>>That's science fiction, needless to say. Yes I agree, we would be stupid to do this ourselves, yet what if we really pis__d of China for example? Your not going to change gears over night or even in a few years. We have given up Steel, Cooper, Aluminum, Textiles, to name some primary ones. Not to mention we and our animals are being poisoned. I purchased from a national chain pharmacy Cipro for a chronic infection and in reading the enclosed fact sheet, noted a number of spelling errors. Needless to say this was counterfeit.
To say our imports could not be stopped is not in my mind impossible, albeit not our choice, or maybe our enemies could just poison us over a period of time. I do not believe we as a people are capable of turning around quick enough to prevent serious problems. The old school 'Uncle Sam Wants You' or be another 'Rosie the Riveter' inner responsibility is alive and well. -----Original Message----- From: Jed Rothwell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2007 3:32 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Vo]:US Lost Stiffler Scientific wrote: >If the US could Seal all borders, nothing IN from anywhere, could we survive >without anarchy? > >Would we become a starving, unable to self support nation? That's science fiction, needless to say. There is no way we would want to do such a thing. But I am sure a country the size of the U.S. could easily be self-sufficient. It was nearly self-sufficient for nearly all extraction (mining), industry, energy and other major economic sectors up until the 1960s. The only difficulty, at first, would be the supply of oil and other liquid fuel. The U.S. imports ~60% of its oil. The price of gasoline would soar to $5 or $10 for a while. People would make very rapid adjustments such as carpooling and video telecommuting -- as we have discussed here -- and the problem would be fixed in five years or so. I think there would be less disruption and suffering than people realize. I think we should immediately impose a $2/gallon tax on gasoline and make this happen, with much of the money used to reduce tax rates for people earning less than $30,000 per year. The other critical import that would hurt a lot more than oil in the long run is brainpower. Many of the most talented students at the top U.S. technical universities and at corporations such as Google are from foreign countries. Thomas Freidman described the graduation commencement at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute this year: "Laughing and Crying By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: May 23, 2007 First I had to laugh. Then I had to cry. I took part in commencement this year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, one of America's great science and engineering schools, so I had a front-row seat as the first grads to receive their diplomas came on stage, all of them Ph.D. students. . . . The reason I had to laugh was because it seemed like every one of the newly minted Ph.D.'s at Rensselaer was foreign born. For a moment, as the foreign names kept coming -- ''Hong Lu, Xu Xie, Tao Yuan, Fu Tang'' -- I thought that the entire class of doctoral students in physics were going to be Chinese, until ''Paul Shane Morrow'' saved the day. It was such a caricature of what President Jackson herself calls ''the quiet crisis'' in high-end science education in this country that you could only laugh. Don't get me wrong. I'm proud that our country continues to build universities and a culture of learning that attract the world's best minds. My complaint -- why I also wanted to cry -- was that there wasn't someone from the Immigration and Naturalization Service standing next to President Jackson stapling green cards to the diplomas of each of these foreign-born Ph.D.'s. I want them all to stay, become Americans and do their research and innovation here. If we can't educate enough of our own kids to compete at this level, we'd better make sure we can import someone else's, otherwise we will not maintain our standard of living. . . ." By every meaningful measurement, the U.S. is dead last in First World education. Roughly 20% of the U.S. adult population has not graduated from high school. See: http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-24.pdf U.S. high school graduation rates are below half in many poor counties and cities. 1.2 million drop out of high school per year in the U.S. I do not know about the rest of the country, but the quality of public education in Atlanta is drastically different from one neighborhood to the next, and in most schools it is dreadful. There is no way the U.S. will survive as a major power or as anything other than an economic colony of Japan, China or the E.U. Ireland will soon have more native high-tech brainpower than the U.S. The U.S. also spends three times more than any other country per capita on healthcare, but by most standards we are dead-last in the first world, and far below places like Costa Rica and Cuba. The nation is in very serious trouble in three fields: energy, education and health care. We have done nothing to address these problem for the last 20 years, and unless the voters and political leaders get serious we will be far worse trouble a generation from now. - Jed
