I'd finished watching American Idol and started doing dishes when a too-loud, smoothly southern voice began to emanate from my T.V. It was the voice of Erskine Bowles, Former Co-Chairman (D) of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform and the former president of the University of North Carolina. He had a lot to say.
He was talking about the Democrats' proposed budget. He thinks America shouldn't be spending as much as it is on its military/national defense budget, and that we must spend more on education and research because, after all, we live in an intellectually driven global economy. Of course, I'm paraphrasing, since I had to pull my hands out of soapy water, take a few notes, and run up to my office to write this.
I beg to differ with Mr. Bowles and his take on the global economy. He stated that it's driven by intellect, based on education and research. I believe our global economy is soundly based on one thing: manufacturing.
We have outsourced too many of our manufacturing plants. For that matter, we have outsourced far too many of our I.T. resources as well, e.g. Dell returned its help desk to the U.S. from its outsourced India location after a few years of abysmal reviews from customers telling people not to buy Dell due to extremely poor customer support.
Our global economy still runs on "who makes the most stuff." By outsourcing America's "making stuff" to China, Japan, India, etc., and rarely manufacturing goods in America, we're sending our economic superiority to other countries and taking an inferior role in the global economy.
We don't make much of anything anymore, and it is a conundrum. It's much, much cheaper to manufacture goods in other countries because those countries don't have to worry about pesky things like human rights, anti-child labor laws, and OSHA regulations. But when nearly everything we buy is made in another country, it takes money out of the pockets of ordinary Americans.
Americans have been spoon fed the idea that we are inferior to other countries because their children spend more time in school than ours or they study more difficult subjects at earlier ages. Don't get me wrong--I strongly believe in a rigorous academic curriculum for American students. But I believe the bottomless bowl of American educational and intellectual inferiority is intentionally fed to us by the teacher's unions and their supporters to garner more of our tax money for their pockets. If there are continuous problems with education, they can keep asking for more money "for the children."
The education gap that may or may not exist between our country and others (one can argue that our summer vacations and weekends off give American children the time and opportunity for creativity and ingenuity that other countries lack) is not the problem with our economy. It's the Manufacturing Gap.
How to solve this is the subject of a much longer post and one that wasn't written during the five minutes my husband was waiting for me to finish so we could watch "Dexter." But I had to say something in the face of this seemingly powerful man spouting the rhetoric that education is what drives the world economy.
The above-mentioned educational differences have existed for a long time in many countries. Yet the economies of the countries to which America has outsourced manufacturing are skyrocketing. It's common sense to see that losing this valuable manufacturing commodity is going to, in turn, drain America's economy.
1 comment:
Fantastic Article. Sure, education is extremely important but with more dollars being made at home comes more dollars available to pay taxes with to help fund education. Thank you!
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