Vox Stimuli

[Stephen Baker]

I harvested some of your ideas and put them into the BusinessWeek story on Vox Stimuli. It's out this week.

Here's the intro:


Just imagine. A half-trillion dollars (or maybe more) pops up in your bank account along with an assignment: Your job is to spend that money on the country's behalf, jump-starting the sick economy and creating jobs. Where do you begin?

Over the last seven weeks, we've been raising that question—the same one the Obama Administration and Congress are wrestling with as they craft a massive economic stimulus package. We reached out across social media—from Facebook and Twitter to our new blog, Vox Stimuli—for ideas and asked experts in science, technology, and medicine to pick a dream project or two.

Why all the brainstorming? Before this crisis, most of us trusted an economy run largely by market forces. Money flowed toward winning ideas. But now government officials are stepping in. With the new tools of social media, the officials can tap a marketplace brimming with smart suggestions. The Obama team is gathering thoughts on everything from green energy to barter on its Change.org Web site. Our experiment focuses on stimulus spending. The ideas have poured in, some with dazzling visions. Manned mission to Mars, anyone? But there's plenty of hard-nosed pragmatism, too.

The big divide centers on two goals—think of them as "Today" and "Tomorrow." Those focusing on Today look at the urgent need to pump money into the economy and create jobs. That spending flows to things we already know how to build—and have been building for decades: roads, bridges, schools.

Hold on, says the Tomorrow crowd (which is much more numerous in our sample). For these people, the current crisis presents a golden opportunity to invest in next-generation projects that promise to make us safer, smarter, cleaner, healthier, and more competitive. They push for digital medical records or research into solar power.

You'll see this tension between Today and Tomorrow in the comments that follow. They may well foreshadow the political debates of the coming months. To organize these insights, we've divided them into four groups: Smart Infrastructure, Simple Stuff, Urgent Needs, and Visions.

[Paul]

My idea is to replace all the school busses in the country with new, natural gas powered busses. We would accomplish several things by doing this. 1) clean up the environment, especially for our children. 2) put U.S. automakers back to work manufacturing these new busses. 3)Reduce our reliance on imported oil, and 4)build up infrastructure in the U.S. natural gas industry creating more jobs.

[PDN]

Some very interesting ideas in the harcopy BW story. If President Obama is really willing to challenge the status quo of federal government services, here's a way to anticipate the future and improve efficiency. I heard the Postmaster General is calling for reduced mail delivery as a way to reduce Postal Service losses. How long have we been hearing this song? The situation never seems to improve... cost increases (nearly) every year and the level of service provided continues to degrade. If Congress is serious about using our tax dollars effectively, they should make like the FCC did with analog television. That is: sign into law a planned phaseout of the US Postal Service by, say January 1, 2020. On that date, all Americans would receive mail electronically. The elderly, disabled, incarcerated, etc. would have to designate a "trustee" to receive their electronic bills and other official documents. The existing Postal Service workers can take retirement or seek to sell their services to a new or existing private company in their municipality who might decide to go into business just to issue regional/local mail for merchandisers or to handle any potential increase in bulk mail and parcel post. Or, they could go into a job which does not require physical labor... they deserve it.

If the federal government wants to go radical X 2, then Congress could append another piece of legislation designed to handle the other half - phase out paper payments processing (checks, money orders, bank draftsc etc.) by some future date.

Not only does this safe our tax dollars - it reduces carbon emissions and fuel usage for postal service vehicles, cargo airplanes and the cars of millions of citizens who pick up their mail every day.

[Kurfco]

During the Great Depression, the Government bought and killed hogs to tighten up the market. People thought it terrible that when people were starving we would destroy food. We did it, though, to get farmers back on their feet by putting a floor under crashing prices for their products.

Fast forward to our housing situation. During the days of easy money, parents bought houses for their kids, illegal immigrants living four families to one rented house bought and moved into four houses, investors bought multiple houses in the belief they could sell them at a good price or rent them out, etc. "Apparent" demand for houses was greater than "real" demand. When the market quit rising and started to fall, kids defaulted and moved back in with their parents. Illegal immigrants defaulted and moved back into a multi-family rental or returned to Mexico. Investors defaulted and just walked away. Now we are left with an absolute excess supply of housing.

Solution: conduct a reverse auction, buy up housing in the most distressed markets and destroy it. We must destroy it because there aren't enough qualified buyers even at lower prices and, most importantly, there aren't enough qualified renters either.

We keep trying to deal with the housing situation like it is a normal housing correction. It is not. We had an unprecedented loosening of credit standards that put a lot of people into one or more houses that they would never have been allowed to buy before and, now that we have appropriate lending standards, would not qualify today. It would be nice if they could be renters but they became buyers on the basis of easy money available to buy houses. Who is making the equivalent easy money available to rent?

The only solution is to destroy houses and make it prohibitively expensive to buy newly constructed ones until the market finds bottom.