Current challenges will worsen without action
Whether you blame globalization, the media, or just "the kids these days," there's no denying the blow the United States has taken to its once unquestionable dominance. With other world powers on the rise and no answer to our growing economic woes, the U.S. looks trapped in a tailspin, leaving many to ask, "How did we get here?" As famed New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says in his latest book "That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back," there are a few overarching themes in America's decline since the Cold War. A couple of these are inevitable and unchangeable phenomena such as globalization and its spread through extremely advanced information technology systems; however, there are a few reversible occurrences that at least deserve some consideration.
The first is a widespread switch from a "saver's mindset" to a "consumer's mindset." The idea of living in the present has become a commendable trait in the past few decades (anyone can recall at least one pop song lyric regarding "living for tonight"). But this laid-back attitude now might cost us a secure and stable future. Want a house you would normally have to save up for? Take out a subprime mortgage. Why will they give it to you? Because they need the cash for this quarter's bottom line.
Hold on — this causes the banks to go under? Bail them out without conditions to prevent this from happening again. Meanwhile, Social Security's expiration date creeps closer and closer (the current year is 2036, just 25 years from now) and has barely garnered more than a few "oh, by the way" comments from Congress. This issue has been put on the back burner even though experts have been sounding alarms since the mid-1990s. Simply put: It's not affecting us yet.
There are traces of this problem in the second thing we can change: the priority of knowledge. During the famed Space Age, the U.S. pumped up funding for R&D in science and engineering, but the percentage of funding per gross domestic product has continued to decline ever since. Now, instead of investing in developments, more and more people are rallying around tax cuts and shrinking the government to give them even less opportunity to fund our futures. This is most apparent in education funding.
Not only has the economic crisis shrunk education budgets, many have seen education become an option — rather than a requirement — in state budgets. There are currently five states in which more of the budget is allocated to prisons rather than higher education. In a day and age where our largest competitor's population outnumbers us almost six to one, it's going to be the quality of our workers and technology that will give us the edge.
Despite the current woes, all is not lost. If we can take these hardships and learn to start acting responsibly because of them, we can once again be the epitome of the modern world.
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