Somewhere along the way Americans came to believe that only Detroit was in trouble, while companies like Toyota and Honda were the new paragons of automotive executive brilliance. Likewise, just six months ago the media covered some remarkable financial market moves that Porsche played perfectly; the German automaker’s resulting billions in profits made that firm the envy of hedge fund traders and earned market analysts’ applause. Going back 24 months, you may remember all the accolades heaped on Carlos Ghosn, the man who rescued Nissan and Renault and was widely considered the planet’s cleverest and most cunning auto executive. No, there was no doubt about it: Only Detroit was run by fools, trapped in their mid-century delusions about the American car market, incapable of change and permanently handicapped by outdated thinking. No wonder so many felt GM and Chrysler deserved their fate at the hands of federal bankruptcy judges.

It is now humanly impossible to keep up with all the news delivered worldwide each day. In fact, the sheer volume of news in any developed country is probably why so many critical issues go unaddressed and unresolved. After all, looking at the news you’d think that one truly earth-shaking event, the bankruptcy of what for almost 80 years was the world’s most powerful manufacturing concern, was last year’s news.

Twenty years ago I stopped using DOS-based computers and switched to Macintosh, when Apple introduced the first Mac Cx. It had one megabit of RAM and a 20-megabit hard drive (which lasted six whole months, and replacing the Apple drive cost over $3,000). That one computer, a 13-inch color monitor, an 8-bit scanner and a few pieces of key software cost $10,000 at the time. This past weekend, as I finished digitizing my collection of 300 DVD movies for playback on my Apple TV, it suddenly struck me just how far the computer industry has come since 1989.

Elected officials support many enduring myths that sound not just good but economically reasonable. They oversimplify them in business logic that helps America’s financial future sound potentially exciting. Once you get past the ostensible intelligence of the sales pitch, though, the facts of the real world intrude. That they are myths may be scarier than anything in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, but they are – equally fanciful tales.

On May 16th BusinessWeek published an article in which I revealed that ethanol has seriously damaged a large number of automobiles right here in the Metroplex. This has actually been happening since last summer; when gasoline prices spiked to over $4 a gallon, apparently one or more gasoline distributors started adding more than the mandatory 10 percent ethanol to make a few extra bucks. One critical point was the fact that repairing the damage ethanol does to an automobile costs between $800 and $1,200, an amount that could devastate a family’s monthly budget. But my research also showed that once the ethanol blend in gasoline rises above 10 percent, for many cars fuel system failures follow quickly.