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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
All I could think to myself was: If we\u2019re 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 \u201d\u201d that\u2019s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted \u201clost 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.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
My fellow Americans, we can\u2019t continue in this mode of \u201cDumb as we wanna be.\u201d\u009d We\u2019ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n