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Highlands Today

Too Many Critical Issues To Fix, So We Must Correctly Prioritize

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 30, 2008

When President-elect Barack Obama takes office in January, the expectations and challenges will be massive. They are so huge, in fact, that Americans need to let reality set in or they are in for a major disappointment. No president past or present could make our problems go away in a short period of time. There's too much to repair that were years in the making. Still, there are a couple of things that must be done, even if the payoff is down the road a ways.

We must rebuild our nation's infrastructure. There is no getting around this anymore, and the fact that we haven't been doing this is a national shame. There is no way our country can maintain - or regain - its power without the proper infrastructure that will lead us into the future.

This requires a federal infrastructure model that rebuilds a super power grid that allows power to be sent far and wide across our nation. As it stands, our electrical grids are regional, not national. You can't store electricity, so even if you can produce it cheaply in, say, New Mexico, it only serves that region. What's not used is lost. So we have to have better ways to distribute energy production in the less populated states throughout the country.

We also must not allow our higher education system to falter, even with a bad economy. New York Times' conservative columnist David Brooks wrote last week that our colleges and universities must not feel the painful budget cuts coming to so many corners of our country. It's only through top-notch universities that we can produce the best and brightest students who will move our country forward.

We would like to take that a step further, and insist that funding for our community colleges must also stay stable. Few institutions better serve citizens than community colleges. It's where a lot of students continue their education, whether it's on to four-year institutions or into the workforce. It's vital to our local economies that community colleges thrive.

Obama has a lot of other big issues to deal with, all of them incredibly important. We have wars and credit problems and the auto industry. We have enemy regimes that want us to suffer, and terrorists who want Americans to bleed. We understand that governmental triage is no easy task.

So while a thousand fires are burning for the next president, we can't expect miracles. If Obama can even tackle 100 of those thousand fires, we'll be much better off. Let's hope he has the wisdom to prioritize correctly and that the American people will be patient and have realistic expectations.

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