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USA and the World: A Reality Check for America is Desperately Needed to Get the Country Back on the Right Track: Political Populism and Tea Parties are Not Going to Ge the Job Done

By Andis Kaulins

The USA is:

"sixth in global innovation-based competitiveness, but 40th in rate of change over the last decade; 11th among industrialized nations in the fraction of 25- to 34-year-olds who have graduated from high school; 16th in college completion rate; 22nd in broadband Internet access; 24th in life expectancy at birth; 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving degrees in science or engineering; 48th in quality of K-12 math and science education; and 29th in the number of mobile phones per 100 people.

The above quotation is taken from Thomas L. Friedman's October 26, 2010 Op-Ed at the New York Times titled Can?t Keep a Bad Idea Down, where Friedman is referring to facts cited by Charles M. Vest, former president of M.I.T., from The National Academies Press titled Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5, a badly titled follow-up study on the state of America.

As Friedman writes:

?This is not a pretty picture, and it cannot be wished away,? said Vest....

Friedman closes by writing:

"A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can?t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by its best scientists and engineers."

Read the whole thing here.

Those stats will get progressively worse if American citizens and political populists of all political parties do not start to get their acts together. Wishful thinking and ignoring the realities is not going to get the job done.

Failure to recognize, accept and deal with the realities will not only have dire consequences in the future, but already has led to dire consequences in the present. Read the next LawPundit posting for an even more sobering statistic about the current situation of America in the world.

Full post as published by LawPundit on October 27, 2010 (boomark / email).