Innovation Nation

America has grown addicted to debt. So severe is our dependency that even in the face of successive economic crises, our predictable response is to simply take on new forms of debt-financial, social, and environmental-and delay the day of reckoning. The Left and Right point fingers at one another, but neither has offered a viable way out.

We simply can't pay down our debts by radically cutting back, drilling ever more oil and gas, or shifting costs to the environment or the future-the costs of overreaction are too high. But so too are the costs of inaction. It is time to stop living on debt, and to create value instead.

Fortunately, creating value is one of the things America does best. Our people have the creativity, enterprise, and technological capacity. This path of innovation plays to our strengths-to the ingenuity of our people, and to the potential of the information-based technologies in which we lead the world.

To successfully walk the path to innovation, we must break the political gridlock that cements in place the policies of a bygone era, a proud era that has served its purpose. The resource-intensive industrial economy of the last century created unprecedented prosperity. But it also planted the seeds of its successor-an economy that can grow more value with less consumption.

In an Innovation Nation-a nation that embraces change and harnesses it to advantage-the Right and Left can work functionally together to cultivate genuine long-term prosperity. They can apply core principles from both sides of the political spectrum. Stepping only to the right, or only to the left, we walk in circles. But by stepping right, then left, then right and left again, we move ahead.