The latest example was all over Maryville’s sports pages on Sunday, December 4th. One headline read: “Historic Championship: Maryville Wins the 13th State Title — Most Ever.”

Our football team has learned to work well together.

Their record this year was 15 and 0. It was their ninth state title and ninth perfect season under an extraordinary coach, George Quarles, who has won 179 games and lost only 13 in his career — the most state titles of any school in Tennessee’s history. Maryville has averaged 30 or more points in 12 of its 13 seasons under coach Quarles and the quarterback, Patton Robinette, who has scholarship offers from good schools everywhere, was named the Gatorade Tennessee Football Player of the Year, part of which has to do with his academic credentials: a straight A-plus average.

This leads me to the second thing — they work well together on in Maryville, whose district was named the best overall school district in the state by the State Collaborative on Reforming Education. The Maryville city schools recently received all As on their state math, reading, social studies, science, and writing assessments.

According to the Tennessean, Maryville city schools have the second highest test scores in the state in reading and math. The high school was selected as one of three finalists in the prized category of high schools “based primarily on student achievement gains and progress over time.”

The football team and the students clearly have learned to work well together, academically and athletically, at Maryville High School.

How did this all happen? Well, I know a little bit about this. I am a proud graduate of Maryville High School. It is not the richest town in the state by a long shot. Most families in Maryville would describe themselves as middle income.

One reason they succeed and why they achieve so much excellence in so many ways in their schools is that the town devotes about 70 percent of its budget to its schools. It is in a county where about half the citizens have a library card. It is a place where if you get in trouble at school, you get in trouble at home. There is none of this business about parents blaming the teacher and the principal for what the child does.

But the school principal, Greg Roach, who is new to the town, said it best. I watched the game on statewide television and saw when he was asked during a halftime interview, “How did this happen? How did you have this champion football team more than any other school in the state and then you are named the best school district in the state? How can you do that all at once?”

He said, “Well, it is a town school and when something happens, everybody shows up.”

They showed up for the football game, but they also show up at the annual academic awards banquets. I have been to those, and over the last several years it’s become more like a sporting contest, with students getting the same honors, awards, scholarships and pats on the back that football players get.

I used to talk about the Maryville schools and the community of Maryville when I ran for president, and my friend, former education secretary and talk-radio host Bill Bennett, who was chairman of my campaign, would say, “Lamar, not every community in America is Maryville.” And I know that — but I think a lot more could be. There are a lot of theories about what makes a good school, but Principal Roach may have it right: It is a town school, and when something happens, everybody shows up.

Work well to get results

When everybody in a community shows up, when people work well together, good things happen. Working well together is not the end goal, just as working well together was not the goal of the football team: they wanted the championship. Working well together was not the goal of the students: they wanted scholarships. But they knew they had to work well together to get a result.

Perhaps that is a lesson for Washington, DC, as we seek to take the responsibilities we have and earn the respect of the men and women of this country who hired us and sent us here to solve problems.

We should celebrate the success of the championship football team of Maryville High School and the “championship” school district of Maryville and suggest that their lesson on working well together (in Washington, it’s “bipartisanship”) might be a good lesson for us.

Tennesseans admire much about our Kentucky neighbors.  We admire their bluegrass, we admire their basketball, we admire their distinguished Senators.  But Tennesseans don’t want Kentucky’s State income tax, and we don’t want Kentucky’s dirty air.  We also know our neighbors in North Carolina don’t want Tennessee’s dirty air blowing into North Carolina because they have told us that through lawsuits in the courts, which they have won.

I joined Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas in introducing bipartisan legislation that will provide what we believe is a better approach, and that approach is to enact the clean air rule into law but give utilities one additional year in which to comply with it.  There are four reasons that I oppose overturning this cross-state air pollution rule.

Reason No. 1 is auto jobs.  The first thing Nissan did when it came to Tennessee 30 years ago was to go down to the Air Quality Board and get an air quality permit so it could operate its paint plant.  Fortunately, our air was clean enough to allow that to happen.  Nissan came, and so did tens of thousands of jobs.

Volkswagen has come to Tennessee.  We want to make sure its suppliers can get an air quality permit so they do not have to go to other States.  So the first reason we need to stop air from blowing into Tennessee from other States is auto jobs.

The second reason is tourism jobs. When I visit the Sevier County Chamber of Commerce, right next to the Great Smoky Mountains I walk in to see them, and they say their No. 1 goal is clean air.  That is because 9 million tourists a year come to see the Great Smoky Mountains, not the Great Smoggy Mountains.

In the county where I come from, we have not elected a Democrat to Congress since Abraham Lincoln was president, but we like to breathe clean air.  Our tourists do as well.

Three, the American Lung Association tells us that dirty air blowing into Tennessee makes us unhealthier, especially children and our older citizens.

The fourth reason is that overturning the rule was no solution.  What will it do?  It will throw it back to bureaucrats and lawyers and bureaucracy and uncertainty and delay.  That is not a solution.

I have had bipartisan clean air legislation in this Congress every year since I have been here, because I think it is our job, not the bureaucrats’ job.  I was elected to work on jobs and health, not pass the buck to the bureaucrats and lawyers.

I want to see the Great Smoky Mountains, not the Great Smoggy Mountains.  I want tourists to come to Tennessee, admire the mountains, and leave their money.  I want the Volkswagen suppliers to be able to locate their plants in Tennessee.  I want all Tennesseans to be able to grow up healthy and not have to worry about dirty air blowing in from other parts of the country.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, (R-Tenn.), can be reached in his Washington, D.C. office at (202)224-4944.

These three trade agreements — with Colombia, South Korea, and Panama — are good news for Tennessee’s economy. They will help bring millions of dollars and thousands of jobs to our state, now that Tennesseans can sell more of our auto parts to South Korea, more of our electronics to Panama, and more of our soybeans to Colombia.

Congress would have passed these trade agreements to help create good private-sector jobs all across the country a long time ago, but unfortunately the agreements sat on the president’s desk since the day he took office nearly three years ago.

In fact, these trade agreements were negotiated between four and five years ago. Congress has been waiting for President Obama to send them to us so we can pass them and move forward with other proposals to help make it easier and cheaper to create private-sector jobs.

In Tennessee, we see the advantages of trading with the world — 116,000 jobs in Tennessee are related to selling our manufactured goods to people in other countries.

In 2010 alone, Tennessee exported nearly $900 million in goods to South Korea, Panama and Colombia, despite the trade barriers these three agreements will get rid of.

Similar trade agreements passed in 2004 helped increase what Tennessee sells to Chile by 416 percent and to Singapore by 195 percent, according to the International Trade Administration.

Millions of Americans are hurting in this economy and need work now, and, with the first step of passing these trade agreements done, Congress can turn to making it easier to find good private-sector jobs. Now Congress can take steps to reform our tax code and get rid of bad regulations to free up American businesses to hire, and get working on entitlement reform to lower our job-killing debt.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, (R-Tenn.), can be reached in his Washington, D.C. office at (202)224-4944.

At a time when the federal government is borrowing 40 cents of every dollar it spends, this agreement represents a welcome change in behavior that I was glad to support.

Make no mistake.  This was a change in behavior — from spend, spend, spend to cut, cut, cut.

Let me give you one example:  On Christmas Eve, 2010, Congress raised the debt ceiling and attached to it a trillion new dollars in spending over 10 years through the new health care law.

This time, for every dollar we are raising the debt ceiling, we are reducing spending by a dollar — not adding to it.

Here is another example:  According to Sen. Portman, who used to be the nation’s budget director, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) would say that if Congress did this kind of dollar-for-dollar reduction in spending every time a president asked Congress to raise the debt ceiling, we’d balance the budget in 10 years.

And one more: The Wall Street Journal reported that because of these spending cuts, the discretionary part of the budget, which is 39 percent of the entire budget, will grow over the next 10 years at a little less than the rate of inflation.  If we could control the rest of the budget so that it would grow at anything close to the rate of inflation, we’d balance the budget in no time.

And balancing the budget is exactly what our goal should be.  That’s what I did every year as governor of Tennessee.  Families in America do it every day.

It is time to balance the government’s books and live within our means.

These spending reductions are an important step —but they are just one step — and no one should underestimate how difficult the next steps will be. Our work on reducing this nation’s alarming debt has only begun.

These spending cuts do almost nothing to restructure Medicare and Social Security so that seniors can count on them and taxpayers can afford them.  The president’s budget projections still double and triple the federal debt.  Under the president’s budgets, according to the CBO, in 10 years we’ll be spending more in interest on the debt than we now spend on national defense.  And, in January, 2013, the first thing the next president will have to do is to ask Congress to increase the debt ceiling.
This problem wasn’t created overnight, and it won’t be solved overnight.  But if I were sitting at Union Station trying to catch a train to New York City and someone offered me a ticket to Baltimore or Philadelphia, I’d take it, and then find a way to get to New York from there.

This agreement was an opportunity to take an important step in the right direction — toward stopping Washington from spending money it doesn’t have.

Congress should now get ready to find ways to take the next step and the next step and the next.  The American people have a right to expect Congress to work across party lines to reduce the federal debt by at least $4 trillion over the next 10 years.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, (R-Tenn.), can be reached in his Washington, D.C. office at (202)224-4944.

In one important way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal is different from the plan that helped rebuild Western Europe after World War II:  its funding would not come from the United States government but from private gifts and foundations worldwide. And instead of the money going for rebuilding bombed out industrial plants and roads it more likely would be spent on schools, health clinics and clean water.

Fundamentally, though, the plans are similar. Both Gen. George C. Marshall in 1947 and Prime Minister Netanyahu today proposed helping adversaries as well as allies.

Both aim to relieve hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Both proposals are based squarely on self-interest, as antidotes to the spread of philosophies unfriendly to democracy:  communism in the case of post-war Europe; militant Islam in the Middle East today.

In both cases, applicants for the money would write their own plans. In 1948, 16 nations met in Paris to develop the Marshall Plan. President Truman then submitted it for approval to the United States Congress.  Most of the money was distributed by grants that did not have to be repaid.

The first Marshall plan was short-term (1948-1952) and so should be this one.  The goal is not to create dependencies but to help people stand on their own.

There are other important differences.

The new Middle East Marshall Plan would cost much less.  The Marshall plan spent between $115 billion and $130 billion, in today’s dollars, over four years.  If a Middle Eastern plan carefully distributed a few billion dollars over five years it could have an enormous impact.

The Marshall Plan started out buying food and fuel and ended up rebuilding bombed out industrial plants, roads and other infrastructure.

In addition to helping fund schools and clinics, a Middle Eastern plan is more likely to spend money on a corps of young people who are paid a subsistence wage to strengthen their own country.

Marshall Plan money went to 16 European governments.  Money for the Middle Eastern plan should probably be distributed through non-governmental organizations.

After World War II, there was a clear effort to impose on Europe (and Japan) the American model.   We should have learned by now that the path to democracy in the Middle East is more likely to be uniquely Middle Eastern.

The original Marshall Plan was paid for mostly by the United States taxpayers. Money for the new plan should come from around the world.

The first Marshall Plan money was used mostly for purchase of goods from the United States.  Today those goods would be purchased from around parts of the world.

What are the next steps? First, a coalition of foundations should step forward and announce its willingness to consider proposals from Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries that would assist a transition to a more democratic form of government.

Second, the first grants should be quickly approved, probably to non-governmental organizations already in place.  The original Marshall Plan moved slowly.   In this age of instant telecommunications, freedom fighters expect immediate results.   Some evidence of improvement in their lives could help sustain a movement toward democracy against the lure of militant Islam.

An early State Department memorandum compared Gen. Marshall’s proposal to a Flying Saucer — “nobody knows what it looks like, how big it is, or whether it really exists.”  Prime Minister Netanyahu’s proposal also is usefully vague, with details to be filled in later by applicants for grants.     But shouldn’t it be enough simply to propose  helping people struggling for freedom based upon the hard-eyed belief that their success will benefit  other democratic countries including the United States and Israel?

I voted against the health care bill because it was — and is — an historic mistake.  About six months after the bill became law, The Wall Street Journal reports that individuals’ premiums are already going up.

I have already voted for legislation to repeal the new law, and if there is another motion to repeal it, I’ll vote for it again.

The wisest course now is repealing the law and replacing it with immediate insurance reforms and step-by-step reductions in health care costs so that more Americans can afford to buy insurance.  For example, we should allow buying insurance across state lines; permit small businesses to join together to offer cheaper insurance to employees; limit junk lawsuits against doctors; reduce waste, fraud and abuse; and expand health savings accounts.

Senators on my side of the aisle repeatedly urged these steps last year, before the bill became law. Now, we should repeal this law and replace it with sensible, thoughtful legislation to reduce your health care costs.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, (R-Tenn.), can be reached in his Washington, D.C. office at (202)224-4944.

BROCHURE CLAIM: The brochure claims in the first paragraph that the new health care law will result in “increased quality health care.”  Well, that would mean to me, I would think, that I would continue to have at least the coverage that I have today — and hopefully more.

FACT: But Medicare’s own chief actuary noted in an April 22nd memorandum that without intervening legislation to correct the payment cuts in the new law, some providers would “end participation in the program” with the effect of “possibly jeopardizing access for beneficiaries”— that doesn’t sound like increased quality health care to me.

BROCHURE CLAIM: The second paragraph of the brochure says the new health care law will keep “Medicare strong and solvent.”

FACT: Now here’s the truth: the $529 billion in cuts to Medicare — no one disputes that the law calls for those — are being used to pay for a $1 trillion health care bill, not to shore up Medicare.  Common sense says that if you take $529 billion out of Medicare over the first 10 years or $1 trillion out of Medicare over 10 years after it’s fully implemented, and you spend almost all of that on something other than Medicare, that’s not the way to make Medicare more solvent.

BROCHURE CLAIM: The second page of the brochure says, “if you’re in the Medicare Advantage plan, you will still receive guaranteed Medicare benefits.”

FACT: This is one of the most disingenuous comments in the brochure.  If you read that and are one of the more than 11 million people on Medicare Advantage, you’d think, “My Medicare Advantage must be OK.”  But the truth is, Medicare Advantage plans will have “less generous benefit packages,” according to Medicare’s own chief actuary.

BROCHURE CLAIM: It says, “the new law preserves and strengthens Medicare.”

FACT: That’s disingenuous, too, because the new law does not include paying doctors who serve Medicare patients the proper compensation.

I’m very disappointed that the Obama administration, in its effort to make the health care law sound better, would send out what amounts to propaganda.  There is a federal law against propaganda — it says that annual appropriations can’t be used “for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States.”  I don’t know whether this violates the law, but it doesn’t tell the truth in the way that we Medicare beneficiaries deserve to have the truth told to us about what the health care law does.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, (R-Tenn.), can be reached in his Washington, D.C. office at (202)224-4944.

Then Three Mile Island and Chernobyl happened.  The world pulled back, fearful of nuclear technology – even though no one was hurt at Three Mile Island. In fact, no one has ever died as a result of a nuclear accident at an American commercial nuclear reactor or on a U.S. navy ship powered by reactors.  Chernobyl was the tragic result of a flawed technology never used in the United States.  Still, the United States hasn’t licensed a new reactor since 1978.

Now the rest of the world is returning to nuclear energy.  France is 80 percent nuclear and has the lowest per capita carbon emissions and among the cheapest electricity costs in Western Europe.  Italy, Britain, Finland and Eastern Europe all are exploring new reactors.  Russia, India, China and Japan are moving ahead.   South Korea is selling reactors to the United Arab Emirates.

These countries realize that exploding populations demand large amounts of cheap, reliable electricity to help create jobs and lift people out of poverty.   And nuclear power provides just that.  The National Academy of Sciences in a 2009 report said that the cost of nuclear power is equal to or lower than natural gas, wind, solar, or coal with carbon capture.  Reactors can operate for 80 years while wind and solar last about 25 years. And nuclear reactors operate 90 percent of the time while wind and solar are only available about a third of the time.  (Remember: wind and solar power can’t be stored today in significant amounts.)  Most people don’t want their lights and computers working only when the wind blows.

Nuclear plants occupy a fraction of the land required for wind or solar.  For example, 20 percent of U.S. electricity comes from 104 nuclear reactors on about 100 square miles.  Producing the same amount of power from wind would require covering an area the size of West Virginia with 183,000 fifty-story turbines as well as building 19,000 miles of new transmission lines through scenic areas and suburban backyards.

Nuclear fuel is available in the U.S. and is virtually unlimited.  We don’t have to drill for it.  We don’t have to mine it nearly as much as we do for coal.  And thanks to technology, we can safely recycle “nuclear waste” and turn most of it into more fuel.  After recycling, the French are able to store all of their final waste from producing 80 percent of their electricity for 30 years in one room in La Hague.

A more recently realized benefit of nuclear power is its ability to combat climate change.  Nuclear power emits zero greenhouse gases.  Today it produces 20 percent of our nation’s electricity but 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity.  Wind and solar provide less than 2 percent of our electricity and 6 percent of our carbon-free electricity today.

The United States uses 25 percent of all the energy in the world.  At a time when we need to produce large amounts of clean power at home at a cost that will not chase jobs overseas looking for cheap energy, Americans can’t afford to ignore nuclear power.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, (R-Tenn.), can be reached in his Washington, D.C. office at (202)224-4944.

1) Figure out what went wrong and make it unlikely to happen again. We don’t stop flying after a terrible airplane crash, and we won’t stop drilling offshore after this terrible spill. Thirty percent of U.S. oil production (and 25 percent of natural gas) comes from thousands of active wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Without it, gasoline prices would skyrocket and we would depend more on tankers from the Middle East with worse safety records than American offshore drillers.

2) Learn a safety lesson from the U.S. nuclear industry: accountability. For 60 years, reactors on U.S. Navy ships have operated without killing one sailor. Why? The career of the ship’s commander can be ended by a mistake. The number of deaths from nuclear accidents at U.S. commercial reactors is also zero.

3) Determine what the president’s cleanup plan was and where the people and the equipment were to implement it. In 1990, after the Exxon Valdez spill, a new law required that the president “ensure” the cleanup of a spill and have the people and equipment to do it. President Obama effectively delegated this job to the spiller. Is that a president’s only real option today? If so, what should future presidents have on hand for backup if the spiller can’t perform?

4) Put back on the table more onshore resources for oil and natural gas. Drilling in a few thousand acres along the edge of the 19-million acre Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and at other onshore locations would produce vast oil supplies. A spill on land could be contained much more easily than one located a mile deep in water.

5) Electrify half our cars and trucks. This is ambitious, but it is the best way to reduce U.S. oil consumption, cutting it by one-third to about 13 million barrels a day. A Brookings Institution study says we could electrify half our cars and trucks without building one new power plant if we plug in our cars at night.

6) Invest in energy research and development. A cost-competitive, 500-mile-range battery would virtually guarantee electrification of half our cars and trucks. Reduce the cost of solar power by a factor of four. Find a way for utilities to make money from the CO2 produced by their coal plants.

7) Stop pretending wind power has anything to do with reducing America’s dependence on oil. Windmills generate electricity — not transportation fuel. Wind has become the energy pet rock of the 21st century and a taxpayer rip-off. According to the Energy Information Administration, wind produces only 1.3 percent of U.S. electricity but receives federal taxpayer subsidies 25 times as much per megawatt hour as subsidies for all other forms of electricity production combined. Wind can be an energy supplement, but it has nothing to do with ending our dependence on oil.

If we need more green electricity, build nuclear plants. The 100 commercial nuclear plants we already have produce 70 percent of our pollution-free, carbon-free electricity. Yet the U.S. has just broken ground on our first new reactor in 30 years, while China starts one every three months and France is 80 percent nuclear. We wouldn’t mothball our nuclear Navy if we were going to war. We shouldn’t mothball our nuclear plants if we want low-cost, reliable green energy.

9) Focus on conservation. In the region where I live, the Tennessee Valley Authority could close four of its dirtiest coal plants if we reduced our per capita use of electricity to the national average.

10) Make sure liability limits are appropriate for spill damage. The Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, funded by a per-barrel fee on industry, should be adjusted to pay for cleanup and to compensate those hurt by spills. An industry insurance program like that of the nuclear industry is also an attractive model to consider.

These 10 steps forward could help America grow stronger after this tragic event.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, (R-Tenn.), can be reached in his Washington, D.C. office at (202)224-4944.

Instead of dealing with the high jinks of big Wall Street banks, the bill is going to take over Main Street lending and on top of it create a new czar to make decisions about millions of Main Street transactions across America.  It looks like Washington is about to start regulating your daughter’s dentist bill, the plumber, and the storeowners up and down Main Street who give you flexible credit.  That’s going to make credit harder to get because the dentist or the plumber or the storeowner is going to say, “I’m not going to fool with it.  I don’t want to be regulated by some Washington bureau, so if you want to buy my goods, go to the bank and get some money or get another credit card.

That’s going to slow down the economy.  That’s going to make jobs harder to create because it’s going to make credit harder to obtain and harder to offer. If our real intention in Congress on both sides of the aisle was not to interfere with Main Street lending, then we should have actually done that.  Republicans offered an amendment that would have done that, but it was defeated by the Democratic majority.

And we don’t need another czar.  But suddenly, we have this new Washington agency not only possibly regulating Main Street lending, but with an unaccountable person running it who writes the rules and regulations.

On top of all this, the United States’ total debt is about to reach $13 trillion. That means we’re racing past a yellow flag to a large red flag that’s waving in the wind and saying, “Stop the train before we run off the fiscal cliff.”

The Democratic Congress seems to be totally unaware of this big red flag and this fiscal cliff toward which we’re headed.  It continues to take steps to pass the president’s budget, which will double our debt in five years and triple it in 10.

The elections this May are one more reminder that the November election will be primarily about too much spending, too much debt, too many taxes and electing Republican senators to put a check and a balance on a runaway Washington government.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, (R-Tenn.), can be reached in his Washington, D.C. office at (202)224-4944.