Do Americans Remotely Care About the Next Generations?

Oh sure, most parents and grandparents – with bizarre criminal and extreme negligent exceptions – love their children. But preparing their children to survive and perhaps thrive in life appears to have a fallen off the list of American priorities to the point where it is barely visible on our master list, which instead seems to favor deficit reduction over growth-directed investment and making sure our military spends at least what the next ten big military spending-nations combined commit to defense over education.

I’ve already blogged heavily on primary and secondary education, so today I am focusing on post-secondary skills that we desperately need and the kind of infrastructure commitment we need to support so that our children can actually cross bridges safely, feel secure in their drinking water, remain healthy as sewage is properly removed, commute to work within reasonable times and prosper from the free flow of goods and services across our roads and highways while remaining safe from dam and levee collapses. We have put infrastructure on a back burner, even though financing such projects is actually an investment with a measurable rate of return, since the collapse in 2008.

Between 2007 to 2011, the United States has seriously de-prioritized building and repairing our infrastructure: “The United States has fallen sharply in the World Economic Forum's ranking of national infrastructure systems. In the forum's 2007-2008 report, American infrastructure was ranked 6th best in the world…The 2011-2012 report due in September [showed] America at No. 16, with South Korea overtaking the United States during the last year, according to a copy of the rankings obtained by Reuters… The quality of American roads is about on par with those of Malaysia. They lag Hong Kong, whose infrastructure tops the overall list…

“Weak transport infrastructure alone will shave 0.2 percentage points off economic growth this year, said Steven Landau, a researcher in Boston at the Economic Development Research Group… America spends roughly 2 percent of GDP on infrastructure, about half what it did 50 years ago, according to a U.S. government report from October [2010]. Europe spends around 5 percent and China 9 percent… Because American spending is falling, the drag on growth will grow to 1.3 percentage points in 2020, Landau said.” Reuters, August 16^th.

In August of 2008, before our infrastructure repair budgets were further reduced, CNN noted: “Across the United States, there are about 600,000 bridges. The Federal Highway Administration reported in 2006 that one quarter of the nation's bridges were at risk. The American Society for Civil Engineers said in 2006 that it would cost nearly $10 billion every year for the next two decades to fix them.” Estimates today are that between 60,000 and 75,000 U.S. bridges are seriously unsafe.

From February 8^th damsafety.org, the organ of the state dam and levee safety officials: “The latest back and forth stems from the creation of a new database of the nation’s 2,200 federal levee systems. 10 percent of the nation’s levees have been declared ‘unacceptable.’ Only 9 percent of the nation’s levees have been rated “acceptable,’ while 80 percent have been deemed ‘minimally acceptable.’” 4,000 dams are in imminent danger of collapse according to that organization. Adds the June 20^th Scientific American: “As the U.S. and China endure record-breaking floods [in the 2011] spring, there is a risk that is being overlooked amidst the inundated towns, evacuations and rising waters. Dams in the U.S. boast an average age of 50 years, and the American Society of Civil Engineers continues to give the nation’s dams a D grade overall in terms of maintenance. Will it take the catastrophic collapse of a dam—like the five [failures] in the 1970s in the U.S. that killed hundreds—before the infrastructure is repaired?” Think about how expensive it is to deal with a massive levee or dam collapse as opposed to fixing it in the first place. Apparently, we just don’t give a damn!

Further, in a world where jobs in engineering and healthcare still go begging, instead of building up our post-secondary capacity in these arenas, because teaching these skills requires costly facilities, equipment and laboratories beyond average instruction, we are deficit-cutting these programs because they create the greatest “savings” in state budgets. It doesn’t seem to matter that the new jobs they create, the resulting growing tax base and productivity cycle that benefits us all, and the multiplier effort on job creation would go a long way to help shift our deficit ways into a potential surplus. Politicians are only looking for short-term solutions.

“Technical, engineering and health care expertise are among the few skills in huge demand even in today’s lackluster job market. They are also, unfortunately, some of the most expensive subjects to teach. As a result, state colleges in Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Florida and Texas have eliminated entire engineering and computer science departments… At one community college in North Carolina — a state with a severe nursing shortage — nursing program applicants so outnumber available slots that there is a waiting list just to get on the waiting list.” New York Times, March 1^st.

We simply don’t seem to differentiate between wasteful spending – like the $850,000 per U.S. soldier in Afghanistan that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testified before a Congressional subcommittee – and long term investments – supporting education, infrastructure and research – that pay long-term cash dividends and support economic growth. We are killing our post-secondary education system and crushing students in an impaired economy with impossible higher levels of tuition and student debt. “Even large tuition increases have not fully offset state cuts, since many state legislatures cap how much colleges can charge for each course. So classes get bigger, tenured faculty members are replaced with adjuncts and technical courses are sacrificed.

“State appropriations for colleges fell by 7.6 percent in 2011-12, the largest annual decline in at least five decades, according to a report from the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University. In one extreme example, Arizona has slashed its college budget by 31 percent since the recession began in 2007… It is this cumulative public divestment — and not extravagances like climbing walls or recreational centers advertised on a few elite campuses — that is primarily responsible for skyrocketing tuitions at state institutions, which enroll three out of every four college students.” NY Times. Are those seeking a better life, sacrificing to put their kids through school doing nothing more than fostering snobbery? Is this the new American value system? Does America really want to shoot itself in the head and simply step out of the global economic race by under-training the next generation? So if someone asks me if Americans really love their children, I’d have to answer, on paper and at Christmas… maybe.

I’m Peter Dekom, and our commitment to our children needs a lot more affirmative action than mere loving platitudes.