Maybe the politicians who want to build a network of defense missiles for the United States are on to something. Funding a strategic missile defense program might not be a bad thing, though not for the reasons the politicians give.

I'm not going to ponder the strategic value of any antimissile scheme. It will be effective sometimes, ineffective others, like any other system designed to prevent catastrophes from happening. For example, more than 30 baseball teams fight to prevent the Yankees from winning the World Series, but they have been ineffective recently.

But then, I live in Chicago and back the Cubs. So I think the baseball defense system has been darn successful, preventing a Cubs World Series victory for nearly a century. I'm sold on the idea that a defense system can work, particularly if the attackers are as incompetent as the Cubs.

But that's not the real reason I'm putting my extremely powerful support behind the missile defense proposal. I'm thinking about jobs. Layoff announcements and earnings warnings from high-tech companies are almost as common today as e-mails with get-rich-quick schemes. If engineers aren't being hit yet, it seems only a matter of time.

Much of the money for a missile defense system will support the complex engineering job of figuring out how to spot and hit missiles without sparking an alert every time attendees at a hot air balloon gathering get too high. Hiring laid-off engineers to defend our country is the perfect solution.

The federal government already offers tons of similar work projects for professionals. Hardly a month goes by that it doesn't start another Clinton investigation, thereby throwing thousands of dollars to lawyers. And every time a congressman says "let's establish a research committee," all kinds of professionals are hired to spend a year or two researching and writing a document that no one will ever read.

So why not help create jobs for engineers? Their hourly rate is way below whatever figure it took for Hillary's brother to charge $400,000 for a few weeks of work. Certainly no one can argue that engineers aren't far more deserving of some governmental support than lawyers. Look around your office, house or garage. See anything you like that was put there by a lawyer? But what about good things developed by engineers? They're everywhere.

It's a compelling argument. And I'm willing to fly out to Washington to present this brilliant scheme (or should I call it a concept for a paradigm shift?) to Congress. That's guaranteed to sway them. Look how much good my support has done for the Cubs.