Prioritizing Mythology, Trashing Elites, Unaffordable Education & Immigration

Prioritizing Mythology, Trashing Elites, Unaffordable Education & Immigration

How Does America Protect Her Future?

Who knew that the United States would perfect trashing itself so quicky. How far we have fallen since we ramped up our educational goals and commitments in the Dwight Eisenhower (a Republican at that) era, after we were embarrassed by the Soviet “first,” launching an orbital satellite: Sputnik. Our educational system rose to being the best on earth, the GI bill was still turning out college grads by the millions, but today we rank 19th and falling fast at our secondary level of public education. College is absurdly expensive, becoming unaffordable even as other nations find paths to provide free or low-cost college equivalents. Our immigration policy – if you can find it – is a combination of stopping immigrant STEM experts we seem unable to develop sufficiently here and eliminating the vastly less expense labor pool for the most menial jobs Americans just won’t accept.

We complain about rising prices everywhere, but we make damned sure that those needed to keep pricing manageable in construction, hospitality/food service and agriculture continue to be pushed out of our country. We watch as Canada and the UK suck up all those tech workers that we will not allow to enter the US with their families. China is pushing the AI envelope faster than we are, and both Russia and China are ahead in hypersonic missiles. We lose massive labor values as women hold back from the workplace for lack of affordable childcare, and we remain the only developed country without universal healthcare… as private profits in that sector soar. A loss in aggregate productivity. We have become increasingly fact averse, denigrating the scientific and medical experts who once defined our perpetual ascent to the cutting edge.

We do not tax wealth, and when all is said and done, we are quite willing to continue to cut taxes for the rich, complaining that “entitlements” are the real cause of our massive $34 trillion deficit. Yet with every tax cut, despite the continued promise that they will pay for themselves with trickled down financed new high paying jobs that never materialize, we generate trillions of dollars of deficits – a reverse Robin Hood, where the deficits are shared by all of us but virtually all the tax cuts only benefit the rich. Even with the latest legislation, our infrastructure is still trillions of dollars from being updated, we’ve never seen so many homeless Americans and our average standard of living and life expectancy are declining in a tsunami of income inequality.

1930s New Deal massive construction of hydroelectric power generation and other infrastructure development literally won WWII for the allies. With all that surplus power, we built the ships, tanks, planes and munitions that defined how that war was won. Other than minor damage in Hawaii and some of our outlying minor territories, the United States did not suffer the WWII devastation of Europe and Asia. They had nothing. We had almost everything intact. Post-WWII was a boom time in our country… but we were using factories and methods that did not need to be fixed… but were soon obsolete by modern standards. It took the rest of the world two decades to catch up, but they did so with more modern and productive factories. You might not remember how a nation of virtually all America-made cars morphed into an ocean of Japanese, German and British imports that held up longer than American “built for short term value” cars.

In short, the United States continued to rely on American investments and developments of an earlier era. We stopped investing in our future, we elevated corporate finance at the hot value, and strolled ourselves into the present… albeit with a nice lifestyle for many… on borrowed money and time. Paper profits trumped making and inventing stuff that we could export and use to grow. Hard patents gave way to “social media” patents with more pain than gain.

One recent “small” example that caught my eye was that even in the world of gathering data from space, our existing telescopes are decades out of date, even as that frontier offers potential answers and opportunities reflective of the mega-technological growth of our post-Sputnik era. Technology is almost an addiction. Assuming a technology is completely irrelevant, it has to be updated. And expensive technology yields expensive updating… or simply accepting that you are willing to fall behind. So, when I read a recent piece about telescopes, how extremely large telescopes (ELTs) were an entirely new generation of space voyeurs, a single telescope able to view and analyze the view from half a hemisphere from the elevated, clear sky placements the required, I wondered why they were necessary and what they cost.

It seems without these analytic tools, constantly scanning and comparing the changes literally everywhere, a constant shifting narrow view simply cannot provide the complete and accurate picture. But they aren’t cheap, between $2 and $3 billion each depending on location, and the National Science Board, which advises the National Science Foundation, does not think we can afford both: a Giant Magellan Telescope at Las Campanas in Chile and/or a Thirty Meter Telescope, possibly destined for Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii. There has been work on each, now halted and awaiting funding for completion.

As Dennis Overbye writes for the March 8th New York Times: “But which of the two telescopes will be [completed] — and the fate of the dreaming and the billions of dollars’ worth of time and technology invested already — remains an open question… Both would be larger and more powerful than any telescope currently on Earth or in space, but less than half the projected cost has been raised so far by the international collaborations backing them.

“Michael Turner, an emeritus cosmologist at the University of Chicago and former assistant director for mathematical and physical sciences for the N.S.F., called the recent development ‘excellent news for U.S. astronomy and saw ‘a realistic path forward’ for an extremely large telescope… ‘Before you know it, the telescope will be dazzling us with images of exoplanets and the early universe,’ he said. ‘Should it have happened faster? Of course, but that is history. Full speed ahead, eyes on the future!’” Funding is there probable for one of these ELTs. But which?

There is always push-back from a budget impaired Congress which would bear part of the cost, especially when there is so much criticism of our exploding deficit. “Billions” are always scary, but if you think how many discoveries have been incorporated into our daily lives from building these technologies and how desperate we are to explore the possibilities of minerals, life and potential we cannot even envision now, the dangers that could challenge Earth itself, how can we not?

Europe is already on its own path with an ELT (halfway completed in Cerro Armazones near European Southern Observatory’s Paranal facility in northern Chile), and China is contemplating its version. Given the demands on governmental budgets, issues with burning priority demands, it is always easy to pass. But at what point can we accept the United States as a technology also-ran? Will we lose our edge if we do not?

I’m Peter Dekom, and while we need to address immediate needs, if we do not invest in technology that has general potential vs a specific targeted goal, exactly how will we have a truly globally competitive future?