Insanity is defined as doing the same things and expecting different results. This is also an apt description for what is being proposed in our nation’s capitol, with respect to how to stimulate the U.S. economy.
President-elect Barack Obama should redirect the hundreds of billions of recycled stimulus dollars into our nation’s military industrial infrastructure. The jobs created in our nation’s defense industries are the type that pay annual wages a family can actually live on.
Plus, these jobs are value added. New public investments in cutting-edge defense technology also have civilian applications and this will drive entire new private industries into existence.
The same is true with the nation’s under-funded space program. We should direct tens, if not hundreds, of billions of new stimulus dollars to our nation’s space and aerospace industries. This would be a boost to Vandenberg Air Force Base and would also have a large multiplier effect for our region’s ecosystem, while creating hundreds of new startups and thousands of new head-of-household jobs in the process.
Moreover, tens of billions of the Obama rescue plan should be invested in our leading research universities, including our very own UCSB. The next generation of information technologies, software applications and other innovations are simply waiting to be funded. And when they are, they will result in additional innovations that will result in even newer technologies that can spin off even newer ones, etc., etc. The direct and indirect impacts for our area would be tremendous.
Obama should abandon his plan to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars bailing out irresponsible state governments that want to build 20th-century bridges to nowhere. Instead, through executive order, the new president should streamline the permitting process by relaxing excessive and unnecessary land-use regulations so only those projects that are actually important to a community’s economic security can become shovel ready inside 12-months, instead of the five to eight years it currently takes. This is especially important here in California.
Finally, Obama should propose a $10,000 tax credit to every family in America so their kids can be sent to a local school that works. And every teacher who performs at a level of excellence should receive a $25,000 tax-free bonus at the end of the school year. If we force our local public schools to compete for these students and for these new stimulus dollars, and we also pay excellent teachers what they are truly worth, not only will we attract the best and the brightest to our nation’s education industry, we would immediately begin to see our nation’s public school system improve dramatically. And nothing would stimulate the economy over the long haul more than that.
— Joe Armendariz is executive director of the Santa Barbara Technology & Industry Association.