While sorting through the ongoing debate over how best to jump-start our economy through an investment in broadband infrastructure, a key concern is what stimulus is the right stimulus – tax incentives or grants and loans.

In the case of building a broadband infrastructure for the U.S., the goal is to create an Internet highway, on par with the Interstate highway system developed in the 1950s, as a way of transforming the way we do business, educate our children, care for the sick, and in short, how we go about our daily lives.  There are many potential benefits and positive economic impacts from having a broadband infrastructure.

Now, in planning for how we’ll build this new future, all Americans must recognize the need for investment in our future.

Tax incentives to incumbent providers, while effective in some circumstances, would simply encourage more of the same and keep us standing in place with little or no growth. That won’t do, given that the United States is already behind other developed nations in the volume, speed and locations where information can be sent and received over the Internet.  We need to get moving.

With a new presidential administration, and the global economy in turmoil, the moment calls for American ingenuity through innovation. This won’t happen by accident. It’s going to take government leadership and American know-how to foster a strategy to invest in new initiatives that will keep us competitive and lead us to economic prosperity.

In a guest viewpoint in the Wall Street Journal, IBM Chairman and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano framed the issue this way:  “Will the U.S. make investments in our future whose impact is not just additive, but exponential?  Let’s not fix a flawed past. Let’s build a smarter future for our country.”

Once we have decided to invest in our communities, through grants and loans, then we need to turn attention to what communities must do, one at a time, to rebuild a new economic structure for the future.

What are some of your ideas of how we might raise the learning curve within the U.S. and how we can avoid past mistakes in not pursuing a strategic broadband initiative?

Tags: broadband, CEO, Congress, digital, IBM, infrastructure, Internet, Knight Center, Knight Center of Digital Excellence, Obama, president, Samuel J. Palmisano, stimulus