Shouldn't We Work on Maximizing Worker Productivity?

"In debate over nation's burgeoning deficit, a surplus of worry," in today's The Washington Post, shows our national debt poised to skyrocket as a result of Uncle Sam's running huge annual deficits as far as the eye can see:

Our federal government is undertaking to pay for a lot of new stuff: health care reform, a military surge in Afghanistan, incentives to reduce our nation's carbon footprint, etc. Can we afford it?

We can if we can just get more revenue from income taxes and other sources than we project now. That would lower the anticipated deficits and, hence, the projected national debt.

The only politically acceptable way to get more revenue than expected is to grow the economy faster.

Economic growth is measured by gross domestic product. But growth that is based on anything other than increased worker productivity is but a temporary illusion. It is not sustainable. It is like the late, lamented dot-com boom: it's bound to go bust.

Worker productivity — how much real value each worker produces per hour worked — is where the rubber truly meets the road. The more valuable the goods and services produced by American workers, after inflation is factored out, the higher their wages or salaries can be, the more taxable income they can take in, and the more money Uncle Sam can collect.


By "workers" I mean everyone who is gainfully employed, not just those we used to call "blue-collar" workers, or "labor." Today, we are seeing "white-collar workers," "pink-collar workers," "green-collar workers," and so forth. Their productivity is a huge component of overall GDP.

It becomes a bit more difficult to measure the productivity of higher-ups like a corporate CEO, but the general idea is that CEOs' salaries ought to reflect the productivity of all those lower down in the pyramid — each of whose productivity depends on their underlings, and so on down to the worker bees who actually churn out all that valuable honey.

The more productive every worker-hour is, the more honey workers will produce. We need lots of honey, because huge amounts of it will soon have to be diverted from those who are currently employed to all those no-longer-employed baby boomers like me, to pay for our retirement lifestyles, our Social Security, our medical costs.


What makes a worker more productive? Well, technological advance, for one. When computers started talking to one another over the Internet, all kinds of productive jobs opened up.

Infrastructure, for another. The Internet is infrastructure, but so are roads, bridges, sewer systems, the grid that delivers our electrical power, natural gas pipelines, harbors, airports, rail lines, subway systems, and so forth.

Education is yet another source of productivity — that and worker training in skills required for doing a job.

Perhaps the most important source of worker productivity is energy. We need cheap, reliable sources of electrical power and of all the other ways we use to power our honey-making activities.


That last source of worker productivity, energy, needs to be not only abundant and, therefore, cheap, but also constant and predictable in its plenty and its affordability. That's where alternative sources of energy come in — wind, solar, geothermal, etc. Harnessing them will give us all the affordable energy we will ever need, someday soon.

The technologies we need to harness alternative, renewable energy will appear faster if the businesses that are intent on developing them can be sure that coal, oil, and natural gas prices will not drop precipitously and wipe out these various alternatives' profit potential.

This is why the best argument for lowering our dependency on carbon-based energy isn't necessarily the threat of global warming. It's that a switch to abundant, affordable energy sources like wind and solar will someday soon give us a basis for steadily increasing worker productivity, on into the distant future.


A switch to cheap, reliable, abundant energy can power the technological advance we need. It can provide us with the excuse we seem to need to invest in our nation's crumbling infrastructure, particularly that part of it which is used to distribute electrical power. Plus, we'll need better-educated and better-trained workers to manage our alternative, clean energy system and develop new ways to distribute the energy and tap into it after it arrives at the office, factory, or other workplace.

In fact, there will be whole new job categories such as Executive Vice President in Charge of Energy Strategies. It will be her worker bees who make sure that all the machines that sip electric power out of that newfangled "smart meter" on the wall of the factory or office are themselves "smart."

Smart machines will generate power as well as consume it. For example, a fleet of electric-motor taxicabs will charge their batteries at night when electric rates are low and return any unused charge into the power grid in the daytime when rates are high, thus giving the taxicab company an extra source of profits.

Our Executive Veep and her highly trained minions will be in charge of making sure those profits get maximized.

That's a whole new venue for American workers and their burgeoning productivity. Even if climate skeptics are right and global warming is not in fact imminent, we still ought to invest in alternative energy. Our nation's ability to avoid crippling debt may depend on it.

Health Costs Pressing on Everything Else

In today's The Washington Post, columnist Robert J. Samuelson's Health Care Nation op-ed piece chills my liberal soul.

Samuelson, in his regular op-ed column, covers the economic waterfront. This time his topic is how health care reform efforts would create "burgeoning health spending that, even if the budget were balanced, would press on everything else."

We hear wild charges from the GOP that "Obamacare" would lead to "rationing" of health services, if not a full "government takeover." That's not the real problem, says Samuelson. The real problem is that our society, even if the current health care legislation happens to bite the dust, "passively accepts constant increases in health spending" — to the point that government outlays for health care already consume fully one dollar in every four that Uncle Sam spends.

That fraction will only increase under Obamacare. So even if the health bill that may ultimately pass the Senate is as deficit-neutral as proponents say, spending on health care as a percentage of the federal budget will grow and grow and grow, squeezing down spending on the military as well as on "universities, roads, research, parks, courts, border protection and — because similar pressures operate on states through Medicaid — schools, police, trash collection and libraries."

Oops. Unintended consequences galore, those.

Spending on health care is, says Samuelson, a sacred cow that uniquely "enjoys an open tab" in our economy and political system. No one in politics is ready to bite the bullet and propose reforms that would solve "the central political problem of health-care nation." Our huge problem "is to find effective and acceptable ways to limit medical spending."

Why won't anyone bite said bullet? Because "everyone believes that cost controls are heartless and illegitimate." No one wants to deny anyone in America (except perhaps illegal immigrants) "the best health care for ourselves and [for our] loved ones."

I would add that the health services any one of us might quite naturally demand for ourselves, or for our nearest and dearest, might actually not be of any real value, medically speaking. I myself have undergone any number of expensive tests that have proved nothing, as they happened to turn out. For example, I recently had symptoms that were speculatively diagnosed as a prostate infection. But an expensive cystoscopy showed nothing, and it turned out that my symptoms were in fact caused by an allergy to chocolate.

True, I have also had expensive tests and procedures that very likely have saved me from an early grave, such as the replacement of my aortic valve when a Sinus of Valsalva aneurysm was discovered via a CT scan.

There accordingly needs to be some mechanism put in place to keep me and my doctors from going off on pricey wild goose chases, such as the many unnecessary CT scans, MRIs, and other diagnostic procedures I have been given (because my generous insurance plan covers them) over the past several decades.

But, says Samuelson, "It's easier to perpetuate and enlarge the status quo than to undertake the difficult job of restructuring the health-care system to provide better and less costly care."

Amen to that.

Let's Support President Obama's Afghanistan Policy!

President Obama is catching it from both the left and the right in response to his speech to the Army corps of cadets announcing his Afghanistan policy. In today's Washington Post, conservative Charles Krauthammer let him have it for his "call to arms so ambivalent, so tentative, so defensive" at West Point. In the same paper, liberal Eugene Robinson maligned the president for taking a "wrong path in Afghanistan" and (supposedly) paying scant attention to countries like Somalia to which al-Qaeda presumably could relocate if we succeed in freezing it out of Afghanistan.

They are both wrong.

I support the president's policy — I who opposed the Vietnam War, the first Gulf War, and the War in Iraq. Though I am a liberal Democrat and a dove, I think the war in Afghanistan needs to be fought, and won. The reason: we have simply got to defeat radical Islam.

I consider it a liberal thing, my support of the president. How could it be anything but a liberal value, to oppose those in the world who would dictate people's lives and beliefs at the point of a gun? Who would crush every society that does not share their version of their religion? Who would keep women in burqas and perennial servitude? Children in fear of other children?

Conservatives like Mr. Krauthammer want the president to announce his "outright rejection of withdrawal or retreat," insisting the president's July 2011 date certain to begin withdrawing troops is a lily-livered blunder. I don't think it's a blunder, I think it is a ploy. I think the president wants to use it to pressure Mr. Karzai to get busy instituting needed reform and building up his own forces' credibility, before time runs out.

Liberals like Mr. Robinson want the president to abandon the Afghanistan surge because "al-Qaeda's murderous philosophy, which is the real enemy, has no physical base. It can erupt anywhere — even, perhaps, on a heavily guarded U.S. Army post in the middle of Texas." But that kind of thinking is crazy. It's like saying don't take out a malignant brain tumor because the cancer could pop up somewhere else anyway. Not only that, but what if the surgeon can't get all of the malignancy?

That's lily-livered. And Mr. Krauthammer isn't much better, with his insistence on the president swaggering like John Wayne.

We are in this for the long haul. Afghanistan may not work out. There may have to be several more "new" Afghanistan policies before we find one that works. There may be no way to keep the war going long enough to win it. So President Obama is walking a real tightrope, but it is a necessary tightrope. Walking necessary tightropes is what great presidents do.