To create the new jobs needed in our nation, and make sure our world-leading creativity and innovation ends up creating new businesses, we need deeper pools of venture and early stage capital.

Nowhere are jobs needed more than in the Midwest manufacturing belt. A recent Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program report authored by Cleveland’s Frank Samuel suggests how we might better link new technology discovery going on in the ‘Rust Belt” to new firm creation. It turns out the industrial heartland reaching from Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and St. Louis in the west to Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Buffalo in the east produces on metrics associated with innovation: 33 percent of all national R&D, 35 percent of all nationally competitive National Institute of Health (NIH) grants; 30 percent of all U.S. patents awarded; and educating 36 percent of all U.S. scientists and engineers.

However only 12 percent of the nation’s venture capital gets invested in the region to convert technology discovery to new firms and jobs Even more disturbingly, the Rust Belt’s deep pockets in terms of sizable state and local pension funds that do put money into VC, are essentially sending it to the coasts. Fully 47 percent of the nation’s public pension fund venture money comes from the Rust Belt--but only 13 percent of that money is reinvested in Great Lakes region commercialization.

This dearth of early stage capital is not just a regional problem--but one of national significance--and a threat to the U.S. position as the world’s innovation engine.

More than a decade ago, Michael Kinsley, the journalist and former editor of this magazine, developed Parkinson's disease--a degenerative condition that impairs motor and speech control, producing tremors, rigidity, and eventually severe disability. While the standard regimen of medications helped, he knew that his symptoms were bound to get steadily worse with time. He needed something better--something innovative--before the disease really progressed. In 2006, he got it at the famed Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

More than a decade ago, Michael Kinsley, the journalist and former editor of this magazine, developed Parkinson's disease--a degenerative condition that impairs motor and speech control, producing tremors, rigidity, and eventually severe disability. While the standard regimen of medications helped, he knew that his symptoms were bound to get steadily worse with time. He needed something better--something innovative--before the disease really progressed. In 2006, he got it at the famed Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

If these facts surprise you, it's because you haven't been given a straight story about the Clinton health bill. Take two examples: on November 4, Leon Panetta, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, testified to senators that the bill does not "set prices" and "draw up rules for allocating care"; a month later Hillary Rodham Clinton assured a Boston audience that the government will not limit what you can pay your doctor. The text of the bill proves these statements are untrue.