In other words, we Americans are in the process of gutting the core of government, and it's shocking if you actually look at what Congress and the president recently agreed to. Yet the Republicans want even more cuts now. But we're already on the verge of having to simply close down a lot of the most basic functions of government. In skills and in education we are shooting ourselves in the foot: Our kids are dropping out of college right and left because they can't afford the tuition and the high-interest loans that a good education now requires. Why? Because since 1980, the price of college tuition has gone up 600% and total student loan debt is projected to pass the $1 trillion dollar mark this year.
Ever larger numbers of students can no longer get adequate support from government for a college education. In other countries they get that support automatically, but not in the USA. As a result, we are, in a whole lot of ways, gradually falling behind other industrialized countries. Way behind. The math and science scores of our H.S. and college students are way down towards the bottom if you look at the list of industrialized countries. We're somewhere around 34th in the world, while the percentage of our population who are kept behind bars puts us right up there at the top of this list.
By this means our economy is being completely divided, between two groups
The first group is the top 15% -- the affluent, college-educated folks from elite universities, whose families could afford the now very steep tuition. These are the folks who are benefitting from globalization.
The other group is comprised of the bottom four-fifths of our society, which no longer has the necessary skills to compete globally, can't afford college tuition, and can't find jobs anymore because the jobs they used to have, were moved to China or to other emerging economies that out-compete us because their workers are often better trained and better educated than ours, and work for a fraction of the price.
So, is there a future for American manufacturing? Yes, quite possibly -- but only if we begin to really invest heavily in it once again -- and that means investments in science, technology, infrastructure, and a highly-skilled labor force.
But first we have to decide that we're going to invest in it again. Germany has a strong manufacturing sector and they work hard to keep it competitive. We, on the other hand, let most of our manufacturing jobs go abroad. Why? Because that is what's most profitable for our major corporations -- the same ones that put up most of the campaign money for our bought-and-paid-for politicians, who obligingly dropped import tariff charges for them, so that they could very profitably ship their foreign made goods into the US. That's why manufacturing has been leaving our country for the last 30 years. And unfortunately, when President Obama talks about a jobs program, we're not seeing anything beyond a short-term gimmick. Example: We're going to cut taxes for one year and then raise them afterwards, even though we will still have structural challenges in this country, with regard to inadequate skills and defective infrastructure.
The President talks about these issues but doesn't make any move toward budgeting for them.
Republicans don't even talk about it; they just want to sweep all this out of mind. And that's our problem right now. Since 2007, when the housing bubble began to deflate, people began to cut back on their spending, and now most of them no longer have enough discretionary income to keep our economy going. And without that spending, which makes accounts for 70% of our gross national product, we don't have enough of a growth engine, in the way of jobs and worker income, to sustain the economy. Hence the ongoing recession, which is likely to worsen unless we make some radical changes in national investments, of the kind I just described.
President Obama has gone for gimmick after gimmick, trying to raise demand without raising wages. However, the core problem is that in large swaths of our economy we can no longer effectively compete in this internationally very competitive environment. Millions of make-work jobs or even simple income subsidies, for a year or so, are not going to help us in the long run -- that would only be a short-term fix. What's needed for a long-term solution is increased competitiveness, internationally. And, once again, that calls for major long-term investments in science, technology, infrastructure, R&D, and a highly-skilled and very well-educated labor force (which we are allowing to fall by the wayside).
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