We Need More Than Our Infrastructure Rehabbed
by James Glaser
December 4, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama has talked about rebuilding our roads and bridges as a way to put people back to work, and that might be just the thing we need, especially if we rebuild those roads with hand labor. We have millions of Americans that are qualified to use a pick or shovel, but getting more technical that that would be a stretch for them.

Last week on Florida Public Radio, a school superintendent was touting the fact that his district would have a 50.2 % graduation rate. Now get this. He was touting that because no longer would his district be in the lowest tier of districts with poor graduation rates. That means there is a whole tier doing worse than 50.2 %.

Years ago a young man or woman could find a life-long job in a manufacturing plant in almost every state in the union, but not today. Today, even the few unskilled jobs around still require a high school diploma or at least a GED. With the downturn in the economy, those jobs are going to be sought after by people with a lot more than a high school education.

Today, if you are in the construction industry, it really doesn't matter how skilled your trade is, because there isn't a lot of building going on.

You might think college is the answer, but that education route to the job market is being taken away from many American families because of the cost. The New Your Times reports in a column by Tamar Lewis that "College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S."

The rising cost of college — even before the recession — threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the biennial report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007 while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families.

For the last 60 years, America has decided that we must be the policeman for the world, and we have spent our blood and treasure in that endeavor. Now today, we can see what that has cost us. We have given up our once great education system so we can buy bombs and tanks. We let our roads and bridges fall into disrepair so that we could develop new weapons system and launch that new aircraft carrier. Many of our best minds have been working on new weapons or they have been figuring out how best to torture those we think are our enemies.

Yes, we have to be the best and the most powerful military in the history of the world, but millions of Americans are illiterate. Many of our fast food restaurants don't have numbers on their cash registers, because they can't find employees who have simple math skills. Instead the register has pictures of a big fry or a small one, a big coke or a small one. You press the right pictures, and the price pops up. You enter the size bill the customer gives you, and the machine figures out what the change should be.

How long will it be before America is a third world country? When high school graduation rates hover around 50%, you know it won't take long. President Obama wants to rebuild our roads and bridges, but he also wants to continue being the world's policeman, by making sure we keep the world's most powerful military.

Soon we will have to make a choice. Do we want to continue to spend more on our military than what the rest of the world spends on theirs combined, or do we want to start spending our money on our children and their future? We can't do both. If we don't know that by now, we should.

Free JavaScripts provided
by The JavaScript Source