Trillions and Trillions ...

The Treasury Department was asked to do a study showing how much in unfunded liabilities (entitlements above projected revenues) the country was facing over the next half century. It came back with a report that said 51 trillion, and the White House declined to publish it. If you're wondering how much 51 trillion is, if you take 51 billion -- a nice chunk of change -- and multiply it times a thousand, you have your answer.

In the face of this overwhelming reality, the multi-faceted disgrace known as the Bush Administration is cutting taxes for the rich and for big business, putting forth the super-expensive Medicare Drug Bill and Energy Bill programs (both multi-billion dollar giveaways to the corporations), proposing a Social Security "fix" that would require borrowing a few trillion dollars, and engaging itself with nation-rebuilding overseas. Some among the very cynical (I’m almost there with them) have suggested that the Bushies believe that the Second Coming will occur before all this hits the fan, so they don’t sincerely care about it.



One of this country's dirty little secrets is how many of our brightest engineers and scientists are not native born, but hail instead from India, Taiwan, Singapore, etc. Every year sees fewer and fewer Americans graduating into the ranks of these technical careers, and the ones who do are generally lower in their class than these foreign-born whiz kids. (Facts of the matter: China is graduating four times the number of engineers that we are, and expanding their programs rapidly; Japan is graduating double the number of engineers that we are.)

As their home countries establish computer, bio-tech and other such industries, an increasing number of these wunderkind are heading back to work in their native land. This 21st Century Brain Drain is made worse by the present administration's ignoring of the situation, and made even worse yet by cuts in agencies like the National Science Foundation (as part of the Bushies' war with the country's intelligentsia).

Further compounding these dire straits will be the upcoming regulations which will make corporations expense their stock options, thus eliminating much of them from being given as incentives to high-output techies. Many of these engineers and scientists will heed the prospects of stock option bonuses being offered from their home countries and vacate the U.S. in even higher numbers.