An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll this week imputed to two thirds of Americans a sense of alarm over national decline. Decline, as in "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," by Edward Gibbon.

While Main Street Americans burned with dismay over such a prospect, the Emperor Barack fiddled with calculations for taking over the U.S. health care system and teasing the world into some kind of general agreement over that which Al Gore and others call climate change.

"Jobs, jobs, jobs," as political strategists used to say in more serious times than these. What about jobs for Americans, jobs for Texans, at a time when unemployment runs 10 percent nationally?

Texas Workforce Commission Chairman Tom Pauken sought this month at a Grapevine conference held by the agency he heads, to grab the steer by the horns and focus attention on a matter that to our national leaders seems of secondary, if not tertiary, interest. It was about time somebody did so. Competition in talking about the rebuilding of employment isn’t what anyone would call brisk.

Pauken had several notable ideas, of which, in a way, the zingiest was one you haven’t – come on, join me in confessing it – thought of. It’s to direct more high school graduates into the useful technical pursuits that become unfashionable some decades ago during the big government push to see to it that everyone and his second cousin got a college degree.

We quit worrying about the supply of carpenters, electricians, plumbers, painters, and so on. Few of these invaluable folk needed to become adept in feminist literature, the history of European-capitalist oppression, or even higher-toned stuff like the brush work of the English Pre-Raphaelites. They needed to learn carpentry, electricity, etc. As Pauken put it pungently, "We have to rid ourselves of the elitist notion that college graduates are somehow superior to skilled tradesmen…"

Of whom we don’t have enough. So let’s get more such people; folk who make things that they or others sell. Texas this year, Pauken reported, lost 4 percent of its manufacturing jobs. Yes, other states lost more. But losing people who make stuff isn’t good. It means we have to buy stuff made abroad.

Concerning this necessity Pauken had other things to say, such as that government discourages rather than encourages selling U.S. products abroad. "We literally have a business tax system which subsidizes… manufacturers from countries like China, Korea, Japan, Germany, and others who compete against the American worker. The U.S. government’s failure to remove the tax on exports creates a large and artificial relative price advantage, in both the U.S. market and abroad, of more than 18 percent."

How about taking the tax burden off business so it can put people to work?, said Pauken. Drop the 35 percent business income tax, he said, and replace it, say, with the 9 percent "border-adjusted consumption tax" proposed by David A. Hartman (who is publisher of The Lone Star Report)?

Too radical a move for a Congress that can’t get its act together even on health care? Well, you know where change starts – with conversation. When did we last hear serious conversation related to job creation? Not at the Obama jobs summit earlier this month. There the talk was of "cash for caulking," business tax credits, and a grab bag of supposed incentives to start hiring people and making stuff at a time businessmen say they just want to know how much health care and climate regulation are going to hurt them.

And still it shocks that two thirds of Americans think we’re in decline?

The value of get-togethers such as the TWC conference is the opportunity they afford for putting heads together and ideas in the public domain. That somebody has a plausible plan – somebody like the chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission – is something. Others will form contrasting or overlapping plans. Fine. The First Amendment enables and encourages all voices.

The oddity – which may soon pass – concerning these times is the seeming paucity of concern among political leaders as to how we go about getting jobs back. That may be from the harmful habit, far less known than now when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, of seeing politicians as endowed with supernatural powers to sway human events. The truth, of course, is that the main thing politicians need to do is stand aside: quit imposing solutions that depend on the creation of gigantic bureaucracies to devise regulations and collect taxes.