Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz isn't introducing many bills by comparison to his predecessors, and what he has proposed so far hasn't been especially practical. In fact, his latest ideas are simply bad.

But we've got to give credit where it's due, and Chaffetz does seem to be thinking creatively out of the Washington box. He should continue to do that because his bad ideas could evolve into good ideas if he brings more experienced people into the process.

Chaffetz's bad ideas always seem to be driven by a good motive -- to make government more responsible or more efficient. He should be commended for meaning well. But at some point the rubber must meet the road. The devil is in the details, and Chaffetz hasn't yet shown a mastery of those details.

For instance, one of his campaign pledges was to eliminate so-called "earmarks." Like many conservatives, he'd like to prevent congressmen and senators from inserting money for their own districts into unrelated bills. Earmarks often take the form of riders that get little scrutiny and are widely derided as "pork barrel spending" -- a way to make local constituents happy by feeding them at the federal trough.

At the same time, earmarks represent a reasonable mechanism for funneling federal dollars to local needs. It's the way things have been done in Congress, and not without good reason. You simply can't make a separate bill out of every local spending proposal and debate it individually. There's not enough time, given the overwhelming weight of issues that lawmakers must deal with.

Moreover, you really wouldn't want Congress as a whole to dictate details about local matters. Your elected representatives are more informed about what's needed in their districts.

Finally, earmarks are part of negotiation in Congress: "I'll support you on this if you insert my earmark on that." That's not necessarily a bad thing, though it might be in some cases.

But Chaffetz in his campaign classed virtually all earmarks as evil. His desire to change the system made a great sound bite for his campaign, but he never laid out any details. Now in Washington, facing the beast, the best he could do was to write a labyrinthine set of rules to be used in considering all earmarks. His rules are impractical and have virtually no chance of being widely adopted.

It's not that earmark reform is a bad idea, only that Chaffetz chose the wrong means to get the job done. A better solution would be to require perfect transparency in all earmark legislation, with public access to a centralized online database of bills. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and full disclosure would provide a natural check and balance on congressional spending without the need for arcane rules.

Chaffetz proposed another bad idea last week. He wants the U.S. Postal Service to handle the 2010 Census rather than spend $11 billion to hire workers for the task. "They really have the workforce in place to do this," Chaffetz said of the Postal Service. "They already go to everybody's door."

His proposal is clearly well-intentioned. Chaffetz sees 760,000 postal employees and weighs them against the 750,000 temporary workers needed to conduct the census. Bingo. In his mind, you can cancel out the latter with the former and save a pile of money. He proposes a postal holiday to give mail carriers time to count.

But again, it's impractical. In the first place, maybe two-thirds of employees of the Postal Service are actual mail carriers, so the numbers don't balance even if other problems were addressed -- which they are not.

The census is more than a mere "count." A great deal of demographic information is collected by census workers, who may average 20 minutes to conduct an interview and record data for a particular household. You'd need a year-long postal holiday to free up enough time for mail carriers to do that -- the same year that is required for temporary workers.

You'd also need to train all the mail carriers to collect census data -- so block out more days for that. You'd have to hold up mail that is essential for commerce, courts and dozens of other parts of society.

Chaffetz is absolutely correct that the U.S. Census should be free of potential manipulation by unethical groups such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- better known as ACORN. But there's got to be a better way than hijacking the Postal Service.

That's a bad idea, but maybe it contains the seed of a good idea. It is high time that Washington began to get out of its wasteful box -- on this, all can agree. But the way out needs to be reasonable.

We're not afraid to propose what may also be a bad idea because it might plant a seed as well. If enough seeds are planted, maybe something will grow.

So here's our pitch: Why not use the military? Or some combination of military and other civil service personnel, like employees of the Internal Revenue Service? There are approximately 1.5 million people on active military duty, with an additional 848,000 in the reserves. The IRS has 100,000-plus employees who could simply lighten up on their duties while conducting the Census.

Military census workers might be required to dress in civilian clothes so as not to alarm anyone. But alarm would be unlikely anyway; after all, they belong to us. They are our brothers, sisters, neighbors and friends. We're already paying them and could give them a nice bonus for the extra duty. And they're subject to a strict command structure that would virtually eliminate ACORN-like fraud.

But let's not get carried away with alternatives. The point of all of this is that while Chaffetz should be applauded for his desire to do well, he needs to get his head out of the clouds and his feet on the ground.

Perhaps his bad ideas can be turned into good ones.