I read recently that houses in Detroit, Michigan are selling for as little as $7100.00. Foreign individuals and companies are snapping up these houses, looking to profit from any economic recovery that occurs. Hey, if they think Detroit is going to come back within a few years after decades of decline, more power to them.

If I had a couple of billion dollars at my disposal, I would rebuild Detroit.

First, I would take a really good look at all the open land in the city, buy up a bunch of it, level the unoccupied houses, and create either open space or parkland. The resulting decline of surplus housing would raise property values in the area.

Then I would focus on converting all of those empty factories into housing, businesses, and hospitals - yes I said hospitals.

I recently found out that a major hospital in my area employs 16,000 people. That's 16,000 people with steady work, some of it pretty well paid. Jobs run the gamut from administration and law and finance, to research, to medical procedures ranging from basic to high-tech, all the way to custodial and security.

Our leaders on both sides of the aisle have led us to believe that we are spending "too much" of our gross domestic product on health care when quite frankly it is one of the most productive sectors of our economy. We ought to be investing in more health care services, not finding ways to pare back use of the system, or how to wring more out of the doctors who remain in the business.

T Boone Pickens has already demonstrated that the alternative energy boom is a bust even before it became a bubble. Local environmentalists will never let solar or wind make up much more than a tiny percentage of our energy economy. Neither will they permit additional natural gas exploration. So long as environmentalists rule the day, we will depend on foreigners for oil.

America needs a new growth sector. In the 1990s it was tech, in the 2000s it was housing, and in the 2010s it ought to be health care goods and services.

If I had a couple of billion dollars, I would remake Detroit into one of the greatest health care centers in the world. All those factories could be retooled into medical research, device manufacturing, teaching hospitals,

gotta go - to be continued