bloomberg's letter to the next president (newsweek)

[thesightless]

http://www.newsweek.com/id/165642/page/1

6 pages, too much to copy/paste.

very very well written and inciteful.

[Miroslav]

Re: bloomberg's letter to the next president (newsweek)

it's got good ideas, but it's also pretty vague - kind of like an Obama policy proposal. He's right on immigration. But I don't see how creating green energy jobs here will keep them; everyone knows that they will go to wherever they are the cheapest, and that will not be here.

One thing that he also totally misses is: how the hell are we going to pay for everything? We're getting into a ridiculous level of debt, and at some point soon we need to raise taxes, and/or reduce government spending...or else raise rates to keep foreigners willing to hold our dollars and fund us.

As far as "losing ground not an option", my $.02 is that Bloomberg should open his eyes and get real: the ground is lost, and the US's superpower status is irretrievably in decline. We should certainly do everything we can to keep innovation and growth here, but we need to view the world differently than we have in the past. We need to realize that we will actually have to work in concert with others and be strategic in the way we deal with other countries - and not just insist that they do things our way or else. There are two simple reasons for this:

(1) globalization has broadly rendered our middle class the losers. It's simple market economics.

(2) our dollar will not retain its special status as it did in the past. That means that foreigners will not be willing to finance our excessive lifestyle and we will have to compete much more heavily for capital investment, whereas before we could take it for granted. Our current financial flop already suggests that fallout pretty clearly. We're in debt up to our necks, and we dropped all that cash with no tangible investments for the future - it was on wars, government misallocation, and now bailing out our own massive screw-ups.

You can't open up the floodgates for globalization, go through a massive debt orgy financed by the rest of the world, and still expect nothing to change in your superpower status.