January 30, 2006
Telecommuting
It appears that it has been almost three years since I linked to an article from Walter Russell Mead. A self-described Democrat, Yalie, and college professor whom I truly admire.
This week, he writes in the Weekly Standard (free link) about Ice Cream and Spinach. Political parties have to offer some amount of good for you but less fun "Spinach," to accomplish long term goals, but to get elected, they must combine it with "ice cream" that voters want now. Mead suggests that the current GOP is providing large doses of wartime spinach, and he suggests some ice cream for the Republicans. Each is, in his estimation. conservative in principle.
The first is one of Silence's favorites: telecommuting/telecom infrastructure.
For New Yorkers, transit strikes aren't the only hazard. Since 9/11 we have lived in a city that knows what catastrophe is. Last summer's terror attacks on the London transit system reminded us that even attacks on a much smaller scale can paralyze a major metropolitan area.The point is that promoting telecommuting is good civil defense. Whether a disaster is manmade like a terror attack or natural like a bird flu pandemic, it's important to insulate the American economy as far as possible from the ensuing disruption.
Something like 44 million Americans now telecommute at least part time. Working with state and local governments and with business leaders, the federal government should encourage public and private enterprises to develop emergency plans that would allow as many workers as possible to work from their homes or from nearby satellite work sites during an emergency--and develop plans to protect the country's telecommunications infrastructure as well. More than half the American workforce now has jobs that can be done from home at least in part; if public and private employers put emergency plans in place, we can significantly degrade the ability of terrorists to disrupt our lives.
Hardening the telecom infrastructure and requiring enterprises to develop emergency telecommuting plans and the computer and software capacity to make them work wherever feasible would cost money, but it is something the federal government should support, and by the standards of the Homeland Security budget, the investments would be modest.
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Listen to the ice cream truck. Encouraging more employers to offer more employees more opportunities to telecommute accomplishes several popular things.
I am a telecommuter myself and a believer. Hours of commuting time every week are now under my control, I will save big money not replacing the granolamobile, I use very little gas, and I feel secure that I will be able to work even as my MS gets worse, and I am around as my wife gets better after her stroke.
I don't want to be stingy sharing these benefits with my fellow Americans, but I don't know why Federal involvement is necessary. My company saves office space and depreciation on furniture, and gets me at a lower salary than some previous positions because the arrangement is favorable to me. Infrastructure? I have my choice of DSL or cable internet (I have Comcast(r)) and my company has Juniper Networks's SSL VPN (very cool!).
Silence and Johngalt used to work at this place and know it's not a spendthrift organization -- yet all of this is in place without government assistance.
His second idea is a very conservative reduction in paperwork and transaction viscosity in real estate transactions. No argument there.
His third is the least conservative. He wants the government to enter the education business and provide certifications to compete with private colleges. This is conservative in a Charlotte Simmons, down-with-Ward-Churchill way, but reeks of nationalizing higher education to me.
His basic point is valid. Americans are forced to endure wartime sacrifices and cede powers to the executive. Tax reform is off the table, tax cuts are unlikely. The President needs to have a little butter brickle in the SOTU tomorrow night.