ParisTampaBlog

In today’s NYTimes David Brooks says in answer to the question, “Why did the United States become the leading economic power of the 20th century?” that it was our “ferocious belief that people have the power to transform their own lives that gave Americans an unparalleled commitment to education, hard work and economic freedom.”

Now this may very well be true, that Americans by means of their economic freedom and hard work, if not education, became the world’s leading economic power, perhaps even as early as the final quarter of the 19th. century.

It may also be true that we have fallen, or at least no longer hold exclusively, that preeminent position in the world. Brooks is all wrong, however, in the reasons he gives for our supposed fall from the heights.

In his support he cites two recent books, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, and James Heckman’s in “Schools, Skills and Synapses.”

Goldman and Katz state that our world leadership position ended around 1970 “when America’s educational progress slowed to a crawl,” and then, between 1975 and 1990, stagnated completely. Education, or failure of our educational system being the culprit.

The belief that our educational system is failing us, that this is the principal reason for our fall from world economic power, is widely held. It seems to me, however, that another interpretation is even more probable.

Rather than it being our slowing down isn’t it even more likely that the other nations of the world are beginning to catch up, perhaps by having acquired, many for the first time, some of our own economic freedoms, and certainly and also by their own hard work?

In this Olympic season, some 10 days before the start of the games in Beijing, isn’t it more exact to say that others are now running faster, not that our own runners and swimmers have slowed down in the slightest? And there are a lot more of the others so the catching up was to be expected.

World records are still being beaten. It’s just that we’re not the only ones doing it. Our entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are still makers and holders of “world records,” but they have been joined by many others from other countries, many of whom are themselves in Silicon Valley and in other entrepreneurial hotspots around the Globe, working right along with us, competing with us, and doing more than just holding their own.

In any case we shouldn’t blame our educational system for the fact that others are catching up.

Imagine a country with over a billion people, nearly three times the population of the United States. And then imagine a situation when for the first time these people are free to develop their capacities. Wouldn’t you expect to be beaten by the sheer numbers of competitors in the race to get ahead? In the last century the entrepreneurial competition just wasn’t there and as a result we were alone at the top.

In any case the man who is behind in the race when given the opportunity may very well surge ahead, not because of what we’re not doing, but rather because of what he is now able to do, and in the cases of the hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese, this is happening for the very first time and the world is changing as a result. When looked at from this point of view it’s not at all that we have failed.

Brooks cites Goldin and Katz who describe a race between technology and education. “In periods when educational progress outpaces this change,” they say, “inequality narrows and the market is flooded with skilled workers,… In periods, like the current one, when educational progress lags behind technological change, inequality widens.”

This sort of thinking is based on a widespread misconception, that our economy is principally driven by the supply of skilled workers. Not true. And in fact we should stop pretending that our economy needs large numbers of highly skilled workers. It doesn’t.

Our economy has always had a majority of unskilled workers, first on the farms, then in the factories, and now in the service industries, such as food, lawns, medical, personal care et al., all industries able to take unskilled workers and train them on the job. Forget about having them first graduate from school and college.

It is this incorrect, and harmful to the young, thinking that tries to force more and more of them into the high school graduate college student mold that simply doesn’t fit them.

Many young people, probably a majority of them, no more today than in the past, are simply not interested in the higher order thinking skills that a college education demands. The greatest harm is done by our pretending that they are, not by our so-called failure to educate them.

Further on in his piece Brooks cites Heckman’s conclusion in his  “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” “that high school graduation rates peaked in the U.S. in the late 1960s, at about 80 percent, and that since then they have declined.”

But what could be more “normal” than that? You’d expect them to peak. Not everyone would succeed if the graduation requirements were real. This is the law of the Bell Curve. In fact, if the graduation rates have declined that’s a good sign, as it means that the system rightly is rejecting those who shouldn’t have even been there in the first place.

Nor does the fault, the explanation, lie with the family environments which according to Heckman have deteriorated over the past 40 years, even though that is not at all to say that deteriorating family environments have not created problems in their own right. We have Bill Cosby et al. as witness to that.

Does David Brooks really believe that the gaps in educational attainment, clearly present at age 5 if not before, require only concerted effort on our part to significantly reduce? Would that we could rid ourselves of the inequalities among us, would that it were not “with depressing accuracy, so easy to predict who will complete high school and college and who won’t.”

But we can’t “rid ourselves,” and we can “predict.” Here Brooks indulges, like he would have us think that Obama did during his victory column speech in Berlin, in Disney-land wishful thinking. His realism usually present seems to have deserted him while talking about education.

The are reasons for the educational inequalities that exist, culprits if you will. But these are such things as different intelligences, different levels of intelligence, differences of motivation, emotional stability, presence or lack of self-control, sociability etc.

But these all important intangibles are not for the most part characteristics or qualities that we can significantly alter by our programs and strategies. If we didn’t know that ourselves, from our own experiences with our own children, we ought to have learned that from the experience of the Soviet Union.

Ultimately the “skills slowdown” that Brooks would have us recognize and confront is not that at all. It’s the rest of the world catching up. Furthermore, in the sense that we now live in the entire world, and not just in the continental United States, we’re no longer entirely in charge, if we ever were, of our own destiny.

We’re simply not going, in our lifetimes, to significantly boost educational attainment at the bottom. Educational attainment, if meaningful will always have a top and a bottom, and never the twain will meet.

As long as we were alone in our success we were not bothered by our “bottom.” We’re now sharing the economic lead with others and evidently David Brooks thinks that if we could just better educate our own at the “bottom” we would be on the way to regaining our dominant position at the top. A pipe dream, this. Disney thinking.

Yes, David, America did rise “because it go
t more out of its own people than other nations.” But that didn’t stop in 1970 as you suggest. We’re still doing it. Go to our elite schools, our entrepreneurial hot spots to see it. The difference is that now others are doing as we. And for the world, and for us, that’s a very good thing.

If Obama loses it will be for two reasons, neither one of which has anything to do with the issues that may or may not separate the two presidential candidates:

The first is that too many registered voters are not ready to accept a Black president. Call it prejudice, that which it probably is, although not the “string ‘em up” variety. And this sort of thing doesn’t show up in the polls where people don’t admit to this, as we saw in the NH polls that had Obama well ahead of Hillary, only to go on and lose badly.

The second is that too many remain unconvinced that Obama, of a Kenyan father and a liberal, free thinking spirit of a mother, who left Kansas, our country’s heartland, to live in Indonesia (a Moslem country), and eventually, following her divorce from Barack’s Black Kenyan father, marry an Indonesian, are not convinced that Obama is an American like them, proud to wear the flag pin, proud to salute the flag and all that sort of thing.

Obama needs somehow to overcome both obstacles if he would win the presidency in November. And it’s not clear that he can do so, nor even that he is fully aware of the problem and working at doing so.

Of course neither obstacle lies in McCain’s path. He is white, and he is an American (although born in the Panama Canal Zone), and comes from a line of American heroes as well as being an American hero himself.

He’s 36 years old. That makes him an adult. He is super rich, having a personal fortune estimated at more than $4 billion.

If ever there were an opportunity to freely set out on the path of life-long learning that educators, from ancient times right on up until the present, have talked about, this would be it.

However, this is not the path that Mr. Melnichenko, a Belarus-born math whiz who founded MDM Bank, one of Russia’s largest, has chosen for himself. Instead of immersing himself in the Great Books, he has ordered a 390 foot yacht from Philippe Starck, the superstar French designer of lemon squeezers and luxury hotels.

Instead of props within the boat to encourage a life of learning, perhaps a lecture hall, theater, music room, collections of the great works of art, science, literature and philosophy, the boat will resemble a floating pleasure palace. One thinks of Pinochio on Pleasure Island.

Mr. Melnichenko’s own oversized bed, perched at the top of the boat’s tower, will rotate on a giant turntable (with built-in entertainment systems) to give him better views from his bed out through the tower’s panoramic windows.

There will be similar pleasure suites furnished with stainless steel whirlpool gaths for his guests. There’ll be 100 audio speakers positioned throughout the boat, and more than a dozen plasma TV screens, all linked to a centralized DVD library of more than 2,000 titles. At the back there’ll be a 480-square-yard disco along with a bar of Baccarat crystal and a water-resistant karaoke platform

There’ll be swimming pools, in the front and back of the vessel, a helipad, a hovercraft, a garage for the owner’s car, a crew of 35.

Mr. Melnichenko’s yacht is named A, taken from the first letter of his own name, Andrey, and that of his young wife, Aleksandra, a former supermodel who sang with a Yugoslavian pop group called Models and whom he married during the boat’s construction.

We didn’t really need to read about Mr Melnichendo to know that the super rich, probably even the affluent in general, have always chosen yachts and the accompanying pleasures over life-long-learning.

Now, is there any doubt in anyone’s mind that the children in our schools are more responsive to images of Mr. Melnichenko’s yacht, and the life that it represents, than to the notion of life-long-learning?

I’m sure there isn’t, yet we continue to labor under the delusion that things are not as they are, that children need only our support and encouragement to become life-long learners themselves. And of course they don’t and they won’t.

This is the first part or chapter of a writing project the end of which is not yet in
sight. The project to start with will take me back to the 80s when
my wife, Josée, and I were teaching at the Waring School in Beverly,
Massachusetts.

It was a custom in the school at the time for both
students and teachers to keep idea and image cards, containing words and pictures,
although mostly words as those who liked to draw also kept sketch
books.

The cards were 3 by 5 index cards that we carried about
with us (I kept mine in the inside pocket of my jacket) and from which
we would read out loud to the others during a tutorial or writing
class.

Earlier today I was cleaning out a file cabinet,
preparing our coming move to Tampa, and I stumbled on a pile of my own
cards from that period. Unfortunately most of them are not dated, but
the few that are are from the eighties so I'll take this as the
time period of which I'm speaking.

The first card is dated, March
30, 1987. And I'm in a restaurant, the Lilas Rose, and it must be in
France where I was at the time, traveling with a group of juniors from
our school, on our annual French trip.

"This evening on the road
to Annecy there were men working on the new autoroute to Geneva.
Americans, I thought, are great road builders. We do other things well
also — but not many of these kind of things do we teach in our school.

"Listening
to the 'children' in the car. Subjects of conversation were likes and
dislikes, family, TV and movie personalities, the unusual things they
had noticed, like cars and people. Never once did I hear the word
France, or the French Revolution, or the French civilization (let alone
Chemistry or Physics), all the things we have them do in school, things that were not alive for them.

"But other things are, as I
realized while listening to them. Perhaps for this reason we only
succeed in school in putting their memories to work. School? That's
memorizing things, at least for the so-called good students. For all
the others, if they stay in school, school? That's behaving, doing what
they're told, and most of all listening to the teachers go on and on.

"Ideas?
That's what I do with myself, probably that's what I do to the
children, who themselves remain generally passive in respect to ideas.
Writing idea cards… perhaps this does force them to have ideas. But
only some do, most don't.

"The chattering I hear in the car. The
way they talk when they're not in school? What they talk about. During breaks, during lunch? Should
I start attending their lunches in order to listen to them? And myself,
when I'm not with them? What do I do? What do I do when I leave school?
Watch Hawaii Five-O and the like, NCAA basketball…?

Next in my
pile are six cards, the number 2 card missing, that give a brief
time line of genetic history between 1944 and 1972. I evidently copied
the notable events in this history from some publication, the name of
which I didn't note down on the card.

Today I would have taken
this history, as well as everything else that may interest me, from the
Internet, and rather than note down my takings on a card I would have
copied and pasted what I found into a document and then saved it onto
my computer's hard drive.

It's probably most of all because of
the Internet that I no longer carry idea cards in my vest pocket.
Actually, I almost never wear a vest. (In Tampa to where we're now
moving, we wear just shorts and t-shirts almost year round, and we never wear shoes and socks.)

Now I have a laptop
computer with wireless Internet access that fulfills most of my
communication needs. But I imagine that in a very short period of time
I'll have an i-phone and a Kindle, both of which would probably fit
into the deep pockets of my Cargo shorts and would become, perhaps, my
unique window (s) to the world.

Without a doubt the biggest
change in my own life, occurring when I was well into my fifties, was
the advent of the World Wide Web. Just 20 years ago my information came
nearly entirely from books and periodicals (I was no longer enrolled in
a University). Now, and for the past 10 years of so, the information I
need in order to live the way I want to live comes nearly entirely from
the Internet, and, if from books and periodicals, only from those that
I've first encountered, and in many instances only read, on the Web.

Now I'm back with my pile of
index cards from the 80s, the genetic history time line, from 1944 to
1970. Why those dates? I suppose I'll find the answer to that as I
reread my time line.

I smile now at what I was then, and at what I
may still be. Then I thought it was enough to tell the kids something for them to learn. Or at least I acted that way. And I still think, or at least act as if, it were enough
to tell my grandson something for him to learn it and make it his own,
which of course is never the case.

My assumption then was that I
needed only to familiarize myself with, say, the history of the major
developments in genetics, and then present that history in abridged
form to my students ("present" meaning what? — reading to them, telling
them, having them memorize it for a test?) and that they would learn it
no less well than I. Of course they never did. And why not? Because
only to me was that history interesting and important.

As I reread my genetic (history)
time line cards I realize that I've pretty much forgotten what I then
wrote down (and evidently presented to my students). I see I began with
1944 because that's the year that Avery and others identified the
molecule that carried the genetic information as deoxyribonnucleic acid
or DNA.

I don't see now why I stopped my timeline at 1972. Crick
and Watson's determination of the structure of the DNA molecule as a
double helix was in 1953, and in 1966 teams led by Nirenberg and
Khorana cracked the genetic code, demonstrating that each of 20 amino
acids is coded by a sequence of three nucleotide bases called a codon.
But what happened in 1972?

A couple of things I noted then on my
cards in regard to this history still greatly influence my view of
life, still make me wonder why the discoveries of science and
scientists have not replaced the texts of religion in our thinking
about what's most important in the schooling, if not education, of our
young.

"The genetic code," I wrote, "is the same in man, mouse,
and in all living creatures. And so far there is only one exception,
and it's not Jesus, let alone Mohammad, but a protozoan, the
Paramecian." And on the last card I wrote, "cancer, a cell gone berserk,
— the growth genes having been left on, like we may leave the gas stove
on when we leave for the weekend."

So there were two things on
these cards, two things that to me then, and to me now, seem important
to know, perhaps even vital. I made note of an underlying, fundamental
biological sameness to all life, that which ought to make us respect
all of life. And I referred to the biological control regulation that
is necessary for normal, healthy life, and that when not present results
in terrible things happening, in particular cancer.

I thought it
was important that my students grasp for themselves both of my
observations, but of course, as I only suspected then but now know,
there was absolutely no way I could give them my understanding of
anything at all.

Kids have to be ready, and educators as a rule
don't take into account their readiness, and that's why more than
anything else, kids learn so little of what they're "taught." When I'm
with my grandson who right at this moment is taking his first steps,
and is doing so without me, entirely on his own, I can only marvel at
what he has learned because he was ready.

Would that he could
learn everything in the way that he is now learning to walk (and
tomorrow will learn to talk). But instead of that his parents may soon
take him and put him into a class with others having only chornological
age in common with him, and expect him to learn to read and all the
rest, but of course for too many without my grandson's advantages that doesn't necessarily happen.

What a pass we have come to when this is news, a “new vision” according to an article in today’s NYTimes. Randi Weingarten asks us to, “imagine a federal law that promoted community schools —
schools that serve the neediest children by bringing together under one
roof all the services and activities they and their families need — imagine schools
that are open all day and offer after-school and evening recreational
activities, child care and preschool, tutoring and homework
assistance, schools that include dental, medical
and counseling clinics.”

This is not news. Any number of educators have been saying pretty much the same thing, probably since the time of John Dewey nearly 100 years ago, if not before. More recently James Coleman, Jonathan Kozol, David Berliner and many, many others have highlighted the central roles of the family and the community in the education of children. Certainly these and similar considerations were paramount on the minds of the creators of the Head Start Program in 1965.

But what’s always left out of these and other educational reform proposals are several vital considerations. First, there is the money thing, something that reformers have a hard time with. Ms. Weingarten does not mention the cost of “community schools.” We know they are extremely expensive, as any number of programs such as the Harlem Children’s Zone of Geoffrey Canada have made clear.

In a time of recession, even in a “normal” time, where is the new money for the reform proposals going to come from? Schools that are open all day, providing after school and recreational activities, will double, or more likely triple the costs to the tax payers. That’s most of all why community schools don’t exist, except perhaps in those affluent communities where they are not even needed.

Second, Ms. Weingarten speaks of the Federal Law that would create these community schools. It won’t happen. Education in this country is and always has been locally driven and funded. Ms. Weingarten does not mention the all important role of the local communities, mayors, school boards, and parents. Without these groups no reform will ever take place. The Union’s power and influence doesn’t extend that far.

Fundamental changes in our public education would have to begin with the groups I mention. Without their active involvement and substantial support nothing will happen. We have known forever that community schools are necessary. Of course, “It takes a village.” But we have never known how, or have never been willing to make the sacrifices, to bring them about.

Third, and most important, Ms. Weingarten doesn’t mention the ultimate beneficiaries of her proposal, the kids themselves, and especially those living in our impoverished and otherwise disadvantaged inner cities and rural countrysides.

Education is still in her eyes, even in her common sensical take on what is most needed, what we do to the students, and not most of all, and what it should be, how we can help them, the students, do for and to themselves.

For in fact the history of public schooling in this country is the history of the ideas of educators, each new generation trying to correct (reform) the work of its predecessors. One looks in vain for the history of how the students have benefitted from being subjected to their ideas, be they those of Horace Mann, John Dewey, and on up to the education writers and reformers, of which there are legion, of the present time.

We are often told of how the schools are failing to educate, and this in spite of the seemingly constant series of reforms that were to improve students’ learning. Our educators have acted as if student learning depended primarily on them. Anyone who has ever watched a child take his first step, say his first word, knows that it doesn’t.

Community schools will only make a difference if the students’ responsibility for their own learning is brought to the fore. In general government help programs fail because they are primarily doing things for people, providing rent free housing, make-work jobs, and public education. When “education” is given to kids on a platter and when the kids are not held accountable for what they do with what they are given, the effort is bound to fail.

Left, right, and center; progressive, liberal, and conservative; all terms that I’ve been more or less familiar with throughout most of my adult life time of nearly 60 years.

My earliest memories of liberal and progressive date from the presidential elections of 1940 and 1944 when my father was actively promoting President Roosevelt’s conservative opponents Wendell Willkie and Tom Dewey. In my father’s eyes, and in the eyes of his first 8 and then 12 year old second son Roosevelt’s New Deal was a wrong left turn in the history of our country.

It seems to me now that presidential elections, at least the ones that I have experienced, have nearly always been won by democrats or republicans who most effectively positioned themselves in the center, in the mainstream of the electorate.

In most every instance the winners hadn’t allowed themselves to be captured by the single designation liberal or conservative. I think of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George H Bush, and Bill Clinton.

The conservatives Tom Dewey and Barry Goldwater, and the liberals, Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis all lost badly.

There was only one exception to this rule, the election of 1980, when the conservative Ronald Reagan handily beat the centrist Jimmy Carter. Perhaps this was because Carter’s politics were not well understood by the electorate.

Now we’re over one month into the presidential election of 2008, and the candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, are both trying to take the center, to position themselves in regard to the issues in ways that don’t permit liberal or conservative pigeon holing. Neither one wants to be a failed liberal or conservative candidate.

Their moving aggressively to the center ought to have been expected. It shouldn’t have surprised. But that is not what happened. On the one hand Obama has, to say the least, riled his supporters on the left, the ones who were most with him at the start of his campaign.

On the other hand, McCain has not gained by his moves the support of the conservatives in his party on the right, the very ones who were loudly against his candidacy to begin with and who have not yet in large numbers come out in his support.

But that’s alright. The battle between them is right where it should be, right there in the center. McCain has wisely pushed the hotest button conservative issues, abortion, same sex marriage, and I’m sure if he could, gun control and immigration, back onto the states.

McCain has even made a not unreasonable claim for his candidacy as being closest to that of the 26th. president of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt was both a progressive and a conservative, and McCain would be the same. Progressive in his views on immigration and government help for those who need help, and conservative on defense and economic issues.

Only in regard to his age will it be hard for him to push the Roosevelt comparison. Teddy Roosevelt at age 42 was the youngest president to assume the office. McCain at 72 would be the oldest. In regard to life experiences they are an entire generation apart.

Obama is most often compared to John Kennedy and Abe Lincoln.  The three of them were or would be among the youngest presidents, but even more than their respective ages they are close in the way they seemed to burst upon the political scene, the way they took the country by their strength of character and by their eloquence.

They were not ordinary politicians. Liberal and conservative were not sufficient or appropriate designations. In each case something else was needed in order to understand their exceptional qualities.

We don’t yet know whether Obama will, if elected, be compared favorably to Lincoln and Kennedy. But he definitely holds out that possibility.

Ultimately this election is interesting because it cannot be reduced to the left vs the right, the liberal vs. the conservative. McCain and Obama, for very different reasons, both seem to understand that. Whoever occupies the most ground in the country’s political center will win. At the moment it seems to be a toss-up.

A headline in today’s NYTimes reads “Russia, China Veto UN Sanctions on Zimbabwe.” One’s first reaction is wonder how can that be given what we know of President Mugabe’s treatment of his own people, and in particular and most recently the Mugabe-sanctioned violence and intimidation against his opponents during the recent presidential election.

A moment’s reflection, however, is enough to remind us that Hu Jintao’s hold on power in China, as well as Dmitry Medvedev’s in Russia is of the same kind. In all three countries the political opposition is stifled. Actually we heard more from this opposition in Zimbabwe than we ever do in either Russia or China.

For the Russian ambassador to the UN whatever was going on inside Zimbabwe was not a threat to international peace and security. Therefore, the UN had no business becoming involved. For the Chinese ambassador Zimbabwe should be left free to resolve its own internal problems without outside interference such as the proposed sanctions would represent. Furthermore, China does happen to be a major trading partner of Zimbabwe.

The economy is on everyone’s mind. Everyone’s talking about the job losses and the high gas prices. As are the candidates. What are they saying?

Well here’s Obama:

“I’m calling on Congress and the president to enact real, immediate relief with energy rebates for working families this summer, a fund to help families avoid foreclosure, extended benefits for the long-term jobless, and assistance to states that have been hard-hit by the economic downturn.”

And here’s McCain, from the same NYTimes piece:

“At a time when our small businesses need support from Washington, we cannot raise taxes, increase regulation and isolate ourselves from foreign markets,” McCain called for “tax relief, job creation, and investment in innovation.”

Based on what you’ve just heard whom would you vote for? Well if you’re most of all looking for help from the government with your problems Obama has your vote. He’s promising you relief, relief, and more relief. No question but that it’s the government’s role to help you in your trouble.

Do more and more people feel this way? If they do McCain’s chances of winning the presidency are not good. For McCain says little about what government should do for the people (tax relief, help by creating more jobs, and that’s about it) and he’s not very convincing when he says it.

He is probably more convincing when he talks about what the government should not do (drawing on his conservative roots?). For he definitely implies that things would only get worse if the government were to raise taxes, write new regulations, and set protective tariffs to stem the manufacturing job losses.

But neither McCain nor Obama seems willing to confront head on the principal motor that is driving this economy down. Granted you can’t stare down the oil price rise, nearly $150 a barrel today. And you probably can’t in the short term increase the supply of oil by the discovery and tapping of new fields off shore and in Alaska.

But on the demand end there’s a lot we can do. McCain got it all wrong when he said he would lower the taxes on the price at the pump. For this would only increase the demand. Obama got this right when he refused to take that route.

But neither has had the courage to take the unpopular stand and tell us, if we want relief, to use less oil. Any number of small sacrifices on our part in regard to our oil and gas consumption would do more for the health and strength of the economy than all the government relief programs that all the candidates could ever devise.

For example, how many times when driving to work have you seen cars with any more occupants than a single driver at the wheel. Our efforts to change this situation have up until now not made a significant difference. The “fast” lanes created in and out of our congested cities as a reward to drivers who pool often have few takers and the congestion with the loss of a traffic lane is even greater than before.

Government’s role should be to encourage and actively promote “mass” transit, whether this be two or more occupants in the car, new trolley and train lines, fast trains between our major cities, or any number of other means. This policy if carried out seriously could most of all lower our demand for oil, and even if it did nothing to lower the price at the pump, it would lower the transportation budget of each one of us.

So why in difficult economic times do we talk about what the government can do for us? That was all the talk during Roosevelt’s New Deal and a new deal for the economy never resulted. That only came with the Second World War. Why not talk about what we can do for the country (and the world) by our own efforts? Why don’t the candidates talk about that?