Better late than never--on many issues.
Take Bush's cue on competitiveness
STOP IN SILICON VALLEY SHOWCASES NEED TO TAKE MORE FORCEFUL APPROACHES ON EDUCATION AND RESEARCH
Mercury News Editorial
President Bush arrives in Silicon Valley today fresh from a week of stumping for, well, Silicon Valley.
More precisely, Bush has been making the case -- forcefully, eloquently and repeatedly -- that for America to remain a technology and economic leader in an increasingly competitive world, it must recommit to investing in its future.
It's a message that valley leaders have been preaching for years and that Bush first embraced in his State of the Union. That's when he announced his ``American Competitiveness Initiative'' to double federal government funding for basic research, strengthen math and science education, make permanent a tax credit for research and development, and encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. To see the president promoting the initiative, as he's done every day this week, is as encouraging as it is necessary.
Indeed, despite bipartisan support in Congress for the president's plan, getting legislation passed is certain to be an uphill battle.
In the Senate, various bills that implement portions of Bush's competitiveness agenda enjoy the support of more than half of the nation's senators. And in the House, Democrats unveiled a competitiveness agenda similar to the president's last November. But Republican leaders in the House remain cool to the idea, at best. Bush must work overtime to persuade them. It he succeeds, competitiveness could prove to be one of the most positive and enduring legacies of his presidency.
Part of the president's challenge in convincing members of his own party is self-inflicted. After years of tax cuts pushed by the White House, even Republicans are now alarmed by the huge budget deficits they've created. And the American Competitiveness Initiative will cost money -- $5.9 billion in 2007 and $136 billion over 10 years.
But it's an investment that's well worth it. As the president himself pointed out at Tuskegee University on Wednesday, it was through federally funded research that ``the Internet came to be.'' Other fruits of government-funded research include search technologies that spawned companies like Google, microprocessors breakthroughs that turned Apple, Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics into powerhouses, and countless technological advances that delivered enormous benefits to the economy. Future research in new energy technologies, for example, could help reduce America's dependence on foreign oil and turn the nation into a world leader in clean energy.
And without the investment, America's eroding ability to compete globally is certain to deteriorate further. Nations such as China and India, Russia, Ireland and countless others are emerging as economic powers in part because they are willing to invest in themselves, in the education of their children and in the training of their workers.
Consider that China's universities are producing nearly 10 times as many engineering graduates as their American counterparts, and India's, five times as many. That for the cost of a single engineer's salary here, a company can hire 11 in India and that American 12th-graders recently performed below the average for 21 industrialized countries in math and science. For a country that built its standard of living on the shoulders of the most skilled, flexible and productive workforce in the world, those are alarming statistics.
The seeds of America's prosperity over the past few decades were planted in the late 1950s, when the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union prodded President Eisenhower to call for massive investments in education, infrastructure and research. The time to secure our children's prosperity is now.
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