{"id":641,"date":"2004-04-22T10:09:02","date_gmt":"2004-04-22T15:09:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/archives\/2004\/04\/22\/the-competitiveness-struggle\/"},"modified":"2004-04-22T10:09:02","modified_gmt":"2004-04-22T15:09:02","slug":"the-competitiveness-struggle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/archives\/2004\/04\/22\/the-competitiveness-struggle\/","title":{"rendered":"The Competitiveness Struggle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Losing Our Edge?” href=”http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/04\/22\/opinion\/22FRIE.html”>Thomas Friedman – Losing Our Edge?<\/a><\/p>\n

And what is the Bush strategy? Let’s go to Mars. Hello? Right now we should have a Manhattan Project to develop a hydrogen-based energy economy – it’s within reach and would serve our economy, our environment and our foreign policy by diminishing our dependence on foreign oil. Instead, the Bush team says let’s go to Mars. Where is Congress? Out to lunch – or, worse, obsessed with trying to keep Susie Smith’s job at the local pillow factory that is moving to the Caribbean – without thinking about a national competitiveness strategy. And where is Wall Street? So many of the plutocrats there know that the Bush fiscal policy is a long-term disaster. They know it – but they won’t say a word because they are too greedy or too gutless.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My biggest problem with the Democrats is the unions. After just finishing Fast Food Nation, I can see an obvious need for more union involvement in some places, (meat packing) but in others, they are hampering our ability to compete. Not having national health care is hampering our ability to compete. Cutting education funding is hampering our ability to compete.<\/p>\n

Friedman is 100% correct. Yes we have terrorists to find and bring to justice. We’ve involved ourselves in rebuilding Iraq. (We can’t leave now) But if we don’t commit serious time and effort to education, health care for all, and competition in emerging technologies on a global scale, we will fall behind and we will lose.<\/p>\n

The bottom line: we are actually in the middle of two struggles right now. One is against the Islamist terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, and the other is a competitiveness-and-innovation struggle against India, China, Japan and their neighbors. And while we are all fixated on the former (I’ve been no exception), we are completely ignoring the latter. We have got to get our focus back in balance, not to mention our budget. We can’t wage war on income taxes and terrorism and a war for innovation at the same time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anyways, an excellent opinion page, check it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pf4VN-al","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}