“ How does the U.S. stack up right now as a place to invest? Our workers are expensive because the cost of living here is high and their taxes need to be high enough to pay for a lavish government sector and an Iraq adventure that Joseph Stiglitz estimates will cost $3 trillion, a sizable fraction of our annual $14 trillion GDP. Our college graduates are roughly equivalent in ability to other nations’ high school graduates (story) and a lot of our high school graduates could not compete on the world market for any jobs other than manual labor. Our transportation system is comprehensive, but traffic jams can take an hour or more out of a worker’s day. Unlike other countries, we have no plans to implement congestion pricing. In communications, we lag countries such as South Korea in broadband speed and percentage of households connected; we lag all of Europe and most of Asia in mobile phone coverage. Our consumer market is huge, but it is also brutally competitive and most consumers have all of the stuff that they need; emerging middle classes in India, China, and Arab countries represent more of a profit opportunity.
April 2, 2008
