We cannot bail or tax-cut our way to prosperity. We can only, as Jobs understood, invent our way there. That is why America needs to be for the world in the 21st century what Cape Canaveral was to America in the 1960s: the place where everyone everywhere should want to come to start up and make something — something that makes people’s lives more productive, healthy, comfortable, entertained, educated or secure.

To do that, we need to reinvigorate our traditional formula for success — quality education and infrastructure, open immigration, the right rules to incentivize risk-taking and government-financed scientific research. But to do all that in a recession means we have to cut spending, raise tax revenues and invest in this formula. And to do that, we need a Grand Bargain that involves upfront spending plus credible, long-term fiscal reform that is at the true scale of our debt problem. Obama has given the spending plan, but he has not produced a credible, this-really-hurts fiscal plan — and many Americans know it. The paucity of Obama’s audacity is striking.