We’re hearing lots of chatter about how, fifty years from now, these Olympics will have marked the end of the American century and the beginning of the Chinese one.  Maybe so, maybe not.

One thing’s for sure: America can’t invade and coerce and bailout and tax-cut its way out of this mess.  The conventional wisdom says that, to stay competitive, America should invest more in math and science education at every level.  That way, we can have stronger R&D departments in our corporate-subsidized universities and build more shiny  hand-held gadgets and laser-powered surgery bots and create new super soldier body armor suits and better anti-obesity drugs.  The Diet Patriot MRI Pro 3G will be the ultimate product, ensuring American economic dominance for decades to come.

Now, we’re certainly in favor of increased spending on math and science education.  We’re also in favor of increased spending on every other aspect of education.  But realizing the effects of those efforts will take time.  So as a first effort at boosting American economic competitiveness, we suggest the following two step process:

1. Require every adult American citizen to know the #@$&ing difference between “your” and “you’re,” and “there,” “their,” and “they’re,” on penalty of incarceration and/or public ridicule.  See, it’s embarrassing when so many of our citizens have a poorer grasp of the language than non-native speakers.  Good grammar won’t win us any space races, but we’re sure as hell not going to build and maintain an advanced civilization when our population can’t draw distinctions among basic grammatical forms.
2. Set up “think tanks” for exporting the cult of deregulation to every leading emerging market.  Once China, India, Russia, Brazil et al. put on the rose-colored glasses of free market boosterism, in due course they will begin enjoying the same series of entirely avoidable, robber-baron induced speculative cycles that we’ve come to enjoy here.  Insert a rowdy group of supply-side and trickle-down economists into the key bureaucracies of world governments, and although America’s corporatist elites may ensure we never achieve even modest goals of social and economic justice, the resulting fiscal chaos will ensure that the rest of the world stays handicapped, too.

The latter step is both Machiavellian and, sadly, already being realized.  The first step will likely never be realized: its just no fun to read when their are, like, so many grate shows on you’re tv, lol!

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