Help for the Euro

Help for the Euro

European leaders are pushing the United States to do something about its falling currency. The strong euro makes job-creating exports too expensive and job-reducing imports too cheap.

With its low savings rate and big government budget deficits, the United States deserves some of the blame for all this. But it is China's insistence on keeping its currency pegged to the dollar that has shifted most of the burden of accommodating the world's huge trade imbalances onto the euro.

When they arrive in Washington later this month for the meeting of G-7 finance ministers, it would be refreshing if the Europeans could put away their Airbus order books and show the same vigor in confronting the Chinese as they do confronting us Americans.

Digitizing Health Records

It's great that Microsoft has stepped out in front of the pack and introduced a site where you can store your health records -- or, more precisely, records you can get that are in digital form.

Now, those records are scattered among doctors' offices, hospitals, labs, pharmacies and insurance companies, much of them still on paper. And for more than a decade, reformers have been talking about consolidating them in electronic form. The aim is not only to eliminate duplication, but to prevent medical errors, make sure care conforms to the latest "best practices" and streamline reimbursement. There is the potential to save hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

One reason the whole effort is barely off the ground is that someone needs to lay down a set of common technical standards and templates that software writers can use in writing programs used by providers, insurers and medical equipment makers. The federal government is the obvious candidate, but while it has talked a good game, the Bush administration has yet to deliver.

This abdication reflects a fear by officials that they might get it wrong. It reflects a fear that, once standards are set, there will be pressure for the government to provide the money for the transition. To a large degree, it also reflects a misplaced ideological concern that these are things best sorted out by competitive markets.

Here's what we know now: Markets haven't sorted it out, they probably can't, and with so many conflicting public and private interests, they probably shouldn't. This is a problem requiring the leadership of Uncle Sam, not just Bill Gates.

Saving the Family Ethanol Plant

After Congress order gasoline refiners to buy 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol annually by 2012, it seemed that every farmer and farm coop decided they had to get in on the subsidized bonanza. The industry is already about to hit the 7.5 billion capacity mark, five years ahead of schedule. And, predictably, there is already an ethanol glut that has driven prices down 25 percent even as the price of the subsidized corn used to produce it has more than roughly doubled. There is even talk that a few firms may go under.

But don't despair. With the farm bill still moving through the Senate, there's still time to add a new price support program for ethanol producers. After all, the driving principle of U.S. farm policy is that, unlike everyone else, American farmers should never be subject to the impact of trade, weather or other market forces. And now that it has become a crucial factor in Saving the Family Farm, Preserving the Rural Way of Life and Achieving Energy Independence, surely ethanol deserves all the same job and income guarantees as the rest of the farm economy.

The enduring lesson here should be that when farm subsidies distort markets and put supply and demand out of balance, the right remedy is always . . . more subsidy.