again, Saudi Arabia) and be involved in unnecessary conflicts like the Persian Gulf War.

Instead of falling behind in the race for green energy, policymakers in Washington must ensure that the United States retakes the lead in renewable energy development. By becoming the Saudi Arabia of the 21^st century, we can maintain our geopolitical dominance and economic might.

First and foremost, that means passing smart climate change legislation in Congress. Besides preventing global warming, this legislation would use “carrots and sticks” to promote renewable energy development. “Sticks” would discourage the use of fossil fuels, either through a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system. “Carrots” would be tax incentives to stimulate renewable energy expansion.

Right now, however, energy and climate legislation is being held up in the increasingly dysfunctional Senate. It doesn’t help that Republican leaders are working to advance their own interests instead of those of the country. “There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year!” exclaimed John McCain after health care reform passed last week. (And this man could have been our president?)

The Pew report specifically points out that domestic policy plays a “critical role” in the strength of individual countries clean energy programs.

Tell Congress to pass energy and climate reform now.