Science, yes. But don't forget the poor
By Katrina vanden Heuvel
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
In a speech to the National Academy of Sciences shortly after taking office, President Obama, while faced with a teetering economy, vast numbers of unemployed and uninsured, and two seemingly endless wars, nonetheless paused to embrace a vision of the future.
This is how the left negates their failures: religion. First, they write their icons’ legacies beforehand as a prophesy…
He spoke of President Lincoln's
…Then they invoke the gods…
commitment to science and innovation, even in the midst of great turmoil and uncertainty.
…Throw in some heroic rhetoric…
He said: "A few months after a devastating defeat at Fredericksburg, before Gettysburg would be won,
…Establish an air of inevitability…
before Richmond would fall, before the fate of the Union would be at all certain, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law an act creating the National Academy of Sciences. . . . Lincoln refused to accept that our nation's sole purpose was mere survival."
...thrust misrepresentations and shoddy analysis into historical context…
Lincoln was a believer in science,
Is there really anyone out there that’s not a believer in science? The notion of being a believer is rooted in the necessity of blind faith. Science is, by definition, replicable and therefore observable. Fire still burns you even if you don’t believe it’s hot. You want to know how I know that? Science. Plus I was a two year old once, and I learned that one wicked fast because of my enormous brain.
a believer in our capacity for innovation
Well that’s certainly not the same thing as being a believer in science. The first is a prerequisite for sanity; the second is an assertion that the products of our minds are gifts to the collective (aka, the liberal God) from the masses (aka, people who need to pay more taxes).
and the possibilities it represented.
Innovation isn’t about possibility. It’s about actuality. The possible is not an innovation; it’s an invention. Taking the possible and making it an actuality—that’s innovation. So really, she’s promoting invention.
He saw our future prosperity tied to our ability, as a nation, to create. So does Obama.
Mostly our ability to create new guns. I dare say that sounds more like Reagan than Obama.
In many areas, the president has matched the rhetoric of his (and Lincoln's) speech with concrete action.
In April 2009, Obama created a President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which he has turned to nearly every month since to ask hard questions
Journalists always seem to think that asking hard questions is meritorious. It’s astounding they never do it.
and demand science-based answers. He has fought for - and in a number of cases succeeded in - increasing science and new technology funding.
So you would agree that he is a big spender, no? Follow-up question…what makes Barack Obama better able to decide which technologies to invest in than the individual investor? Does he not believe in the efficiency of the market, or does he believe that the profit motive is not an effective motivator?
(Ms. Vanden Heuvel, feel free to take notes. I’m doing your job for you here.)
He has appointed highly credentialed, public-spirited
Public spirited? Jesus Christ, what the hell does that mean? Avowed communists?
scientists to key agencies.
Seriously, we need Joe McCarthy back. There are Communists in the State Department!
So it came as no surprise, then, that a central theme of President Obama's State of the Union address last week was the modern extension of Lincoln's commitment to science and innovation and of his insistence that we add "the fuel of interest to the fire of genius."
It’s kind of disrespectful to override the President’s chosen hero to compare himself to. Just a random aside: being assassinated does not make a President worthy of praise. I have nothing but contempt for William McKinley. (If you can spell his assassin’s name by heart, you may have had a kick ass 7th grade history teacher like me. Yes, I’ll take 20th Century Assassin spelling for $800, Alex. Leon Czolgosz, bitches.)
Cars that can run on sunlight and water.
Clouds that rain vegan cookies and jetpacks that run on pixy-dust.
A million electric cars on the road by 2015.
Simultaneously a pipe dream and something that isn’t worth aspiring to. Also, what happens if there aren’t a million people in the United States who want electric cars? How do we remedy that once we’ve made it the espoused goal of the federal government?
High-speed rail.
Don’t we alredy have railroad companies?
A faster, more accessible Internet.
Don’t we already have internet service providers?
Renewable technologies paid for by eliminating subsidies to oil and gas companies.
Shouldn’t we just remove subsidies to all companies? Isn’t that “equal protection under the law?” If we selectively give subsidies—federal revenue is known in flyover country as “our money”—or if we give tax breaks and credits to those who purchase what the government suggests, then how are we living our lives free from the yoke of government tyranny? What have we done with our birthright of liberty?
These, all mentioned by the president in his address, are just a small sampling of what awaits an America that rededicates itself to scientific pursuit over the next decade.
An inefficient, market-free energy policy, a rapidly depreciating transit infrastructure that no one uses, and a taxed and regulated internet…the future sure is bright.
The goal - "to win the future" as the president put it
That line was outright stolen from about 5 people, including Newt Gingrich.
- is, indeed, a worthy one,
Keep in mind that these are the people who objected to “War on Terror” because it was ambiguous and murky.
especially when you consider how poorly we have handled the recent past. Largely because of trade policies that place profits ahead of working people, more than 40,000 factories have been shuttered in less than a decade.
I’m at a complete loss. Democrats used to pretend like they believed in free trade, until they decided that advocating that demanding that firms remain unprofitable to maintain jobs was sound fiscal policy with 10% unemployment.
Meanwhile, American 15-year-olds rank 25th in the world in math, and 21st in science,
In high school. High schoolers would suck even if they were great at math and science.
and we are haunted by a skills shortage that makes it harder to compete.
Yes. Skills like welding, carpentry, electric wiring, and masonry. Instead of sending the dullards of society to vocational schools, where they would learn an effective career, recent administrations have poured billions of dollars into the notion that everyone in America should have a college education, regardless of whether it confers any more economic earning power on its graduates. Meanwhile, we have thousands upon thousands of aspiring writer who can’t figure out how to use a semicolon to save their lives, but we have a dearth of employable workers doing jobs that don’t even require an 80 IQ.
All the while, we spent the better part of a decade with a president who scorned science,
This is a veiled reference to fetal stem-cell research. There is a difference between scorning science and having principled ethical objections to methodologies. There’s a reason Tuskegee doesn’t happen anymore, and it’s not because the experiment didn’t yield results. It’s because it’s morally atrocious. Saying so doesn’t make anyone scornful of science.
and a federal government that always let politics trump scientific progress.
Three questions would need to be resolved before I could get on board with this:
1) From where does the federal government derive its authority to regulate and monitor “scientific progress?”
2) Does any non-military department in the federal bureaucracy have a history of developing marketable ideas or products?
3) Assuming that the federal government has both the right to regulate and a history of effectively regulating scientific progress, does this government function make us more or less prosperous and free?
But while Lincoln was committing himself to the advancement of science and innovation, he remained focused on ending the nation's more immediate and immobilizing crises.
One might say he was “focused like a laser beam” on preserving the Union.
President Obama must do the same; it is today's job market, not tomorrow's, and the victims of our historic chasm between great wealth and deep poverty, that deserve his primary focus now.
Are you seriously putting income inequality up as a national tragedy equivalent to centuries of slavery and the atrocities of one of the dead and wounded in what is still to date our nation’s bloodiest war?
We live in a country with nearly 15 million unemployed, and many millions more underemployed.
This was supposed to be a column on science, no?
A country where job creation can barely keep pace with population growth, where for a staggering number of people, the pain of recession continues without any real relief. These are people who cannot wait for a decade-long economic transformation; they need relief - and jobs - now.
No argument here.
And yet, with more Americans now mired in poverty than at any time in the last 40 years -a record 47 million - the president did not include a single mention of poverty or the plight of the poor in his speech.
Do the poor need to be reminded that their lives are desolate and empty?
Ironically,
Seriously, I haven’t read the end of this sentence. Scout’s honor. I’m willing to bet ten dollars that there is absolutely no irony in this sentence. No one ever got rich betting on the competence of the American media.
Republican Paul Ryan's response did acknowledge that government still has the responsibility "to help provide a safety net for those who cannot provide for themselves."
You owe me $10.
Of course, the programs that the most vulnerable
I’m not allowing this euphemism to continue. Poverty and vulnerability are not interchangeable. You’re talking about the poor. Say so.
depend on are the very ones that Ryan, new chairman of the House Budget Committee, has committed to defund and dismantle.
I knew there was a reason I mancrush on that dude.
That Obama was silent on poverty is troubling. But the real challenge for Obama, who through his work as a community organizer has seen poverty as close up as any president,
Washing their feet, perhaps?
will come when Ryan and his reactionary colleagues pass a budget in the House. It will be in that moment that the president will have to stand and fight to preserve the safety net,
Lincoln fought to preserve the Union; Obama fights to preserve the safety net. See what she’s doing there by using the same verbiage?
to defend those who may never see the benefit of a retooled economy.
Have you ever heard the expression “a rising tide lifts all boats?” Everyone sees the benefits of a strong economy.
Obama could bury the word "stimulus"
I bet Lincoln knew when a word didn’t do well in focus groups too.
but still find innovative initiatives (such as a National Infrastructure Bank or large-scale public-private partnerships) to prop up cities and states and frugal pension funds.
Is that frugal used as a pejorative?
And he could push for a 21st-century Works Progress Administration-style program, one that would give those able and willing to work the stability - and dignity - of employment.
And yet, provide absolutely no economic benefit to the economy. Brilliant.
Lincoln said that "the legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves - in their separate, and individual capacities."
In other words, Lincoln didn’t recognize the limitations on government put in place by the Constitution, so we can throw it away too.
Even if this were the standard by which the government derived its authority, provide an argument that the government can run a train line better than private industry. Provide an argument that the government can provide heathcare better than the private sector. Provide an argument that the government can produce new goods and services with the frantic energy of a free economy. I dare you to make the argument that statism and central planning through government is the most efficient economic model. I triple dog dare you.
The president must remember that there are some things that need to be done now, things that no leap of science of technological innovation can cure.
Herpes?
Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of The Nation. She writes a weekly online column for The Post.
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