Paul,
I've modified your letter a bit and am sending this to my reps as well.
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The economic disaster brings us fresh opportunity to think about the
things that aren't working and make fixing those things part of our
economic stimulus. A great example of this is that our broken
customary measurement system needs to be done away with in favor of
metric.
Currently, we use a confusing and out dated jumble of measurements
rather than the user-friendly system the rest of the world uses. I
believe this is a major factor that makes our economy less efficient
than that of other countries and makes our exports less desirable.
The confusing nature of this cacophony of units leads to substantial
losses such as the $125M Mars orbiter and the $25,000 Congress wasted
last year because of a conversion error when buying carbon credits.
It leads to errors in medicine: children ending up in E.R. because of
conversion errors and errors of understanding that stem from parents
using tea spoons out of the utensil drawer rather than a proper
measuring spoon when administering a prescription denoted in
"teaspoons" instead of milliliters. It also leads to extremely
valuable time wasted in our classrooms as we have to teach our
children a difficult set of units and calculations using those units
rather than the much more straight forward metric version, where
calculations often are as simple as moving a decimal point.
Our children emerge from school unprepared for the global economy
because they're unable to effectively use the global language of
measurement.
It's time to fix this mess. Please incorporate the following items
either in the economic stimulus package currently being debated or in
near future legislation:
- require that new infrastructure built with the stimulus package is
done exclusively using metric measures;
- that all new laws passed by Congress, effective immediately, make
exclusive use of metric measurement when physical dimensions are
prescribed;
- that a plan for compulsory conversion to metric in public policy
and public works, including highway signs, national news and weather
reporting, as well as consumer retail regulations, is one of the goals
of this stimulus plan;
- that a comprehensive public education initiative be undertaken to
explain the reasons for these policies that were begun in the 1970s
then canceled by the Reagan administration.
Our nation was the very first in the world to use a decimal based
currency, yet we still haven't made a decimal system of measurement
the only legal system.
