George Rebane
[This piece is the first of a four part series on taxes, jobs, and income that includes, in order of posting, ‘The Administration Discovers Shortage of Engineers’, ‘Higher Tax Rates = Lower Revenues’, ‘More Green Companies Heading for Greener Pastures’, ‘Employment and Income Inequality’.]
The shortage of native technical talent in America has been known to those who read for at least twenty years. The shortage became apparent during the Reagan administration, but the hullaballoo created by the personal computer and interactive multimedia technologies overshadowed the acknowledgement that it was the engineers and other techies who created that new wealth engine – it was not the MBAs and the lawyers.
But institutional venture capitalists helped promulgate the myth that propeller heads did only, you know, propeller head stuff, whatever that was before they finally showed up with a marketable product. The real wealth was created by business suits and legal beagles. Besides, it is much easier to get an MBA or a law degree. So native enrollments in tech schools started dropping, but not to worry, kids from overseas flocked to our excellent university programs in technology.
As the years passed and young people graduated from high schools with advanced placement programs in self-esteem, they began to discover that it was even easier to get degrees in black studies, environment management, comparative social justice, and God knows what else. And what the hell, with one of those sheepskins in your shorts you could always BS your way into a government job.
Well, the world changed in the interval. The Great Doubling came and no one noticed – they still don’t because it’s not visible from where they stuck their heads (RR keyword ‘Great Doubling’). The foreign graduates began more and more to go back to their own countries instead of Silicon Valley to start their businesses. With the US headed for European socialism and their own lands heading toward capitalism, the decision on where to start a business was easy.
Now we have the situation where no one gives that big rat’s asset if you’re a lawyer or have an MBA. You need an MBA today to be seriously considered to run a Jiffy-Lube, and lawyers are making as little as $35/hr in New York just to get some part time work. Most certainly, nobody overseas wants to hire such Americans for a ‘fair day’s wages’. And forget it if you have a degree in Latino Perspectives.
So now President Obama sagely informs the nation that we need at least 10,000 new engineers every year – I am sure that is a brown number. But it finally acknowledges a desperate national need, and a need that cannot be filled with the crap they teach kids in our public K-12 grades. Other nations are graduating many times that number of engineers and technical workers annually, and it is they who now build the fastest computers, best cars, smartest robots, and merrily hack their way into our nation’s most sensitive financial, industrial, and defense networks. (That last one is perhaps the scariest story of all for another time.)
Our kids still proclaim that they ‘don’t do numbers’, instead they are being taught their ‘rights’ and the ‘rights of nature’ under new systems of international social justice. When was the last time any of us examined the qualifications of our unionized K-12 teachers, or spoke up at a board of education meeting?
rebanesruminations.com 
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