Some debates are more fun than others

Three things were notable about last night's final presidential debate:

• It didn't have anywhere near the entertainment value of the prior week's debate #2.
• Romney endorsed Obama's foreign policy.
• Federal deficit stimulus spending is in our future (if Romney wins).

The first one is self-evident because nobody misbehaved, and the stage setup meant that everybody kept to the seats.  Last week's feral roaming about the stage was one for the record books.  Holding a future debate in a coliseum might increase the entertainment value of the event, but probably at the expense of devaluing the substance and enhancing the spectacle.  We are not yet ready to descend to that level, are we?

On the second point:  the foreign policy of the Obama Administration is well-known and has been much-criticized by the Republicans and by the Romney campaign, but Mr. Romney surprisingly failed to articulate that criticism during the debate.  Instead, he seemed comfortably agreeable about all of it.

Now, for that third point (you knew the best would be last, didn't you?).  Odd as it may seem, Mr. Romney as President will apparently push for enlarging the Federal debt by indulging in deficit stimulus spending.  He clearly wants to significantly increase defense and military spending, and when pressed by the moderator to explain the sources of funding for such an undertaking, Mr. Romney offered no convincing answer to the question.

Please don't misunderstand me on this; I'm all in favor of Federal stimulus spending.  It's just that some stimulus spending is better than others.  Defense and military spending does not have the downstream economic yield that can be achieved through other types of stimulus spending.

Think about it this way:  let's say we spend an extra billion dollars on bullets; it doesn't matter what kind of bullets, or what size, they are just bullets of any type, or of some mixture of types.  The economic result is a billion dollars of one-time economic activity.  Those bullets are stored and they do nothing else until they are fired.

On the other hand, let's say that we spend that extra billion dollars on fixing some American highway bridges.  As before, it doesn't make any difference what the bridges look like; we're just doing highway bridge repairs and building.  That also has an economic result of one billion dollars of economic activity.

So far, that sounds about the same as buying the billion dollars' worth of bullets (aside from any ethical or practical concerns).  But here's where there's a big difference -- while the bullets sit around doing nothing else, the highway bridges perform important and long-term follow-on services for the nation's people and its economy by improving the transportation system.  This bridge work helps people and businesses by enhancing transportation safety and transportation timeliness.

There's value in safety, and there's value in timeliness.  That means that there's more than a single billion dollars worth of additional economic activity created by that billion dollar expenditure on bridge work.
 
This needs to be said to any voters who still maintain an "undecided" status:  It's clear that our choice for President is between two different styles and two different substances.

Isn't that what the debates and the whole extended political drama--or would it be better to say "trauma"?-- of the presidential campaign cycle is all about -- choosing from among the various combinations of style and substance that are on offer?

Last week's debate provided a different piece of evidence on the choice.

Mr. Romney--trying to look like he was displaying an understanding of the interrelated economics of energy and pollution--complained that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has made it too hard to build a new coal-fired power plant.

Mr. Obama correctly pointed out that the EPA is doing exactly what people want it to do when it clamps down on coal-burning because coal is the dirtiest fuel that we have.  And, by the way, the price of natural gas as a power plant fuel has fallen so low in the last few years that energy companies prefer the economic advantages of natural gas as a fuel over the higher costs of coal.

Coal is dirty.  Most people--myself included--don't want any more pollution in our living environments.  Mr. Obama doesn't like coal.  Mr. Romney likes coal.  Mr. Obama has the high ground here.

More to come.