What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out - that's the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted "lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job."
Freidman demands accountability! If you waste billions of dollars, you should be fired. He also goes on to identify other policies that have led to our lack of infrastructure:
My fellow Americans, we can't continue in this mode of "Dumb as we wanna be." We've indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can't afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world's best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.
Interestingly, Freidman never once mentions the word "Iraq" in his entire column. As of right now, the Iraq war has cost $582.4 billion dollars, which I'm pretty sure is a lot more than $72 billion (although I did major in English), and even more than the $17 billion for the auto industry that Freidman complains about above. It is, in fact, roughly the size of the economic stimulus package that is being bandied about. And yet, I don't see Freidman aghast that more pro-war columnists, like him, were not fired and / or re-assigned.
Shorter Freidman: accountability for thee, not for me.
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