Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Something Goes Right - 6.29.09

Two “generals” announced they’ll be setting up shop in the state. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry gives us the low-down on the good news…

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There’s an old Paul Simon song, part of which goes like this:

***

when something goes right

Well it's likely to lose me

It's apt to confuse me

because it's such an unusual sight.

***

That’s a familiar feeling in Michigan these days. But last week, something did go right. Two somethings, in fact.

On Friday, General Motors announced it would build a new small, fuel-efficient car at a plant in Oakland County’s Orion Township. That means twelve hundred jobs were saved that would have been lost. Michigan was competing against Tennessee and Wisconsin, and we won. Nobody knows exactly why GM made that choice, but this much is clear: Michigan officials pulled together and worked hard and creatively in order to make it happen.

Originally, a factory in Spring Hill, Tennessee appeared to have all the advantages. As the Detroit Free Press’s Katherine Yung noted last weekend, Spring Hill is a more modern plant.

It also has a paint shop. The factory in Orion Township didn’t have a paint shop, and you might have figured that was that. Especially since it costs around $180 million to build one. But spurred by pressure from Gov. Jennifer Granholm, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation went to work.

The MEDC set up what amounted to a war room, where staffers monitored what the other states were offering. Eventually, they cobbled together a bunch of business tax incentives and offered GM a tax credit package worth $779 million.

The governor lobbied GM intensely, and in the end, it all paid off. Now, there are those who think this whole decision may have been political. After all, the government now owns most of General Motors. Michigan has the nation’s highest jobless rate, and state Democrats could use a break before next year’s elections.

Tennessee, on the other hand, is hopelessly Republican. Did the President intervene here? People in the know say not. The governor was told flatly that this would be a business decision, and Obama’s auto task force would not be involved.

The day before that welcome auto news, the state scored another coup that could have even greater potential implications.

General Electric announced it would hire more than a thousand workers for an operation in western Wayne County that will focus heavily on renewable energy, especially the form the governor is most passionate about: wind technology. In this case, there is evidence that the President pushed GE to consider Michigan. What matters, however, is not how we got the project, but that we did.

The governor has long had a vision of the state turning to wind power, not only as a source of energy, but as a major source of new jobs making the components that make wind energy possible.

We simply don’t know how much long-term economic potential this will have. But it seems clear that it ought to position Michigan as a national leader in wind energy technology.

We aren’t out of the hole yet, by any means. But this may have been Jennifer Granholm‘s best week in office. And this time, she deserves considerable credit for making both things happen.

Essay: Staying Connected - 6.12.09

The day of the digital TV transition has arrived. Today is the deadline for television stations to convert from analog broadcasts to digital. According to research by Neilsen, as of this past Sunday, almost three million television viewers nationwide are not ready for the switch. This has Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry concerned.

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We’ve had quite a week in this state. Chrysler finally managed to merge with Fiat. General Motors learned that it will get a new chairman when it emerges from bankruptcy.

The Red Wings play for the Stanley Cup tonight. The Detroit Tigers are holding on to first place. And tomorrow morning, in homes across Michigan, some people will turn on their televisions, only to be greeted by what my students call the blue screen of death.

That’s right; this is digital conversion day, and if you haven’t got your converter box yet, and aren’t hooked up to cable, a satellite, or star fleet command, you are out of luck.

I suspect we’ll survive the changeover from analog to digital without riots in the streets, but some people we may never hear about will be left behind. Many are elderly, and may not know how to connect a converter box and may be too proud to ask for help.

That worries me. Some years ago, a Hungarian-born scholar set out to determine the effect of TV on American culture. He concluded that TV was our culture, and our escape.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave without wireless Internet, you know that these are rough times. This week, I talked to an executive of the cable system in Toledo.

Cable TV costs money, and you might think the number of people canceling was up.

You’d be wrong. There are fewer disconnects than in good times. It is pretty clear why. Television is an amazingly cheap form of entertainment for the entire family. People need escape.

This is nothing new. During the Great Depression, people who couldn’t pay the rent nevertheless flocked to movie theaters. There, they watched a lot of cheery musicals and romances.

They also followed sports avidly, even if they couldn’t afford to attend the games. In that sense, there is an uncanny similarity between then and now. Michigan was mired in the Great Depression back in 1935. But when you talk to old men who remember that year, they remember it as the year Detroit was the City of Champions.

The Red Wings won the Stanley Cup for the first time, and the Tigers won the World Series for the first time.

People followed those games intently, in their newspapers and on their radios.

Incidentally, sociologists found that many impoverished people would let their other furniture be repossessed, but would somehow keep up the payments on their radios.

People need to be connected. That’s both easier and harder than it used to be.

Newspapers are disappearing. We are living in turbulent and transitional times, and I want to ask a favor of those who run our society: Try to remember that millions of us are still not on the Internet. That everyone doesn’t have a hundred digital channels, and doesn't get news bulletins on their phone.

Nor can everyone now out of work become a software engineer. We may not be able to avoid being a nation of haves and have-nots, at least for awhile.

But if those of us who are connected forget those who aren’t, we risk someday not having a society at all.

Essay: Before the Dawn - 6.8.09

More than a dozen of the state’s top stem cell researchers met last week at the University of Michigan. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about the meeting…

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Imagine that you could set your time machine to go back sixty-five million years to what would later become Michigan.

Try to arrive just before a comet or an asteroid struck our planet and set off an ecological cataclysm. That’s what science now thinks happened to the dinosaurs, anyway.

If you got there before that, what you would see was a world dominated by huge reptiles, with some little insignificant mostly rat-like things scurrying around in the underbrush, things that had hair and nursed their young. We call them mammals, and though nobody knew it, they were about to inherit the earth.

Now, come back to last week, when the news was dominated by the troubles of a modern-day dinosaur called General Motors. Now, I‘m not saying GM is about to die.

But it is clear that it is going to be a much smaller part of our economic future.

Something else happened last Thursday, however, that was totally overlooked by the media and which may well be the equivalent of the first Congress of the Mammals.

That is to say, the first major meeting of our intellectual, and what may be our economic, futures. Quietly, without fanfare, more than a dozen of the state’s top stem cell researchers met with life science industry representatives at the University of Michigan.

Their purpose was to discuss ways they could all work more closely together. This meeting wouldn’t have been possible a year ago, by the way. But the voters last November ended Michigan’s outlawing of virtually all embryonic stem cell research. That happened the same day we helped elect a new president.

And this winter, President Obama signed an executive order permitting federal funding of such research.

Part of the meeting last week won’t be terribly controversial. Everyone agrees that collaboration among Michigan’s universities is key from the standpoint of science. But there may be some eyebrows raised by the fact that representatives of private industry were there.

Some may say that scientists have no business collaborating with businessmen who are mainly concerned about money. But in fact, applied science and business have been going steady for ages.

Edwin Howard Armstrong, the inventor most responsible for modern radio, made most of his great discoveries in partnership with RCA, the Radio Corporation of America.

Collaboration among universities and with life science industry representatives, and - dare I say it - venture capitalists - is essential for our state’s economic future.

That is, it is essential, as a U of M announcement put it, “if Michigan is to speed promising stem cell discoveries from the laboratories down the path toward therapies for patients.”

Nobody realistically expects a short-term fix for our economic troubles. Michigan isn’t going to become the nation’s spinal cord store tomorrow. But it is quite possible that our major universities could nail down patents on some strong intellectual properties.

That alone would provide a seed bed. It’s nice to know that even now, as we struggle with the wreckage of the past, the future, in a few select laboratories around our state, is struggling to be born.

Essay: Requiem For the General - 6.1.09

GM has filed for bankruptcy protection. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry looks back at the automaker’s history...

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When I was a freshman at Michigan State a long time ago, the late Walter Adams, a distinguished economist, was then acting president of the university. One night he came to my dorm for a bull session.

I don’t remember anything he said about the major topics of the day, such as Vietnam. I do remember that he thought General Motors ought to be broken up into five separate corporations. GM was too big, too rich and had too much market share. It had become so dominant that it choked off both competition and innovation.

He felt that the consumers would get a better deal and better cars would be built if there were more and smaller companies.

Well, General Motors was never broken up by the government. But other nations took care of providing the competition. Except GM was too big, too unwieldy and too bureaucratic to swiftly compete.

When I finally moved out of Michigan for awhile and bought a Honda in 1989, it was so far superior to the Oldsmobile and Buick I had owned that I never again wanted to buy an American car.

Multiply that experience several million times, and you will have a fair idea of what happened to GM, and the rest of Detroit, for that matter. Still, I have to confess that I am still a little stunned at General Motors’ bankruptcy, and more than a little sad.

This was more than just a company.

General Motors was the prototype for the modern American corporation, and for a long time, the biggest one in the world. Though founded by the rambunctious buccaneer Billy Durant, it was Alfred Sloan who shaped it into the all-encompassing universal vehicle manufacturer it became. His slogan was “a car for every purse and purpose,“ and that’s exactly what GM was.

During World War II, General Motors played a major role in defeating our enemies, as its many factories were swiftly converted to produce tanks and trucks and fighter planes.

Later, for a variety of reasons, General Motors began to lose its way. Even when it was clear what was wrong, somehow it too often proved impossible for GM to fix itself. Now, it will get one last chance. Today, General Motors begins the process of bankruptcy reorganization. The good news is that this is going to be perhaps the most cushioned bankruptcy in history.

The federal government, which already has invested something like $20 billion in GM in recent months, is throwing in another $30 billion in an effort to try to reconstitute a smaller, “new GM.”

Still, this is major surgery without anesthesia. The Oakland Press’s Joe Szczesny says this “will mark the death of a blue-collar dynasty which bestowed upon generations of North Americans the security of a job for life and a ticket to the middle class.”

Think about that. I don’t think any of GM’s best-known critics, including Ralph Nader and Michael Moore, ever thought they’d see this. What’s happening now may be necessary. Better things may emerge out of all this. Yet I think you still have to be profoundly sad.

Essay: Emissions Standards - 5.20.09

Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry shares his thoughts on the new fuel efficiency and emissions standards that were announced by President Obama yesterday...

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President Obama has made it official: The government is going to require fuel efficiency and emissions standards for cars that are far higher than anyone could have imagined only a few years ago.

Current standards require new cars to average 27.5 miles per gallon; trucks have to get 23 miles a gallon. But here’s what those figures will be just seven years from now: Cars will have to average 39 miles per gallon. Trucks will have to get 30 miles per gallon.

I have never even driven a car, other than a hybrid, which got that kind of mileage. But that is going to be the required standard, less than seven years from now. For years, the automakers have fought savagely against increased mileage standards.

Their bulldog on Capitol Hill was Congressman John Dingell, Detroit’s human truck, as they called him. He’s been in Washington and on guard for the automobile industry since 1955.

Yesterday, here’s what he had to say about the agreement: “This is a remarkable environmental and national security accomplishment in an era that requires aggressive action to combat global warming and free our nation from foreign oil.”

Six months ago, if you showed me those words, I would have thought they came from Ralph Nader, or Greenpeace.

So - why does everyone all of a sudden think these drastically heightened fuel economy standards are a good idea? For a number of reasons, perhaps the biggest of which is that it doesn’t make any sense to have different state standards for emissions.

There are plenty of areas where the states should have broad leeway to make their own laws. But we all share the same atmosphere. California cannot prevent Nevada air from blowing across the state line. From the automakers’ point of view, having different standards for fuel economy doesn’t make sense either.

They are barely staying alive. They can’t afford, as Congressman Dingell said yesterday, “to be concerned about meeting a patchwork of different state standards.”

For years, California has had far tougher fuel standards than the rest of America. What Detroit wanted was for California to be forced to back off. But that isn’t happening. The nation’s biggest state is immensely rich, and immensely powerful, politically and otherwise.

Plus, for all intents and purposes, Chrysler and General Motors are wards of the government. They are depending on federal financing to keep them going, and help them through bankruptcy.

They are in no position to rock the boat. We are facing a new world here, and Detroit is going to have to be brave. What nobody knows, however, is whether the automakers can possibly achieve these fuel efficiency targets in less than seven years.

In past years, targets have been set, but then amended, pushed back, watered down. It’s possible that the mentality in the boardrooms is, as Free Press columnist Tom Walsh said yesterday, to say anything about 2016 that you need to say in order to survive.

Possibly. Yet things aren’t what they used to be. Every day, Michigan sees a little more clearly just how true that is.

Essay: Powering On - 5.12.09

Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about our state’s energy needs...

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If you are worried about the Michigan economy’s ability to rebound, you’ll be happy to know that someone does have faith.

Someone believes firmly that we are going to be growing again, and not only that, they are willing to put up the money to prove it.

I’m talking about the energy companies. They’ll admit that consumption is down, but they don’t expect it to stay that way. And since it takes a little longer to build a power plant than it does to order a hamburger, they have filed a bunch of requests to build new coal-fired plants, plus at least one new nuclear reactor.

Now it is an article of faith among environmentalists, liberals and other like-minded people that so-called old school energy projects are bad. Think air pollution, hydrocarbons, Three Mile Island. What we should be doing, they say, is renewable energy. Wind, and solar. And of course they are basically right. We should make better use of wind power than we do. If solar power can be harnessed in an effective way, I am all for that. Governor Jennifer Granholm is a tremendous advocate for wind power.

So much so that she has ordered the approval process for conventional plants slowed down, if not entirely stopped. That may sound like a good idea, but in fact I think it’s very risky.

Preventing new conventional plants from being built now could actually cause an environmental hazard in the future. And here’s why. Wind power is wonderful, but experts doubt that it can ever generate more than a small fraction of our energy needs.

Nor has Michigan poured massive resources into developing wind power, in large part perhaps because the state is broke.

Eventually, when the economy revives, we are going to need more power. Where do you suppose the electricity is going to come from for all those plug-in hybrids we hope to be buying?

Americans are a spoiled lot who like their creature comforts. Thirty years ago, we had a President who appeared on television wearing a sweater and suggested we turn the thermostat down and get used to being colder. When he ran for reelection, he lost 44 out of 50 states. Politicians learned from that.

What I fear is that when our state’s energy demands start outstripping supply, we’ll suddenly authorize crash programs to build them, which will be far more worrisome from a safety standpoint.

Without any doubt, Bill Milliken was the most environmentally friendly governor we’ve ever had. Last month, he and two other former governors, Jim Blanchard and John Engler, co-authored a article strongly urging Michigan to expand its nuclear energy capacity, starting right now. They pointed out that despite all the fears, that nuclear has been a remarkably clean and safe form of energy. Yes, we need to find a permanent storage site for the spent fuel rods.

But they make a good case that, in their words, “nuclear energy can help power Michigan’s economic turnaround.” We are being forced these days to reexamine a lot of old assumptions.

Maybe this is another taboo we should reexamine as well.

Essay: Smoking Ban Update - 4.28.09

Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry is wondering about the possibility of a state-wide smoking ban...

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Do you remember how magazines like Time and Newsweek used to have 'whatever happened to so-and-so?' features? You know, where you'd find out that some former astronaut or beauty queen was now living in Bay City and selling insurance.

I always loved those stories, and in a tribute to them, today I am going to revisit the long-forgotten issue of the smoking ban. You remember the smoking ban, don't you?

Polls show the vast majority of Michigan residents want a total ban on smoking in workplaces, bars and restaurants. Studies have found that second-hand smoke kills more than 50,000 people a year. The more people understand this, the more they favor a ban.

Not only that, a majority of our legislators favor a ban too. Governor Granholm says she would sign a smoking ban bill the minute one hits her desk. Even Ohio has a smoking ban.

Yet, Michigan has none.

Why is that? Well, it's complicated, but it all comes down to simple, stupid, partisan politics as usual, with an assist from the special interests who want people to keep smoking. Here's a brief synopsis, for those who haven't read the whole dreary book.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop doesn't want any smoking ban, period. He would prevent any vote on one if he could.

But he is opposed by some key senators in his caucus, namely Tom George of Kalamazoo. So Bishop says he will allow a vote on a bill - under one condition. It has to be a total ban.

Now, he did that because he knows that Democrats want a bill that will exempt the Motor City’s casinos. Ever since Ontario‘s smoking ban, Detroit's casinos have seen a huge upturn in business from Canadian nicotine addicts, and Detroit needs every cent it can get. So we have a stalemate.

But we also have a potential solution, and a hero. State Sen. Tupac Hunter, a Detroit Democrat says, "Look. Since we can‘t seem to do it, let's let the people decide."

Braving the wrath of the casino interests, he introduced a bill that would put a total smoking ban on the statewide ballot in November of next year.

You might think Senator Bishop would say, "Hey, great idea." But there is one problem. Hunter is a Democrat. In today‘s bitterly partisan Lansing, the Republicans who control the Senate don't want Democrats to get credit for anything.

So the odds are that Hunter's bill will die stillborn, unless enough citizens let the senate majority leader know they are sick of politics as usual, and want the legislature to either do its job, or let us do it for them. By the way, you might keep your eye on Tupac Hunter.

Two years ago, when the big shots in the Michigan Democratic Party were lining up for Hillary for President, this 34-year-freshman bucked the trend. He insisted on heading the statewide campaign of an unknown black guy with a ridiculous name who wasn’t even on our primary ballot. Well, you know how that turned out.

I'll be curious to see if he has similar luck with the smoking ban.

Essay: End of the Beginning? - 4.16.09

Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been taking stock of some recent good news for the state…

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When it comes to our long-term economic future, this has actually been the most promising week for Michigan in a long time. Two very good things happened. A major movie-making complex is going to be built in Allen Park, a downriver community south of Detroit. The film industry is, to my amazement, really taking off here.

This will help it grow even faster. In what may be an even bigger deal, four different companies announced plans to invest more than a billion and a half dollars in advanced battery manufacturing operations in Michigan. If all this actually happens -- and this is still something of a big if -- and if electric powered and hybrid cars are really going to be the vehicles of the immediate future …

This will be huge. What it would seem to indicate is that the next generation of a hopefully resurgent auto industry, or large parts of it, will be located in Michigan. If virtually all the batteries for the new cars are produced locally, it gives us a better shot at keeping assembly plants here, and maybe even attracting new ones.

Now, we must be careful not to get too far ahead of ourselves. We do need to look carefully at what was actually announced.

The best known of these companies is A123 Systems, a Massachusetts-based firm that has been chosen by Chrysler to make the batteries for the electric cars it plans to put on the road.

It plans to start operations in Livonia, and then, to quote Crain’s Detroit Business, “could expand to additional sites in Southeast Michigan, ultimately creating a total of more than 5,000 jobs.”

Initially, however, we are talking about 300 jobs. Now, that’s good news, but not economic reality-changing news. Two major questions remain to be answered.

First of all, we don’t really know if they can work all the bugs out of these batteries before the Chevy Volt and the new Chrysler electric vehicles are scheduled to roll off the line next year.

Engineers say that every so often, maybe in a few cases per million, lithium ion batteries can rupture, ignite, or explode when exposed to high temperatures. It wouldn’t take very many exploding batteries to completely doom these vehicles.

The experts seem confident they can work this out by the time the cars hit the market. We have to hope so - and hope that the new cars are exciting enough, high-performing enough, and priced low enough to appeal to vast numbers of customers.

The more they sell, the more batteries will be needed and, presumably, the more jobs will be created. Both these potential battery plants and the new, $146 million Unity Film studios owe their birth to the state’s skillful and intelligent granting of tax breaks.

Still, it will take time to see how successful these things are. When it comes to Michigan’s economic troubles, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, this isn’t the end. It isn’t even the beginning of the end. But maybe, just maybe, it could be the end of the beginning.

Essay: Smoking Ban - 3.20.09

A possible ban on smoking is being talked about, again, in the state legislature. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry gives us a rundown of what’s really going on.

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Secondhand smoke kills people. It killed the lovely and brilliant Alice Trillin, wife of the brilliant humor writer Calvin Trillin. It has killed people I’ve known, and kills, by various medical community estimates, between 54,000 and 75,000 Americans a year.

That alone should be more than enough reason for Michigan to outlaw smoking in bars and restaurants. Additionally, polls have consistently shown that large majorities of the population are in favor of a total smoking ban. But the legislature has failed to pass one.

And here’s why. There are two main culprits. One Republican, Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, and one Democrat, State Rep. Bert Johnson of Detroit.

Bishop doesn’t want a smoking ban at all, because he fears it would be bad for some businesses. In fact, for a long time he simply prevented the state senate from voting on any bill to ban smoking.

But last year, he faced a revolt in his own caucus, led by State Senator Tom George of Kalamazoo, who, as a physician, knows just how terrible second-hand smoke can be. So finally, Bishop agreed to allow a vote, but on one condition. He would only agree to a total ban. No exemptions whatsoever. This was shrewd.

Remember, Bishop doesn’t want any smoking ban at all. Now, he knows he can’t stop a total ban from being passed by the Senate, but figures -- so far correctly -- that a total ban won’t pass the heavily Democratic State House of Representatives.

Why? Well, originally some blue-collar representatives feared the wrath of their constituents, who like to smoke in bars. But the real problem is the casinos. Canada is a civilized country which is generally ahead of us, and Windsor enacted a total smoking ban some years ago. That immediately boosted Detroit casino business by 30 percent, from smokers coming across the river.

Detroit casino operators reason that if Michigan bans smoking everywhere as well, these folks will have no reason to leave Canada, especially since their casino is somewhat nicer than any of ours.

So Democrats, led by Bert Johnson, the chair of the House Regulatory Committee, wanted a bill banning smoking in restaurants that had an exception for the casinos. They also wanted to exempt those trendy “cigar bars,” the kind of places arrogant young stockbrokers hung out before they helped destroy the economy.

But Senator Bishop said all or nothing. So we got nothing and no smoking ban, which is what he wanted all along.

And innocent people continue to die. You can argue that if smokers want to kill themselves, so what? Well, we all pay for it in terms of higher health care costs. And there are non-smokers who work in these places because these are the only jobs they can find, and it is hard to turn down any work now.

We owe it to ourselves to push our lawmakers to resolve this and get the most comprehensive ban possible, as soon as possible.

For if they can’t solve something this simple and important, than just what is a legislature for?

Essay: Health Care Summit - 3.17.09

Michigan Radio’s Senior Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about how the economic crisis is increasing the importance of health care reform:

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There’s an advantage to being relatively old. You know, for example, that someday winter will actually be over.

And you get to see some amazing ironies. For example, let’s take our Time Machine back to 1994. Bill and Hillary Clinton were desperately trying to get national health care reform. And they were being defeated by a coalition led by the wily House Minority Leader, one Newt Gingrich. That fall he would head a smart and successful campaign to take control of both houses of Congress for the Republican Party, which he pledged to a “Contract with America.”

I remember the scorn and disdain Gingrich heaped on those backing universal health care. I can just imagine what he would have said if some pointy-headed liberal had proposed, for example, paying teenage girls not to get pregnant. What if the girls did anyway?

Well, then our bleeding heart wants to pay them to take prenatal vitamins, and pay their toddlers to read, and maybe pay them not to smoke.

Boy, the old Newt Gingrich would have had a field day beating up on that guy. Well, someone did come to Michigan this month, toured the Henry Ford hospital in West Bloomfield, and spoke in favor of doing all of that and more. That someone, by the way, was Newt Gingrich, who seems to have had a change of heart.

Today, he says health care should be accessible to all, though it is not at all clear how Newt would get us there. His sincerity may strike some as dubious, since he no longer holds office, and is hinting about running for president.

Gingrich also said there is too much focus on the problems of financing health care, which is a little like trying to tell your creditors that they are obsessed with money instead of paying them.

But if even Newt is on the health care bandwagon, it is clear something is happening. The White House, for example, is holding a series of major regional health care forums.

The first of these was in Dearborn last week. Melody Barnes, who heads President Obama’s domestic policy council, started things off by saying, “We can’t afford NOT to reform our health care system now.”

Despite the economy, despite everything else, we need to start, because the situation will only get worse. Before the sweeping layoffs of the last few months, experts calculated there were about 47 million Americans without any health care at all.

That number is certainly higher now. Congressman John Dingell, a longtime advocate of universal health care, told the forum that health care woes cause a bankruptcy every thirty seconds.

Health costs will cause a million and half Americans to lose their homes this year. Something has to be done to take care of our citizens and to make our industries competitive again.

We‘ve got a lot of deep tissue work to do on this nation’s faltering economy. One sixth of that is our faltering $2.2 trillion health care system, which is equally in need of an overhaul. Long as the patient is on the table anyway, we might as well start.