By now, you would think I wouldn't be surprised, disgusted and at a loss for words about emissions from Washington, D.C., but this concept called ownership society.... Well, I guess it has something to do with vision or dream or reality politics or something.

This one simply won't come clear to me the way The New Frontier or The Great Society did. I mean, who owns anything anymore? We're all making payments on just about everything we've got, and if we've finished paying the thing off, it owns us. Such is the nature of the new economy, which itself was a vision out of Washington just a few years ago.

I finally figured out the new economy. At the risk of confusing everybody, myself included, I'll define the new economy: It is when you make a lot of widgets without paying the people who make them very much, and you don't make them real well so that they break or wear out quickly so that people will, over time, buy more of the widgets than they ever meant to, but they won't remember how many they've bought, because they're working three jobs to buy the screwy widgets and that makes them too tired to either make or double-check a budget.

The sales tax from this process is supposed to take a chunk out of the deficit, but it never does, because Congress has to spend too much money on subsidies and welfare for corporate bail-outs and for local and state governments who would be shot or worse if they tried to convince locals to pay their own way.

One of the key elements of the old new economy line was the Internet. That bubble hasn't burst, but it is deflated substantially from what it was when it went on line. Futurists talked a lot about how you could sit at home, key in all the items you wanted from the grocery and have them delivered.

It would save huge chunks of time that an Internet user could use more productively than he could walking up and down the aisles at the grocery.

Well, it was quicker than going to the grocery in person, but nobody said anything about how long it would take the truck to get there with the grits and rolls, so there was no way the buyer could leave the house and risk missing the truck, then have to go to the store in person when the corn flakes and gizzards arrived, thus wasting twice as much time as it would have taken to have gone in person in the first place.

The Internet's still around, of course, but it's in transition. What it amounts to is everybody saying exactly what he or she thinks or what he or she plans to think and sending it out into cyberspace. Nobody much reads any of it; no time between writing one thing and sending it in time to write something else.

In a few words, the Internet is the new version of the Tower of Babel.

In a few words, the new economy is cutting off one end of a blanket and sewing it on the other end to make the blanket longer.

And here comes The Ownership Society. Precisely what's coming isn't yet clear, but does this mean that property lines are going to take on a lot more emphasis?

Sometimes, of course, it is a nuisance when people just show up at the place you own, or they expect you not to let your rap music cross the yard fence and ruin the family picnic. Then there's that attitude that takes certain drivers down the middle of the highway, and when asked why they did it, they say they've paid taxes on half the road and their half's in the middle.

It's anybody's guess where an idea, once launched in something like a president's state of the union address, might go when the people get a hold on it.

So far, it's going in a direction that George W. Bush doesn't want it to go. With his privatization (or personal ownership) idea for Social Security, the polls don't give him very good numbers.

Apparently, changing the Social Security system is the kingpin of this new ownership society. We'll work for our money, and, although it appears we will be required to invest some of it in something (guaranteed safe, of course), we'll own the money.

Given what most Americans know about managing money in the wake of the new economy, this should be a windfall for financial advisors. These guys will own a lot of stuff!

It behooves all of us to own as much as we can before the ownership society gets going in full steam. With likely cuts coming in Medicare and the cost of health care rising at nearly twice the rate of inflation, it will be hard to keep what we own and still buy what we need.

For small collections of people, those of us in places we call communities, should get busy and own all we can. The administration in D.C. is proposing cuts of up to 35 percent in the Community Development Block Grants, those federal dollars that build and maintain things like sewer systems, water projects, police, fire prevention, all the infrastructure things that we never look at.

Without the grants, there's no place to go except to the users, those of us who pay the monthly bills. Guess we can say we own the stuff...

It is part of a president's job to tell us to spend our money wisely, but when you don't have any, like the nearly 40 million Americans with no health insurance, it's hard to take him seriously. For some time now, at least 20 years, the rich Americans have been getting richer and the poor Americans have been getting poorer. The ownership society isn't addressing this gap.

If I have it right, and I'm not at all sure whether or not I do, the ownership society works this way: When you are off welfare and you have at your disposal the not-very-large percentage of your salary that goes to Social Security in your sweaty hand, you can start a search for a financial advisor, one who has been at it a long time and not one of the new ones that will appear from under every rock, then ask him or her to make it grow.

If it doesn't grow, you can e-mail your senator and congressman who used to be able to go over to the Social Security office and set them straight, but they won't be able to go to Wall Street and get the same results. They aren't even likely to try, because footing the increasingly high price tag for getting the message out in a campaign will depend on the same folks who will take the complaint.

The big black hole in the whole ownership society idea is what nobody's yet mentioned. When you own something, you have to maintain it. In other words, it owns you or it gets decrepit and falls to the ground.

In a few words, the ownership society is the government saying you're on your own out there, and good luck.