Linking out is very important to define the nature of your domain, but at best it should be a PR wash and likely will lead to a significant loss (because all links to and from your page get diminished by that 85% dampening effect).
I have to disagree with you there.
Say I link to 10 other pages, my internal pages will suffer a PR loss (let’s assume I care about PR), but I would also have an extra 10 pages linking to me which would effectively boost my PR. So basically, my PR would only suffer a minor loss at the very worst.
But having an extra 10 links to my site with my targeted keywords in the anchor text, then my site would get a boost in the search engines – at least in google.
To go off topic:
Now – as for PR I don’t care much about it. I believe having a PR4 and having 30 links with anchor text “keyword 1 keyword2” is better than having a PR10 with 10,000 links with the anchor text “click here”. That said, since most people believe PR is of worth I do check mine and other pages PR. That’s my opinion and so far it’s working out pretty well. But this is not the question I have asked.