Livin’ Off the Past, Ignoring the Future

You’d think that if our government really believed in the United States, they would invest in it. Instead, we are relying on what past, more visionary, administrations created for all future Americans. Like the infrastructure repairs, upgrades and development of massive electrical power generation in the Depression era. The same electrical over-capacity that allowed the United States to supply the free world and its own military with ships, planes, tanks, truck, guns and munitions to win WWII. Or the Eisenhower administration’s construction of the National Interstate Highway system that shot our productivity through the roof. Perhaps the medical research that ended polio or the space race that developed avionics, computer-driven command and control systems, GPS location technology and dozens of other job-creating inventions funded by the US government.

But that was then. Aside from denigrating the value of human capital – by slashing education budgets, ignoring massive shortfalls in our daily infrastructure and cutting back funding for healthcare and medical research – the government is wrapped up in idiotic pursuits that do nothing to invest in our future. Trade wars with tariffs that will never pay for themselves. Building the most expansive military in history, but one that has not won a major global conflict since WWII. Cutting taxes for the rich while cutting back investments in what the United States will need to be competitive and productive in future years. Slamming immigration even for the most qualified engineers and scientists by refusing to allow their families to accompany them. Higher education has never been so unaffordable.

In short, our recent policies have ballooned our deficit – creative massive interest payments that devour our federal budget – while just about everything that would really grow our economy is the subject of budget cuts. That notion that if you give rich people more money, jobs and values will “trickle down” to the rest of us may be the most disproven economic theory on earth, but it is always the backstop to conservative efforts to reduce taxes “to stimulate the economy.” That “tax cut that was supposed to pay for itself” hasn’t… and never will.

While China is funneling money into infrastructure, education and research, we aren’t. As China threatens to dominate the world of artificial intelligence and quantum computing, we lag woefully behind. It’s a battle where the first to achieve that pinnacle of full quantum computing will be the one and only winner… and that winner is decreasingly likely to be the United States. With that computing power, China will be able to hack into any server and create unhackable barriers to everyone else.

We have an administration that is science averse. Nature doesn’t care who is stupid and who is not. She doesn’t alter her irreversible flows to cater to any particular constituency or follow any trendy “solve it all” false slogans. One of the most obvious realities of our current federal government is how much they hold scientists, educated elites and experienced experts in total disdain. For future Americans, these shibboleths are disastrous. False beliefs that cannot sustain a great nation. The government is phasing itself out of supporting scientific and medical research. Education? Worse. Better to waste money cutting taxes for those who do not need it.

“America ranks 28 out of 39 countries in terms of what share of its GDP gets allocated to university research. In real numbers, that was about $33.3 billion in 2017 or .2% of the overall total. That’s a lot of money, but it’s offset by the cost of doing business in the country. When that GDP proportion is adjusted for economic impact or so-called ‘purchasing power parity,’ the U.S. actually ranks 34th overall.

“‘Government funding of R&D has always been a pretty important enabler of innovation,’ says Rob Atkinson, the president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, an independent nonpartisan think tank, who coauthored a recent report on the trend. ‘It sort of creates the seed corn, if you will, that entrepreneurs can then take and build companies off of. Universities are a key area of that.’ The other typical funder is corporate contributors, which combine to provide about one-tenth of what the government does and has followed a similar downward trend. ‘We’re doing poorly on both,’ he says.

“And it gets worse: Based on ITIF’s report, not only is the United States investing less that other places, many of those places are giving more and more. The data comes from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and National Science Foundation. Since 2011, ITIF has found that the U.S. rate of spending has declined at a rate of about 2% per year while China is spending about 10% more annually. In fact, the top 12 countries are putting in at least double (and sometimes far more) than the U.S. is providing. The U.S. would have to spend $108 billion annually to match top-ranked Switzerland.

“While America is obviously a global power with a booming tech sector for now, that should be viewed as an unsettling trend. ‘Part of the reason I think people aren’t as alarmed about this is because we had such a head start,’ says Atkinson, who notes that the government spent more on university research and development in the mid-60s than the rest of the world did combined.

“ITIF recommends that the U.S. increase its allotment by at least $45 billion annually to maintain a slot in the top seven largest financial contributors. Beyond that, it will take some serious order of magnitude increased to knock off the top spenders. It also recommends that Congress expand its energy-related research tax credit program from just businesses to include universities.

“‘We built up the greatest universities in the world by far, and we still have the top universities in the world,’ Atkinson says. ‘It’s sort of like glacial melting of icebergs. . . . every year the Chinese universities are getting better compared to ours, British universities, European universities, they’re all, they’re all getting better compared to ours, and they’re getting better for the simple reason that they’re putting more money into it.’” Ben Paynter writing for FastCompany.com, October 22^nd. There’s a reason Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are so fond of Donald Trump’s vision for America. Without much help from either of them, our President is simply pulling us out of the race. That “head start” is long gone.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and the accelerating damage from such short-sighted priorities and policies just might be our rather dramatic undoing.