Our imagination deficit is what we should worry about

WASHINGTON - While the United States remains utterly frozen in adebate about budget deficits and all the things that governmentshouldn't do, other countries are marrying public and privateresources to make themselves stronger and more competitive.

While the United States is not even sure we should have gonehalfway toward providing health insurance to all of our citizens,other democratic countries long ago began using government to coverall their citizens - and have health costs far lower than ours.

While Americans pay less in taxes than the citizens of other richcountries - and currently pay the smallest share of their incomesfor taxes since 1958 - one house of Congress thinks the only thingthat can be done to help the country is to cut taxes even more.

While other countries have jumped ahead of us in green economics,we have backed away from any effort to put a price on carbon tobattle climate change and promote new technologies. In theRepublican Party, politicians have to apologize for even thinkingabout global warming.

And while other countries invest in their basic facilities, weare letting our roads and bridges, rail and water systems, and ourbroadband access go to seed. We created the interstate highwaysystem, and now we can't maintain our sewers.

Oh, yes, and nearly 14 million of our fellow citizens areunemployed.

OK, now you can go back to the dreary deficit debate if you wish,but this catalogue is offered to suggest the irrelevance of ourWashington conversation to the problems the country faces.

Our imagination deficit is the shortfall we should worry about.We seem incapable of doing what we did in the Truman, Eisenhower,Kennedy, Johnson and, yes, Nixon years: imagining how practicalpublic action could make our citizens' lives better, our countrystronger, and our private economy more productive.

Sure, we need long-term fiscal balance, and going back to andthen reforming the tax rates we had under Bill Clinton would do muchof what we need to do - and cut the deficit faster over the comingdecade than would Rep. Paul Ryan's plan, which is heavy on tax cuts.

The larger and more important challenge is to figure out how wecan plan, invest and compete with countries far more focused than weare on how the new global economy works. And the people most amazedat our country's inability to do so are not armchair socialists buttough-minded CEOs.

Encouraged by Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, I spent time recentlywith The Wall Street Journal's report on its annual ECO:nomicsconference, published in March. Right off, the Journal's accountemphasized that China is "grabbing clean-technology market share notbecause of its cheap labor ... but through strong mandates andsubsidies to build a new export industry." Ahem, those words"mandates" and "subsidies" don't come out of free market theory, butthey're working.

The report quoted Mark Pinto, the executive vice president ofApplied Materials Inc., who said that in solar power, the U.S. is"neither the largest in manufacturing nor the largest market." Headded: "That's very unusual."

Do we really want to lose this market?

On his blog, Pope cites another corporate leader who attended theconference, Andrew N. Liveris, the chairman and chief executive ofDow Chemical Company. "Around the world," Liveris writes in his book"Make It in America," "countries are acting more and more likecompanies: competing aggressively against one another for businessand progress and wealth. ... Meanwhile, in the United States, weoperate as if little has changed."

I won't pretend to agree with all of the CEOs' views on tax orregulatory policy. But it is striking that so many of them arepragmatists, not ideologues. They understand that government effortsto promote national prosperity need to go way beyond taxes anddeficits.

Dionne is a columnist for The Washington Post.

You might recall an observant politician who noted earlier thisyear that "South Korean homes now have greater Internet access thanwe do. Countries in Europe and Russia invest more in their roads andrailways than we do. China is building faster trains and newerairports. Meanwhile, when our own engineers graded our nation'sinfrastructure, they gave us a 'D."'

A few months later, the same politician said: "We don't have tochoose between a future of spiraling debt and one where we forfeitinvestment in our people and our country."

That would be President Obama, and you wonder: Is there anychance at all that he can move our national conversation to the taskof "winning the future"?