The Iowa Racing & Gaming Commission will not promote a new casino in Polk County - or anywhere else - but will move forward with plans to hear proposals from five other counties whose voters have approved new gaming facilities, commission members said Thursday.

"We owe it to those five counties to give them the best shot and the best look and that's how we will proceed," said Commission Chair Greg Seyfer at a meeting at the Riverside Casino & Golf Resort.

Commissioner Kate Cutler added that it's not the board's role to encourage communities to apply for new gaming licenses. "We're not going to promote additional applications," she said. "That issue should be put to rest."

At the public unveiling last month of Quad Cities First - the chamber-of-commerce-controlled replacement for the Quad City Development Group - I ran into Sean O'Harrow, the executive director of the Figge Art Museum.

His presence was a bit of a surprise, given that arts and culture are too rarely mentioned in the same breath as economic development in the Quad Cities. (They weren't mentioned at the debut of Quad Cities First.)

There's a reason for that: The establishment's conception of "economic development" is usually limited to luring employers to our community to create jobs (or at least move them from somewhere else). And the discussion is typically restricted to issues such as tax climate, transportation infrastructure, direct incentives, and workforce.

Yet, as O'Harrow pointed out, a community's culture is essential to attracting people - be they CEOs, workers, or tourists. And he and I wondered whether cultural marketing had been given any consideration as DavenportOne and the Illinois Quad City Chamber of Commerce took control of external economic-development marketing through Quad Cities First.

The answer, to the surprise of nobody: not really.

That oversight can't be corrected, so let's move into third-rail territory and suggest something truly radical: the long-term goal of a merger of Quad Cities First with the Quad Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau, creating genuinely unified external marketing with a holistic view of the area - not just business opportunities, but life.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary and former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack advocated "cap and trade" legislation during a town-hall meeting at the Iowa State Fair, despite a hog farmer's plea that it would increase the cost of electricity and hurt small farmers.

"There is no question as I travel around the country ... [that] they are currently seeing the impact of climate change," Vilsack said. "There is an expectation of American leadership on this issue. The concern I have is that if we fail to lead on this issue ... it will impact not just the cap-and-trade conversation; it will impact our capacity to convince countries to do things in other areas."

Mike Ver Steeg from Inwood raised the issue with Vilsack during the hour-long meeting attended by about 200 farmers, union members, and elected officials.

"We need to not pass the cap-and-trade bill because I spend about $2,400 a month on electricity right now," Ver Steeg said. "If that goes through and I have to spend 30 to 50 percent more, I don't have profit right now. That's going to hurt small farmers like me."

Vilsack acknowledged that energy costs may go up but argued that in the short term, there would be offsets with cropping, fertilizer, methane, and nitrous-oxide reductions that would negate the increases.

About 50 years ago, Senator Everett Dirksen (R-Illinois) uttered this famous quip: "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money."

Today, we're talking about a trillion here, a trillion there - a thousand-fold increase in the scale of government spending, part of which is attributable to the shrunken purchasing power of the dollar due to inflation, and part to the unrelenting expansion of government.

"Trillion" is an easy word to say. It rolls effortlessly off the tongue. This is unfortunate, because the ease with which we talk about trillions of dollars can keep us from grasping how enormous this sum is. If you had been spending a million dollars a day, 365 days per year, how far back in time would you have to go to have spent your first trillion? Since the founding of our republic in the 1780s? Further. Since Columbus stumbled upon the New World? Further still. Since the birth of Christ? Nope, not yet. More than two millennia of spending a million dollars a day wouldn't even bring you three-quarters of the way to your first trillion.