Still the smartest guy in the room.

Or one of them, at least.

(President Clinton) picked clean energy as the new idea most likely to revive job growth. In a National Journal forum on innovation, several experts offer an assortment of other possibilities—from improved transportation systems to more-sophisticated genetic engineering to advanced wireless communication.

The more pressing question is what policies are most likely to nurture such breakthroughs. Republicans, with renewed intensity, argue that less government will mean more innovation and growth. That strategy produced benefits during the 1980s. But if lower taxes and less regulation alone guaranteed growth, Bush's economic record would not have been so bleak.

The Democratic alternative that Obama touts is greater public investment in the building blocks of productivity—education, infrastructure, basic research, and development. Clinton is obviously more disposed toward that approach, but he also pointedly warned that Democrats can't implement it without shifting more federal resources from consumption (mostly through entitlements for the elderly) toward investment. "Our risk is that we'll be so averse to any changes in the entitlement programs that we'll continue to spend … too much money on today, so we don't have enough money [to invest] for tomorrow," he said. (emphasis added)

Government is drowning itself in unchecked spending on people who are no longer economically productive, and in the meantime we have technical colleges and universities that can't provide adequate capacity and preparation to meet the needs of growing, high-demand sectors of the economy.

Granny and Gramps are eating the goose that lays the golden eggs. How much longer are we going to stand for it?