Arianna Huffington recently wrote an op-ed piece titled When It Comes to Innovation, Is America Becoming a Third World Country? She makes several good points as to why it's happening, but her solutions are way off the mark.

Normally I'd post my comments on the blog follow-up, but since it's heavily moderated I'm sure my disparaging comments would be wiped clean.  Ms. Huffington claims that the following will help solve the problem:

Spread the broadband love.  Nope, not even a serious reason why we are behind.  Tell me that Taiwan, China, India and Israel are more connected than we already are.  And they are the countries that Ms. Huffington is implicity referring to regarding the H1-B visa program.

Green Bank.  Let's set aside money for green innovation and industries.  Great idea in theory, but as reported in my earlier blog about the DOE partnering with China on "Green R&D" you can see where that money will be going... Not here.

Loosen the H1-B Visa program limits back up.  Yeah, we tried that back in the 90's with the software industry, when the limit was raised to 250,000 visas being granted annually.  Guess what happened?  The best and brightest weren't being brought in, but the cheapest were.  Then, when we went all protectionist over the tech industry, those same cheap foreign workers took everything back to their home countries.  India, Taiwan, China, Israel.  The same thing would happen again.  See a theme here?

I know, I know - it's easier to poke holes in other people's solutions, but hers have been proven to not work in the past in other markets so why go back there? 

I do wholeheartedly agree with her main point though - our education system is breaking down and falling behind.  Until that is fixed, we are not going to be able to hold our ground in countries where education is a higher priority and the programs in place are actually pushing the students to improve instead of lowering the standards to the lowest common denominator.

Also, in a selfish way, I think that the government would spur more domestic innovation if they rewarded those SMB and VSB firms that are spending R&D and production money here in the US.  That would help boost the need for qualified engineers and manufacturing in the domestic market instead of outsourcing everything.

OK, off my soapbox for now... I guess this is one issue that really hits close to the heart with Weffo Performance being focused on engineering and manufacturing being done in the US of A in order to do our part to boost the economy, small as we may be...