Here is the Bush administration’s solution to the national debt problem, from Aerospace Daily, Sept. 9:

The Pentagon’s new undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics said the Defense Department is reviewing its supply chain operations, acquisition requirements, and planning in light of increasing globalization.

Kenneth Krieg, who filled the No. 3 DOD position June 3, further said the department will “scour the world” to find the “best” industrial sources for its defense needs, and that the largest federal department must become “creative” in research, acquisition and delivery, especially to encourage competition.

“We have to make substantial changes in the way we do business, and that includes more collaboration with friends and allies,” Krieg said Sept. 7 at the 2005 Common Defense Conference in Washington. “This is not easy
— change never is.”

Speaking to the meeting of foreign and U.S. defense officials and industry representatives, he said companies will continue to decide how to bid and provide their products and services. He indicated that cooperative, international consortia will continue to be considered, especially if they lead to industry sources bidding for Pentagon work.

“We generally seek competition where competition is possible,” Krieg said at the National Press Club. He pointed to a Lockheed Martin Corp.-led international consortium that won the contract for the next fleet of presidential helicopters over incumbent Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.

Actually, the much-hated Mr. Clinton was a bit concerned and is the only president in my politically aware lifetime who actually did something about it. Admitedly, he had it relatively easy, but too many adminstrations have failed to use boom times to pay off debt. Whatever his other faults, he did.

— Donald

I don’t particularly disagree with this, but some this “increased productivity” has come at a very high price. Dfens and I obviously come at it from very different political perspectives, but I think he and I might agree on the reality of at least some of this price.

We drive every commodity to the lowest possible purchase price by using foreign labor a step above slave labor, we keep very few “starter” jobs at home for the always large numbers of people who do not have the capacity, the wherewithall, and / or the sheer ruthlessness to become scientists or industrialists. All this benefits “consumers” in the short term, but taking away high-paying jobs also takes away the _new_ money that consumers have to spend.

Too many of us are living off our the fat of our parents: we inherited our money; or we’re working off “education for all” that our grandparents paid for and we largely refuse to pay for the next generation; we’d rather consume than educate the future. We export both our jobs and our money while laying no seedcorn. The only thing that bales us out is immigration, where we’re living off education that other country’s have paid for and importing low-cost labor. Now we’re turning against that, partly because of the low cost labor but mostly because of our fear of alien people.

What happens when we run out of money, which, since we as a nation have been living in the red as long as I’ve been economically aware, we will? I don’t know, but I suspect that it won’t be a pretty picture.

— Donald

True.

“The population density has been such that the infrastructure was sufficient for the cars.”

Only partially true. What is often missed is that this was a deliberate Enron-style effort on the part of automobile interests, who bought up rail lines and physically destroyed them, thus encouraging (or even forcing) auto use, which encouraged us down the destructive path we are now on. We build ever lower density cities that cannot be served by efficient transportation and end up in complete gridlock at an extremely high price (in terms of energy and the costs of extracting and defending it, and of wasted time and effort).

There’s only one solution. I hate to sound like a broken record, but it’s to let the market work. Let the suburbs and their ridiculously inefficient infrastructure pay what it really costs, and businesses and individuals would quickly revert to a far more efficient transportation model.

We won’t do it. Like psychopaths, we’ll pay any price to maintain our increasingly unmaintainable system (e.g., tapping the petrolium reserve every time there is a modest price spike in the strained energy infrastructure — and this heavily subsidised price really is modest: to quote again from The Economist, gas still costs far less than bottled water and we happily buy rediculous amounts of the latter without a second thought).

As you and many others have pointed out, we talk capitalism but spaceflight is hardly the only arena where we refuse to practice it.

— Donald

The same thing is happening to manufacturing that happened to agriculture.

Dfens: “I recall the little manufacturing town I grew up in didn’t have such [transportation] problems.”

Gee, and I’ll bet it was a properly designed town where most people walked to work and / or took a tram or bus. I used to live in Silicon Valley and the transportation situation there is rediculous beyond belief. All of SV looks pretty much the same: low-rise office parks interspersed with two-story appartment blocks surrounded by little fake parks and parking. The few remaining islands of single-family homes are isolated from shopping and everything else by the freeway grid which makes walking any distance difficult to impossible. North, south, east, or west, it all looks like this for thousands of square kilometers. When I lived there I rented a flat near my job at a space industry newspaper. As far as I could tell I was literally SV’s only regular pedestrian. Everyone else figured they had to live on the opposite side of SV from where they worked (even though, unless you were rich or lucky enough to live in the hills, it looked exactly the same as where you worked), and cross over in enormous traffic crunches each morning and evening. The stupidity of it all, especially by mathemeticians and physicists who can geometrically _prove_ how stupid it is, stuns me to this date.

Today, there is nothing I hate more than commuting. I refuse to work anywhere but within walking distance of my home in an inner city. Fortunately, I save so much money doing that, and my writing skills are in sufficient demand, I can usually make it work.

Dfens: “I also do not blame labor costs for the current trends away from manufacturing, but primarily blame the hostile environment that exists due to our runaway legal system.”

Here, I fully agree with you. The rule with labor is just like anything else: you get what you pay for. If you pay pennies, than labor will follow the ol’ Soviet dictum: “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”

I have made a personal pact with myself that I will participate in no class action lawsuit that is asking for more than the actual damages, unless there is clear and unmistakable evidence for fraud on the part of the corporate officers. (Enron and their ilk deserve no mercy, certainly not from Californians who were their direct victims.)

I try not to buy Chinese-made products, not so much to buy American (though I do that) but because I don’t want one country to dominate the world’s economy, and certainly not China. Since what amounts to one step above slave labor is, indeed, very cheap for everyone else, that is a very difficult thing to do in practice.

— Donald

I have a fellow engineer who left aerospace to manufacture a commodity associated with a long time hobby. He recently had to layoff his employees because a Chinese company decided to reverse engineer his product and make the same using inferior materials and processes for much less money. He can try to sue them, which will make some lawyer rich and he himself poor, and have no effect on the Chinese company, or he can allow them to manufacture his product and make money from the royalties, which will also make him liable for the inferior product. Then he can and probably will get sued for the cheap junk and end up with nothing. Either way his employees, whom he considers to be almost like family are out of a job. Welcome to America!

Fine, then they can do it without subsidies. Road may be more flexible, but rail is far, far cheaper. You can build an awful lot of rail for what one minor highway costs, and you can run a lot of metal-on-metal wheels for what it costs to run rubber wheels on tarmac. Again, this liberal says, let everyone pay what it costs and let the market decide.

Regarding manufacturing in the United States, I _do_ agree with you. One of our problems, I think, is that with our rediculous infrastructure subsidies we’ve made our economy so physically inefficient that it simply costs too much to make anything here. I think there may be a bit too much attention paid to labor costs and not enough to what might be called the “friction” cost in the rest of the economy — the fact that we use absurdly high quantities of energy per unit of economic production. The amount of time that people spend in traffic jams is time that is not spent doing something creative, e.g., inventing new and better manufacturing methods.

— Donald