Living just a few hundred feet from the Lake Michigan shoreline, I have self-interested reasons for caring about the health of the Great Lakes. Hence, I’m one of the voters at whom Barack Obama aims his pander when he calls for a “Great Lakes Czar” with a starting bankroll – a “down payment” – of $5 billion.
It would be nice, in a way, for the people of South Carolina and North Dakota to send their tax dollars to my neighborhood, but consider this: The states that border the Lakes – Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York – have an aggregate state GDP of $3.8 trillion. Subtracting the approximately 20 percent that goes to the federal government (and ignoring the fact that much of that money flows right back), over $3 trillion are left, about 30 percent larger than the economy of Germany. Yet it is somehow beyond the means of the Great Lakes region to clean up our own waters? We are helpless without a Czar from Washington?
Illinois alone is as rich as Australia. How would you react if Kevin Rudd were haunting Capitol Hill begging for foreign aid to deal with his country’s ecological problems? Or if one of our Presidential candidates were pressing aid – and Czars – upon him?
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