Monday morning reads.

Good stuff from two of our journalism elders.

Tom Blackburn on budget realities:

So Mr. Obama inherited the budget with the $1.3 trillion deficit that now looks too optimistic. What has he proposed to do about that? Cut it in half. Where have we heard that before?

Half would be $533 billion, the White House figures, or more than the current deficit before the government became the country's spender of last resort. What is his target date to reach that? By the end of his first term. Last time we had this plan, the target receded to the vanishing point.

Anyway, half of way too much is still too much.

Mr. Obama also promises spending and spending growth cuts. We have heard that before, too. The closest they got was the year when President Reagan's budget director devised the budget asterisk for "cuts to come" that never came.

Mr. Obama made a better beginning. Defense Secretary Robert Gates outlined real curbs on spending growth. Congress would have to approve. Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., who tries to look thoughtfully supportive, was first to the plate. He liked a lot of Mr. Gates' ideas but not ending construction of F-22 airplanes. His peers include senators who do not mind ending the fighter plane program. How many bombers does bin Laden have? But, golly, they just can't go along with some cuts Sen. Lieberman can accept.

There are no orphan programs in the Defense Department. Nor are there programs anywhere else without a clutch of lawmakers who take personal responsibility for their well-being. Just for now there is almost no such thing as bad government spending. Some bankers feel well enough to sit up and take pay increases, but they show little inclination to go back to work.

Government is the last spender standing because it can print money. Take away its spending, and we have Cuba's economy. But the government can't spend money it doesn't have forever.

Critics of Mr. Obama's spending plans talk as if it is still 30 years ago, and we can choose whether to use the budget to build up the country or dig it into a hole. There are not more than a dozen adults who were not compliant with the wrong decisions back then and along the way. That includes those who went ahead with tax cuts even though they knew there would never be the political will to make offsetting spending cuts.

Their sudden amnesia makes the noisiest critics too obnoxious to agree with even though they are, basically, right.

Mr. Obama also acts as if it is 30 years ago. First thing he did was cut my taxes. Don't they all? If we had passed his $3.6 trillion budget back then, we might not be where we are today. But we didn't. So we are in a hole and will be for a long time after the economy revives.

The kind of growth he needs to make his spending work would look like recent bubbles. We might achieve that kind of growth honestly, without another bubble. But considering where we are and how we got here, the better bet would be on Arlen Specter getting the Republican presidential nomination.

David Broder, tracing Detroit's decline through his own vehicle history:

When I was in high school, my parents gave me 15 shares of General Motors stock, worth maybe $600, and a lecture on investing in America. This is a great company, they said, and now you own part of it. Hold on to it, and your investment will grow.

They had that confidence, even coming out of the Great Depression, because they knew how deeply entrenched General Motors and its products were in the American way of life. It wasn't just Dinah Shore singing the jingle: "See the USA in your Chevrolet." Yanson Chevrolet was just down the street from my dad's dental office, and when parts started wearing out on one year's model, Burt Yanson would offer him a trade-in, and a new Chevy would go into our garage.

I never sold that GM stock, partly out of respect for my parents and partly because I could witness the steady conversion of its dividends into additional shares and the rise in the stock price from year to year.

Now, all the accumulated shares of some 60 years are worth less than what my parents paid for the original 15. As a taxpayer, I, along with millions of others, am now a creditor of GM and Chrysler. But looking at both of them, what I feel is mostly regret.
...
My parents never thought of buying anything but an American-made car. Nor did I -- until the Army sent me to Europe in the early 1950s and I saw the early-model Volkswagens and Renaults and Fiats, little, cheaply made vehicles that ran forever on a tank of gas.

I bought a used Fiat Topolino -- a Mickey Mouse car -- to use on weekend passes, and though it was so underpowered it barely made it up a sizable hill, it served its purpose. But I sold it when my tour of duty was over, and I bought a Plymouth here at home.

By the time John Kennedy was in office, we had four young sons. Hauling them and their supplies to our summer cabin in Michigan became the real transportation challenge. Nothing else had the same roominess and economy as the Volkswagen buses -- high-standing boxes on wheels that started showing up about then. We bought a succession of them, used. Their fan belts snapped as easily as rubber bands but were cheap and easy to replace.
...
By the time the Republicans held their national convention in Detroit in 1980, it was clear that the American auto industry was in real trouble. We stayed in a rented house in Grosse Pointe during the convention, and our neighbors were candid about the worries they heard at work.

It is now almost three decades later, and the surviving companies and their dealers, creditors and workers finally are making the desperate adjustments this deteriorating situation requires.

Can the Big Three survive? I certainly hope so. But when I see what has happened to the city of Detroit -- the homes boarded up, the streets emptied, the newspapers starved -- I have to wonder. This industry has ignored so many warning signs. Can it still respond?

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On a personal note, it was First Communion weekend at my Church, where the young ones take the Eucharist. Before mass, the priest read a note from the Bishop: due to the swine flu, please no hand-holding during the Our Father prayer; no handshakes or kisses during the Sign of Peace; no Eucharists placed on the tongue, but in the hands only for the parishioner to transfer; no communal wine, no Blood of Christ to share during the Eucharist.

I get it. At the time the Bishop's directives went out, we were in the early, unknown part and the scientists thought it best to err on the side of caution. But from a distance, it amuses me, just like I used to get a chuckle driving through my little Illinois hometown in 2003, 2004, 2005... and seeing the Color Caution flag flying above the city hall/library/fire station complex. To let us know the terror level alert in town for the day. Funded by a federal response program, I think.

Anyway, I still maintain that local decisions are best made locally. That one-size-fits-all shouldn't become such a habit that we get out of practice of thinking for ourselves about solutions, preventions, and procedures.

Hopefully, the Bishop will lift his restrictions soon, and people can choose to reach out to others as much, or as little, as they like. (My father for example, stopped shaking hands during flu season awhile ago, and uses Purell liberally. I don't think he drinks from the chalice either.)

Isolation surely would be best if there were an epidemic or a pandemic, or people dropping by the dozens locally. But you'd hate to shutter churches, and alter worship practices, based on overreaching centralized decision-making that encourages Americans to wave their fear flags high.
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Sometimes we get so caught up in the problems of the past, and the measured responses that we can forget the thrill of living, the promise of new life, and the assurance that the world will keep on turning.

There's power in numbers sure, but never let that discount the worth of one individual, thinking and living for himself.

Make it a great Monday, this first week of May 2009.