DURING THE NEW YORK CITY transit strike in December I fielded a lot of calls from out of town family and friends wanting to know how I was surviving. Easy, I told them. I'm telecommuting. And I'm ready to sit around in my bathrobe all day drinking herbal tea for as long as it takes.
If anything, the days when I stay home are more productive than the days I go in: There aren't so many distracting phone calls or chats with coworkers, and of course there is no commute.
With all that extra time and energy on my hands, I found myself thinking about subjects I usually stay away from: domestic subjects. And eleven years after Republicans first took over Congress, I'm amazed at how few appealing proposals are on the table.
At any one time in American politics, we have a Spinach party and an Ice Cream party. The Spinach party wants you to do a lot of unpleasant things that will do you good. The Ice Cream party wants you to be happy now. Back in the Jimmy Carter administration, the Democrats were the Spinach party: Pay higher taxes. Obey more government regulations. Turn down your thermostats. Give the canal back to Panama.
These days, however, the Republicans are sounding more and more spinachy. Finish the war. Retire later and get less when you do. Be nice, boys and girls, and stay quiet while all the good jobs go to China. You will thank us later when all our policies make you better off in the long run.
The Spinach party often has a lot of worthy policy ideas, but there is a problem: Nobody comes running when the spinach truck drives by, jingling its bells.
I'm a Democrat myself and a foreign policy buff at that, but the absence of attractive domestic policy initiatives from the party that controls the White House and both branches of Congress is both alarming and depressing at a time when most Democrats seem incapable of addressing national security issues with any coherence. So during the transit strike I used the time I saved from commuting to put together some proposals that met three criteria: Each had to be popular, practical, and consistent with conservative principles. Some are new, some are old, but all are ideas that, it seems to me, would benefit both the American people and the political party that proposed them.
THE FIRST IDEA, not surprisingly given my personal circumstances the other month, has to do with telecommuting. 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.
Once employers develop this emergency capacity, and once we have protected the telecommunications network, this extraordinarily powerful and flexible capacity can be used for other emergencies--like hurricanes, blizzards, oil boycotts, and transit strikes. Like the interstate highway system, originally planned to ensure the rapid movement of goods and troops in wartime, or like the Internet, originally created by DARPA for defense purposes, the telecommunications network and emergency plans would have many other uses. We could encourage the use of the emergency infrastructure in normal times, for instance, to conserve energy and meet clean air standards. Companies that met certain standards for increased telecommuting would benefit from tax reductions, and the government would look with more favor on home-office deductions for workers who telecommute.
