Friday, December 19, 2008

Inside Public Policy

N.E. can be magnet for tech talent and infrastructure

If the economy wasn’t reason enough to make us anxious this holiday season, Tom Friedman’s latest opus dedicated to the systemic weakness of humanity, “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” will surely do the trick. So, it made me think about the  “out of the box” steps we could take to make New England the place to be by 2020.

Let’s turn the future on its head, by being cool, the place where people want to be: spiky, the best technology and talent, and connected, building our infrastructure to bring us close to the rest of the world.

For most of this decade New England has added great jobs and produced wealth for those at the very top end, while stagnating and losing opportunity for most everyone else. Now, with the country losing its footing, what could we do to move us back to our rightful position as the leading region in America?

Can we use our small size, yet dense population, to reprise our role of  the industrial revolution, as the region of entrepreneurship, ideas, and great schools and infrastructure?

Consider a bitter pill that, taken now, will give us unique strength when things get really messy worldwide in 10 or 20 years. Instead of focusing on our financial problems of the next two years, we should aim at preparing for the coming systemic shocks from environmental, global competition and demographically driven pension and health-care problems.

New England should become a cross between the gleaming infrastructure and free education of northern Europe and the state-supported R&D and business development systems of Singapore and South Korea.

Here is the deal (children, close your ears): The six New England states — in a coordinated master plan — could create a set of new energy taxes many times higher than the present, creating a common floor, higher than the rest of the nation, for the cost of gasoline, home heating fuel, and natural gas.

If we can collect an extra dollar just on gasoline we would create a revenue stream that could fund an authority with over $6 billion in new dollars annually for education, infrastructure, clean energy R&D and investment in energy savings.

Think what we could do. First, we would raise enough money that needs-based subsidies could address real issues of hardship for people and businesses who can’t pay the taxes. Let’s be real, $4 gas and home heating fuel is coming back, so let’s build a region that is battle-tested and ready to compete by getting there first.

The new funds would create a superb New England-wide bus, rail (and even a trolley) system; offer energy-saving investment loans for businesses and homes; reduce tuition in our community colleges and other schools for students who live here and want to take technology-related classes; and provide more risk capital for new businesses.

New England would have the money to build a clean energy cluster that could lead the nation. We would not only build fuel cells better, we would be the living laboratory for the energy-scarce world that is coming.

I hate to think what is going to happen to New England if we spend 10 years cutting budgets and hoping that our energy  and infrastructure needs take care of themselves by magic.

Crazy and politically impossible? Maybe. But don’t we want the world to beat a path to our door? Entrepreneurs, investment capital and the talented youth of the world will want to be here. Let’s make the New England brand about quality and preparing for the reality of the future.

We may not like the look of the future, but it’s coming.

Matt Nemerson is president and CEO of the Connecticut Technology Council. He can be reached at mnemerson@ct.org.