“The program will be available to all student borrowers for legitimate colleges and community colleges and other skills-based training. The Grand Bargain will also bring back Al Gore’s Reinventing Government initiative from the 1990s, which made government function better and at lower costs, with the federal workforce at its lowest level since 1960.

“Finally, our future growth rate will be enhanced by creating a National Economic Investment Fund to more adequately fund the ARPA agencies, including DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which gave us the internet and GPS; and the ARPA-H agency, which supports transformative biomedical and health breakthroughs, including further advances in the Human Genome Project, which has already given us a return on investment of more than one hundred and forty-one to one.

“The National Investment Fund will operate the way university research programs that produce commercially valuable results have functioned for more than forty years. Universities can license their discoveries to the private sector in return for up-front payments or for stakes in new companies as long as all profits go back into further research efforts.

“For example, MIT charges nothing on the front end for the use of its taxpayer-funded research but takes a modest ownership position. New York University has earned a lot of money from contributing its discoveries to new companies. So has the University of Central Florida. Based in Orlando, its campus is now the third largest in the United States after the University of Michigan and Ohio State. UCF’s creative software developments have been used by NASA, Disney World, video-game companies, and others.

“In addition to selling the software technology, UCF gives faculty members leaves of absence to help start-ups deploy new technologies and established companies integrate their advances into ongoing operations. This system has enabled taxpayer-funded creativity to generate an enormous number of new jobs that make America more competitive, and it provides money to the university to keep expanding its software work. It’s time to take a system that works well with university-funded research and apply it to other taxpayer-funded R and D efforts, increasing government revenues and reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio without raising taxes above what’s outlined in the plan.”

Then Maddy says, “We know that big investment programs produce more tax revenues than they cost. But if we’re short of our goal after five years, the Reinventing Government board will be empowered to make more recommendations on savings, beginning with a review of the recommendations in the Simpson-Bowles budget report from 2010 and a rigorous effort to bring health-care costs in Medicare and Social Security Parts C and D into line with inflation. The board’s decisions, after public hearings, can be implemented unless they’re blocked by Congress.”