The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.
All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out ”” that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.”
My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.
Yawn. There was a time when Friedman was interesting. Usually wrong, but interesting. Now just wrong, and boringly predictable.
I think he’d make his points better if he was not quite so snippish in tone.
I take exception to a few items.
“We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts…”
Then sir, lead the way and give the money back. You may feel free to donate as much as you wish of your own money to the IRS.
“…energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars…”
Let me get this straight; he WANTS higher energy prices? Again, feel free to empty your wallet at you local gas station each week. I need to get to work (in my 35 mpg sub compact) and still have money left over for the other essentials of life for my family. It might be nice to also have food at affordable prices rather than inflated prices due to fuel costs. And, it is also nice to have heat in my North Eastern U.S. home.
Oops, I sent that on without my final comment.
I hope he has the chutzpah to repeat his comments about immigration to those hunting for work after January 15th, 2009.
“…immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.”
When we have 20% unemployment next year, will he still have this warm fuzzy for immigrants taking U.S. jobs? If so, I recommend that he go spend some time in an unemployment line.
We can afford the tax cuts, what we can’t afford is continuing the massive annual spending increases on the part of the Central State.
He’s spot-on, however, about the horrible state of public education but wrong about the remedy…NCLB imposes all kinds of standards that already aren’t being met. What’s the point of laying down more yardsticks that won’t be attained? The problem is the culture, and no one among the chattering classes even pretends to do a thing about that but keep on stoking the nihilist furnace.
And yes, our infrastructure needs a lot of work, but it’s a lot sexier cutting ribbons on shiny new stadiums, convention centers and bogus white elephants like “green projects” than on rebuilt sewage treatment facilities. Hence, we get new stadiums.
America has become as enervated as Europe, and we had better snap out of this torpor or be consigned to Europe’s declinist fate.
The problem is we perfected a mass-producing economy that can produce millions and millions of cars, laptops, refrigerators, plasma tv’s, plastic Christmas trees, houses, and on and on and on. But along the way of learning how to rapidly turn dreamers’ designs into millions and millions of actual high tech products we can buy, we forgot to make the people to buy them. Or, more correctly, we made the people but aborted them. We have aborted some 48 million people since 1973 in this country – the U.S. – alone. That is about 1/6 of our current population of some 300 million. That is 48 million people to buy all those millions of products we can rapidly make. So now we have the products and the ability to make the products, but not the people to buy them. Europe is getting old. Japan is very old. There aren’t enough young people, enough “new” people to sustain the supplies our factories can produce. Their is not enough people to generate sufficient demand to counterbalance our production capabilities. Hence Chrysler shuts down for 30 days due to excess inventory in showrooms. We have millions of new homes sitting empty, and no young people to occupy them.
Imagine…..
All of the people currently living in the 62 largest cities of this country gone!
Completely gone!…
That is what it means to have aborted 48 million children. Think of these cities all empty and you know why our economy is faltering:
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