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It’s a intimate argument that the only way for the United States to stay competitory in the global economy is through innovation and entrepreneurship. New ventures account for almost all of the net occupation growth in our economy, and the only way to remunerate for formulating occupation losses is to lead the world in creating the new industries and high-paying jobs of the future. Without the growth of innovation and entrepreneurship the U.S. has experienced over the past fifty years, our economy would be 40 percent smaller, and our usual of living would be 40 percent lower, than it is today. But the growth of entrepreneurship is a global trend, and while our best system is to innovate, what is less many times acknowledged is that it’s every one else’s best scheme as well.
Since the end of World War II, the United States has had the best innovation infrastructure in the world. We invest the most in exploration and development, and have strong intellectual property rights to protect and recompense innovators. We also lead the world in management education, and have the most extensive and flexible venture capital system, but we can’t take these vantages for granted. China, India, Brazil, and other formulating countries are working to foster these schemes as well, and as a result, innovation is accelerating. Over the past various decades, the rate of innovation has surged to an unexampled level, as is evident by looking at the growth of patent apps and grants. This surge is due in outstanding portion to globalization and the proliferation of productivity-enhancing communications tools like the Internet, which has made the innovation race far more volatile. The fast rate of acceleration means that the United States could surge in front quickly, but it could likewise fall speedily behind.
When the Berlin Wall fell and Communism collapsed, it produced 3 billion new capitalists in the former Soviet Bloc and Asia, a great deal of of whom are exceedingly well educated, highly motivated, and more than willing to make sacrifices to achieve their own version of the American dream. Due to the massive population in fabricating Asia, it effortlessly eclipses the West in terms of total entrepreneurial action and the sheer number of entrepreneurs, and the Chinese government is supplying significant incentives for growth and consolidation. On track to become the world’s greatest economy by 2050, China will not be content to stay a low-cost manufacturer. They are already moving upstream into hi-tech manufacturing, and are merchandising access to the Chinese market for R&D, business consulting, and financial services available in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, making it the center of an progressively integrated Asian economy.
What this means for the United States is that we can’t afford to take our innovation infrastructure for granted, not if we want to preserve the American dream for our children and our grandchildren. Yet in so a heap of areas, we are doing precisely the opposite of what we need to stay globally competitive. Federal exploration and development funding is being cut in critical areas like selective information engineering science and nanotechnology. American intellectual property is not being adequately protected from alien piracy and counterfeiting, and after training the world’s most gifted scientists, engineers, and enterprisers in our universities, we’re sending them back to their home countries to compete with us rather than furthering them to stay here in the United States. Entrepreneurial education, while growing, still does not adequately prepare students for the demands of entrepreneurship, and effort capital funding has grown conservative and moved upstream, creating a funding gap. Financial incentives such as stock choices that are used to motivate enterprisers and their laborers are beneath fire due to intense scrutiny of corporate accounting, and American labor is fighting tooth and nail to preserve a scheme of compensation that is no loner financially viable.
As of now, the United States is still the world leader in innovation and entrepreneurship, but in the long term, the shift of wealth and power to the East will be beyond our control unless we proceed to fabricate new chances through innovation. In the next few years, there will be challenges, specially from Asia, but there will be a great deal of prospects as well-so long as we make smart choices. While government spending needs to be reduced, we can’t afford to neglect the schemes that are necessary in creating economic growth. If American business is going to stay competitory globally, we need our young humans to be entrepreneurs, older Americans to be roots of capital, and our public and private originations to adopt polices that will strengthen, rather than weaken, America’s innovation infrastructure. If we fail to do so, it won’t be just jobs that are relocated to other countries, but the American dream itself.
Rebooting American Dream Rebuild Country
Thom Hartmann covers 11 straightforward solutions to America’s current problems. At the core of each is a call to reclaim economic sovereignty and to wrest control of democracy back from the corporate powers that have hijacked both America and her citizens.
What’s peculiarly distinguishable when it comes to Hartmann’s solutions is that all have been proven to work. Every single one of his 11 steps either was throughout history portion of what built America’s greatness in the past (such as enforcing the Sherman Act and breaking up big corporations or returning to a tariff-based trade policy), or has worked well in other nations (like a national single-payer healthcare scheme —Medicare Part “E” for “Everybody”—or furthering the growth of worker-owned cooperatives like the $6 billion Mondragon cooperative in Spain).
From addressing the problem of a warming globe to the death of America’s middle class to the loss of our necessary liberties, Rebooting The American Dream shows how America may reclaim the resourcefulness of our Founders and the greatness we held both at home and abroad for over a century.
From Publishers WeeklyNationally-syndicated radio host and bestselling author Hartmann (Screwed) takes up his progressive cudgels once again. His theme this time: the need to turn back the clock 30 years and undo the bequest of Reaganomics. Turning the clock back further still, he recounts a story with regards to how George Washington had to have an American suit specially made for his Inauguration because, even after the revolution, fine costume (and much else) was still imported from Britain. Unlike a good deal of who argue the need for a return to protectionist policies, Harmann doesn’t fault China for skirting rules of free trade, but rather applauds their successful adoption of Hamiltonian economics, which in his opinion made America great. While a great deal of of his 11 points are broadly accepted by progressives (a carbon tax, for instance) his take on corporate reform is unique. Not only does he aid rigorous regulation of corporate lobbyists and disavow the faith that the First Amendment endows corporations with rights, he proposes the U.S. replace big corporations with cooperatives and adopt a shareholder-free “social-capital” model; profits not employed for reinvestment would be disunited amid laborers and the community, avoiding “the pitfalls of both innovative capitalism and old-fashioned communism.”
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About the Author
Thom Hartmann is the nation’s leading progressive talk radio host, heard on over a hundred stations, as well as on XM and Sirius radio, and seen on live nationwide television thru the Free Speech TV network. He is also a four-time Project Censored-award-winning and bestselling author of twenty one books, including Unequal Protection, Threshold, Screwed, Cracking the Code, and The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. In addition, Hartmann is an entrepreneur, an internationally known speaker on culture and communications, and an innovator in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, and economics. The former executive conductor of a residential treatment program for in an emotional manner troubled and mistreated children, he has helped set up hospitals, schools, famine relief programs, and communities for orphaned or blind children all around the world.
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Most helpful client reviews
46 of 51 humans found the following review helpful.
 Practical ideas
By Malvin
“Rebooting the American Dream” by progressive radio and TV host, entrepreneur, activist and author Thom Hartmann proposes how to restore American working class economic and political justice. Suggesting that America’s proud industrial past is prologue to the future, Mr. Hartmann discusses the ideas and policies that are known to work if we may only find the wisdom and courage to act. Written with passion, intelligence and wry humor, Mr. Hartmann’s accessible and endowing book ought to be cherished by a wide audience.
Insprired by Alexander Hamilton’s 11-point Plan for American Manufactures, Mr. Hartmann dedicates eleven chapters that touch on critical economic issues including tariffs, taxes, little business, banking, energy, immigration, and more. Mr. Hartmann finds that ever-increasing corporate control of the economy has led to concentrated ownership and wealth at the top while pushing the middle and lower classes of American workers towards the bottom. Drilling into each issue in detail, Mr. Hartmann discusses what policies need to modify if we want every one to participate in the American Dream, not just the few.
For example, Mr. Hartmann contends that stiff tariffs are critical to protecting the kinds of well-paying jobs that may only come from sustaining a strong domestic manufacturing base. On this point, Mr. Hartmann goes versus the so-called free trade message that is relentlessly amplified by a media whose multinational corporate sponsors net profit handsomely from their exploitation of world labor market disparities. In this light, Mr. Hartmann in the right way and forcefully dismisses Thomas Friedman’s well-known but erroneous ‘flat’ world theory as “nonsense”, siding rather with Hamilton and the dozens of other industrial countries around the world today including Germany, South Korea and China who have significantly raised their standards of living by supporting their respective home manufacturing industries.
However, Mr. Hartmann intends to do more than just inform. Trading on his signature radio and television sign-off, “Tag, you’re it!” the author hopes that the info indicated in his book will inspire readers to demand real modify in government and accountability from huge business. We need more humans like Mr. Hartmann.
I highly commend this book to everyone.
30 of 35 humans found the following review helpful.
 High on Specifics…
By James Hiller
… a quick read, and yet a little short on inspiration (more on that later). For the past various years, I have listened devotedly to Thom Hartmann. Broadcasting out of Oregon to a national audience, Hartmann has tried relentlessly to give voice to the un- and underrepresented in our country; battling corporate personhood and it is unrelenting financial influence it is billions of dollars has on our democracy, and rectify the course our country has traveled over the past thirty years. One thing that I have admired with regards to Hartmann is his desire to invite those who disagree with him on his radio program and debate indispensable issues (Limbaugh and Beck, are you listening?). So it was with great excitement that I was offered a copy of his most recent book, “Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country”.
On the heels of his last book Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture (honestly, which I wasn’t much inspired to finish), this is a much more practical and real book. Hartmann dissects issues of real importance to our country. Based on the work of Alexander Hamilton, who wrote an eleven step plan for building our country’s industrial base, Hartmann takes his principles and places them in the forefront of our Republican shattered American economy. The primary chapter alone discusses the hemorrhaging of American jobs due to loop holes and anti-protectionist laws that have opened up the world to American jobs but not American products. Just try and find something in stores that is American made. It’s challenging. Other chapters in the book include rolling back Reagan’s tax breaks on the rich, the rise and domination of corporate media, and the ravaging effect of lobbyist influence on Congress. If you are a regular Hartmann listener, none of these topics are new to Hartmann.
Hartmann does an magnificent occupation placing his arguments in an historical context, which personally resonates with me. He also backs up his arguments with facts and stats (that I’m sure conservatives don’t want to acknowledge). His chapters are short and quick reads, packed full of utile info for those of us wanting to challenge the current status quo. However, I got rid of one star for man of the chapters being somebody impersonal. In an venture to make his points, now and then Hartmann misses the humane connection in these stories. However, the power of the book lies in the information, and it’s staged clearly.
In fact, I may see using this book as a guide for writing letters to the editor, for blogs, or for any person wanting to challenging conservative coworkers or family members who have “drank the Kool-Aid” and think that lower taxes for the rich, more tax breaks for oil companies, and now unlimited corporate spending for promotion in elections. Hartmann has opened the battle with a strong book, and I highly commend reading it.
Like a former reviewer said, will any individual in the Obama administration even read it?
29 of 34 people found the following review helpful.
But will Obama read it?
By Cecil Bothwell
Thom Hartmann has delivered another lucid comprehensible statement of what’s gone defective in America in recent decades, and, as ever, he is brief and to the point. I read this latest in one sitting and came away with talking points for my own work and a renewed hope that change is possible.
Hartmann is unrelenting in his assertion that Reaganomics and Clintonomics have undone our nation, abetted by corporate interests and the Supreme Court. Globalization has beggared the U.S., crushing the middle class, moving formulating and corporate headquarters offshore, and further entrenching the super-rich. CEO compensate in this country was at in regards to the world general before Reagan, galore 30 times that of entry-level workers. Now it is routinely 500 times more outstanding than the lowest, and most times 5,000 times that level.
The author demonstrates and explains why higher taxes have always raised wages and scaled down the size of government and why unions are necessary to worker rights. He shows why all of the other produced nations in the world have benefited from universal health care and shows that a simple majority in Congress could make Medicare available to any individual who wanted to join – and that it would be without apparent effort and without delay revenue neutral.
Only once does Hartmann slip back into the faith-based thinking that ought to have been part of his youth when he sideswipes “our faith in the supremacy of science.” (He wandered off into magical thinking in one brief stretch of his other than as supposed or expected thoughtful The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Revised and Updated: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It’s Too Late). Blaming “our belief” in science for environmental harm is an adverse confusedness of cause and effect, for which I closely bumped this review down to four stars – but Hartmann is other than as supposed or expected so good that I gave him a pass. We don’t “believe” or “disbelieve” in science, or shouldn’t. We receive or don’t receive the results of repeated experiments, and it isn’t science that dumps toxins in rivers or allows genetically altered species to go wild, it is public policy and, often, corporate greed at work.
Elsewise, Thom, good on you. And tomorrow, the revolution.
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