Bush's Albatrosses

David Broder today:

The factors that make President Bush a vulnerable incumbent have almost nothing to do with his opponent, John F. Kerry. They stem directly from two closely linked, high-stakes policy gambles that Bush chose on his own. Neither has worked out as he hoped.

The first gamble was the decision to attack Iraq; the second, to avoid paying for the war. The rationale for the first decision was to remove the threat of a hostile dictator armed with weapons of mass destruction. The weapons were never found. The rationale for the second decision -- the determination to keep cutting taxes in the face of far higher spending for Iraq and the war on terrorism -- was to stimulate the American economy and end the drought of jobs. The deficits have accumulated, but the jobs have still not come back.

"The weapons were never found."

And they will never, ever be sought after, developed and deployed against unsuspecting humans by Saddam or his sons or his extended family. The Hussein mafia is the albatross.

In his recent court appearance, Saddam announced defiantly that Kuwait belonged to Iraq. A few minutes later he was led away in chains. Quite a stunning change in fortune from 1990 when a similar statement preceded a possibly drug-induced invasion and annexation of Kuwait. America was forced to deploy 660,000 troops--42% of the US military--to the Persian Gulf to confront this nuiscance. Nearly 200 Americans never made it back from the desert war.

Bush 43 wasn't the one who made the mistake--repeat a thousand times David Broder: it was a ghastly, costly mistake--of sparing Saddam in 1991. Nearly a million Iraqis died from the subsequent sanctions while American tax payers footed the bill ($10 billion annually) of stationing troops in Saudi Arabia, angering Bin Laden who later attacked America. A lot of very bad things radiated from Saddam.

"The deficits have accumulated, but the jobs have still not come back."

Wrong. Good jobs are here for the taking. Technology, especially, is the place to be again. IT spending has gone up across both commercial and government sectors.

The real bad news is that we have a shortage of qualified labor, not good paying jobs.

A recent study by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) reported that as many as 425,000 high-tech jobs would go unfilled in coming years.

Corporate America will do whatever it needs to ensure that the work that needs to be done gets done. In the nineties, the Y2K scare and the Internet boom (or mirage) forced the US to recruit foreign labor--H1-B visas were thrown about like confetti.

When the recession hit, many of these workers were laid off and sent back home. Some stayed and waited it out. When the economy rebounded, these foreign workers were well-positioned for a more competitive technology environment, and some did, it could be argued, take jobs away from Americans.

Shortage of qualified labor at home, advances in communication technology, abundance of high-skilled, cheap technologists overseas (China, India)--these are the real reasons why outsourcing became big.

The antiquated public education system Bush inherited is the albatross.

Enter Bush's technology agenda: "Promoting Innovation and Competitiveness":

# Improved Math and Science Education. President Bush signed into law legislation that provides $160 million in 2002 for a new math and science partnership program. These funds are a down payment on an ambitious, five-year $1 billion initiative. This program will link elementary and secondary schools with technology-savvy colleges and universities, strengthening math and science teaching and education at all levels.

# Strengthened Corporate Research and Development. The Administration has proposed broadening access to the research and experimentation tax credit to make it easier for companies to deduct many costs associated with developing new technologies and drugs. This reform will take effect by mid-2002, and the Administration continues to strongly support making the tax credit permanent.

# Strengthened Federal and University Research and Development. To encourage increased innovation, President Bush helped push federal R&D funding over $100 billion for the first time in history. The President signed into law funding increases for science and technology at the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Departments of Energy, Agriculture, Interior, Commerce and Transportation.