All In

Full Speed Ahead

It is time to put the pedal to the metal, open her up, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

While our leaders in D.C. sit there moribund, mired in their petty politics the United States is squandering the most precious resource it has. That resource is the head start we have on the rest of the world. As of this moment the United States still has the capacity to out-innovate, out educate and out produce any country in the world in critical materials. That gap is rapidly closing. Even if we start tomorrow we will be in a race for our livelihoods and standard of living. If we wait for market forces of supply and demand to drive development we will inevitably lose the race to those who will not allow capitalistic reticence to prevent their race to the future. Our competitors want to take over the elite spot in the world and have no compunction whatsoever about forcing our citizens to become third world residents.

Even now China is producing three times the engineers the United States is. One of the biggest reasons that innovative companies do not locate here is the lack of skilled and educated people who are proficient in the areas they require. No longer are China and India content to take our low wage jobs and do them even cheaper. Now they want the big prize. This is not without precedent. After WWII the United States helped Japan rebuild its industry and one of the things they built was steel mills. They used the current technology while the United States plodded along with antique technology. Ask Pittsburgh and US Steel what happened. Japan ate our lunch and we still aren't manufacturing steel at competitive prices. Retooling costs money.

And retooling is what the United States needs right now. Not in ten years or twenty years but right now. But it isn't so much the manufacturing that needs retooled. Oh, we will still be able to support some basic manufacturing to satisfy the domestic market but we won't be able to export those products to the world as long as we try to maintain our standard of living. The United States must retool in the areas in which we can be competitive at high rates and high profits.

Even now it may sound counter-intuitive to take on initiatives that will cost money but the need is so dire that to not do it will likely condemn the United States to second world status for a lengthy time. That may not be so bad for the upper crust but the effect on the middle class would be devastating. In all likelihood the wealthy class may be OK because they profit from financial activities that take place in other parts of the world but the part of our country that makes us great would be plunged into the doldrums much the way the population of Russia was after the demise of the Soviet Union. Never a wonderful place to live for the common person their situation became so dire that their life expectancy deteriorated.

It is time to go all in. Or as close to it as we can swing in order to jump start the chase for more engineers and mathematicians. We have quite enough investment bankers and such for now, thank you. Our future will depend on having a product that will sell all over the world that others cannot easily duplicate and that is our people. We already have great institutions and a twenty year program to focus on emerging technologies would once again place the United States in the premier position in the world. We have not deteriorated so far as to begin to lose critical skills but we are in danger of being overtaken in these areas. Just recently a Chinese company bought a domestic company that dealt with solar energy's patents. That means that now we will have to pay them to use that technology. That we could allow that to happen is just crazy.

People went nuts when Solyndra failed to prove profitable but being profitable and being valuable may be very different things. That capacity inherent in that company was worth supporting until profits came. Not every effort can be done better by the free market. We would never have gotten atomic energy in time to save us that way. Hydrogen fuel cells are possible right now. All we need is the infrastructure to provide fuel. Government could support that.

But more importantly things like scholarships in the sciences and engineering would encourage students to pursue those fields especially if they could leave college with the prospect of not owing a hundred thousand dollars for it. Allow new teachers to work off their loans by giving them a bonus for teaching. Efforts such as this will save our way of life and ensure the future of the United States for another century. In the face of this certainty one of our Senators in Kentucky is in favor of eliminating the Department of Education. Just phenomenal.

My take on the future. The future is now.

As usual I desire your comments.