THE PERIL AND THE PROMISE

A nice piece by one of President-elect Obama's key economists, Larry Summers, in yesterday's New York Times: "Obama's Down Payment: A Stimulus Must Aim for Long-Term Results." The key phrase for me is "the peril and the promise": the economy is dangerously vulnerable on multiple fronts, and yet there is so much potential for transformative change.

I'm not politically savvy enough to extract any "dog whistles" out of Summer's words, but optimistically I hope that the focus will be less on "shovel ready" stimulus and more on smart investments to retool our economy and its workers. With every industry pulling a muscle positioning itself under the windows where money is going to be thrown out onto the streets, here's to an economic recovery plan that instead puts that money to the highest and best uses, even if those are the very things that sound the death-knell of some status quo industries and jobs.