If I Were President?

John H. Lambert

Now there's an original idea.  How many times have you heard a person reflect on that very question?  Kinda sounds like something I would hear Archie Bunker say on All In The Family, a popular sitcom from the early 1970's.

The more I think about this, what would I spend my time doing?  I think first I decide early on that I wouldn't run for a second term - ever noticed how people age during that first year.  Reagan was the only President I remember to keep his hair black.

What would my priorities be?  First, I'd feed everybody - and I mean everybody within our reach.  Taking care of those closest to home to start with and branching out from there.  The best thing that we could ever do as a nation, is simplify the school lunch program to a single sentence: If you're in the school house when a meal is served, you eat free!  I don't care if you're just visiting the school or making a delivery or why exactly you're there (as long as it's legit) or about the politics and all the hoopla surrounding the DoA's Federal School Lunch Program.  They're good people and I'm sure they mean well.  What I care about are people feeling good about themselves and putting pure American Grade "A" goodness in every growling stomach.  This is America, we can do this.

Aside from feeding everyone, Americans seem happiest when they're able to satisfy their desire to be mobile.  The automobile is very likely the hallmark invention (it would be between the automobile and electricity as a distributed power source) of the last century and maintaining the continuance of its function in our lives, and continue to be affordable to the masses will likely be the hallmark of this century.  To specify and clarify a little, how we fuel it and make that affordable for us and the world - and I do believe it's America's job to do this first.


As we divest ourselves of the need for crude, this will make more of it available to the rest of the globe.  Since fossil fuels are actually more economically important in more depressed regions of the world - because they're cheaper to refine into useful products - I believe America can undergo this task because it is far reaching, because it will take the greatest minds and because we desire to get it right first.  So, in giving the world affordable alternative energy vehicles we actually accomplish two goals.  The one just mentioned, plus making 25% (+/-) of the world's supply of crude available to growing economies.

Say we do this - which type or class of vehicles would be targeted first?  Simple, at least to me anyway, it would those vehicles most likely to be acquired by societies wealthiest people - a cycle from the top wage earners down to the common man.  A cycle that would eventually affect every automobile and automobile owner in America.  When Henry Ford built his first vehicle, a goal was that anyone that wanted one would have access to one.  That can still be a goal.  In Henry's day however the world wasn't already saturated with existing automobile technologies - unlike today.  The change will have to be gradual but progressive.  But how can it be made attractive to the automobile manufacturers?  I think that answer can be found in how they consume energy themselves - electricity.  That's on another page.