http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/AOT10-Government Spending.html<\/a>), the national debt was $9.3 trillions.\u00a0 This means that our national debt has increased by almost 13% in eight months!\u00a0 In terms of each U.S. person\u2019s share, it has increased from $30.6K to almost $34.6K!\u00a0 If we don\u2019t take drastic steps to reduce significantly this huge national debt, essentially we will be bankrupting our grandchildren.\u00a0 Because of the current financial crisis we are facing, we may have to swallow the bitter pill and increase our national debt even more in the near term before we can turn it around.<\/p>\nWe point out these shortcomings not because we want to trounce on the U.S. We understand that there are a lot of positives about the U.S., and we understand that every country has its shortcomings. We focus on our shortcomings because we are concerned that if we let these shortcomings continue in the years to come, the quality of life for our children and especially for our grandchildren will suffer greatly. It is time that we be courageous and scrutinize carefully what we have been doing and then take drastic corrective actions, including actions that we weren’t willing to take in the past. The solution is of course extremely complex and involves many things. I believe that the solution at a high level must include at least the following three components.<\/p>\n
Mental Fortitude<\/strong><\/p>\n\n- We must admit that our country is facing serious problems. The first step in solving a problem is to admit that there is a problem.<\/li>\n
- To solve these problems, we cannot conduct business as usual. We must be willing to do things which in the past we were not willing to do.<\/li>\n
- Each of us must be willing to contribute and may have to sacrifice something in order to make the country better and therefore in the long run also make it better for ourselves. We must emphasize more on \u201cwe-ism,\u201d instead of \u201cme-ism.\u201d.<\/li>\n
- We must set higher moral and ethical standards for everyone, including ourselves, our children, and our political and corporate leaders.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
High Level Comprehensive Strategic Plan:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n- Our government must formulate a comprehensive, strategic plan that focuses on the long-term returns, and not always on the short-term returns.<\/li>\n
- We must recognize that the current situation is drastically different from the situation during the first 200+ years of our nation. In the first 100+ years, we had vast territories across the North American continent for our country to expand and vast natural resources for our people to utilize. In the second 100+ years, our country’s natural geographical isolation helped to provide barriers to keep other countries from attacking us and our stronger economy helped us to dominate the weaker countries in the world. In the 21st century of global connectedness and global economy and the rise of more economic powers, we must find a way to compete successfully with many more worthy competitors. Furthermore, when the world is so connected, terrorists can now easily create havoc across national boundaries.<\/li>\n
- We must stress the importance of a balanced budget and the need to reduce our national debt. If we keep living beyond our means, our children and grandchildren will pay for it.<\/li>\n
- We must provide proper government oversights to protect the public from excessive greed and risky investment schemes.<\/li>\n
- We must focus on developing alternative energy resources, not only to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but also as significant long-term revenue sources via exporting these alternative energy resources.<\/li>\n
- We must develop smaller, more fuel-efficient, and higher quality cars so that we can gain back market share. Our corporate leaders must address the fundamental problems facing their companies, and our labor unions must be more willing to compromise when the circumstances require it.<\/li>\n
- We must revitalize our high end manufacturing industry to take advantage of the great creativity and entrepreneurship of Americans, so that we can benefit more from the products we invent.<\/li>\n
- We must take care of our environment. This not only can make our lives healthier, but it also provides long-term revenue sources via exporting future environmental friendly technologies.<\/li>\n
- We must put more focus on improving and expanding our infrastructure so that we rely more on public transportations and less on personal transportations, thus reducing our energy consumption and contributing to a cleaner environment.<\/li>\n
- We must treat other countries, nationalities, and cultures with respect and as partners in solving the global problems. We should not ride into a foreign land as a lone cowboy to solve that foreign land’s problems. We should not give preferential treatment to one country at the expense of other countries.<\/li>\n
- To combat terrorism, on the one hand we need to get rid of any unnecessary political motivations from our political positions and actions in order to make it more difficult for the terrorists to attract new recruits, and on the other hand for those countries that are fertile grounds for new terrorist recruits we must find ways to work with those countries to try to improve their economy.<\/li>\n
- We should continue to reduce the gaps between different races, different sexes, the rich and the poor, and the have’s and the have not’s. At the same time, we should reduce the feeling of entitlements, and we all must contribute our part.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Raising Our Educational Standard:<\/strong> (we separate this out as a separate item from Comprehensive Strategic Plan because of its fundamental importance)<\/p>\n\n- The quality of the graduates at every level of our educational system will probably be the most important factor in determining whether our country can compete successfully with other countries.<\/li>\n
- The world is now flat and we are in a global economy. In many aspects of our economy, we have to compete with the rest of the world. Since our standard of living is higher than almost any other country, we must compete at the high end of the food chain, and cannot compete at the manual labor end of the foot chain. So we need to continue to create new and better inventions, products, ways of doing things, ways of managing the manufacturing process, ways of distributions and marketing of our products, and ways of providing customer service. All these require high quality graduates at every level.<\/li>\n
- In the second half of the 20th century, our country was fortunate to be a magnet for the best and brightest of the world’s students to come to the U.S. for college or graduate school. Because of better opportunities in the U.S., most of these best and brightest stay in the U.S. to work and became major contributors to the U.S. economy. Although the number of foreign students coming to the U.S. to study might not have changed significantly, many more of them are returning to their own country after they graduate or after a few years of working in the U.S. Furthermore, with opportunities opening in other developed countries, many more Americans are now going abroad to study or to work. This results in a reduced brain inflow to the U.S. and perhaps eventually to a brain outflow from the U.S. As discussed in the previous bullet item, this could be devastating to our ability to compete at the high end of the food chain.<\/li>\n
- We previously discussed that the American educational system is not ranked near the top. There could be many reasons contributing to this status. In my opinion, one of the reasons is that our teachers in the elementary and secondary levels are not evaluated and rewarded based on a merit system. Instead, they are evaluated and rewarded based on a tenure system and years of service. It is ironic that the U.S. prides itself in being an advocate of a free enterprise economic system based on competition, yet the fundamental system that trains our workforce is not based on a merit system. When insightful and courageous school administrators try to establish a merit-based system, as in the Washington D.C. school system, our teacher unions are usually at the forefront of battling against it. It makes one wonder what is the primary target of the teachers: the welfare of their students or their own welfare?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Summary:<\/strong> The U.S. is on an unprecedented crossroad. We are facing tremendous challenges which if we don’t properly solve, our country will no longer be the richest and most powerful country in the world, and the quality of life for our children and grandchildren will suffer greatly. Solving these challenges will not be easy. We will not solve these problems if we continue to do business as usual. The solutions are complex and will require all of us (citizens, corporations, schools, unions, and government) to look within ourselves and take courageous actions that are beneficial in the long term to the society as a whole, and not just beneficial to ourselves in the short term. We need to recognize that if we do this, then it will also be to our benefit in the long term.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Several significant events occurring recently in the U.S. should force us as Americans to scrutinize closely what has been happening in our country. In particular, our country, having been the richest and most powerful country in the world in essentially the second half of the 20th century, doesn’t seem from several perspectives to be doing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":409,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions\/409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}