How to Refloat These Boats

It is precisely because we lack a road map that it is so crucial to strengthen public investments in research and education, which have traditionally laid the foundation for discovering and exploiting previously unimaginable jobs and industries. The United States is entering a 20-year period in which there will be no net growth in our native-born workforce. At the same time, there are five times as many graduates of engineering programs in China and India together as there are in the United States. And those nations are doubling their support for research as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP).

Our call to meet this challenge doesn't have to be couched in the jargon of policy. It should echo earlier calls for Sputnik-level initiatives to expand basic research, improve problem-solving skills in our classrooms, and massively increasing the incentives, grants and pay we need to inspire a new generation of scientists. It should recognize that if our workforce isn't growing, we need to inspire and better employ those on the margins of our economy, while helping the poorest children to get to society's starting line.

Funding such efforts, while restoring fiscal discipline, would require a bipartisan fiscal deal that would both repeal tax cuts for the most fortunate and slow entitlement growth. Neither the undoing of trade agreements nor further cutting of the capital gains tax rate will ensure that we remain a nation able to fulfill its unwritten economic compact, and where all boats, not just the yachts, rise with the tide.

Author's e-mail:

gsperling@americanprogress.org

Gene Sperling was the head of the National Economic Council under President Bill Clinton. He is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and author of "The Pro-Growth Progressives" (Simon & Schuster).