We must band together to get U.S. ahead

Richard Rychtarik, Las Vegas

Wednesday, April 20, 2011 | 2:04 a.m.

Global competitive pressures, including lower wages and better-educated foreign competitors, are rapidly gaining ground on America’s workforce. America is no longer the only game in town as it was for decades after World War II. We were king of the hill then, relatively untouched by war and well on our way to being a military, economic and education superpower.

Those days are behind us, the youngsters who propelled the economy in the 1960s, 1970s and beyond are all but gone. Within another decade, many highly skilled, highly paid Boomers will retire. As a group, their replacements seem to be a ragtag bunch of folks with limited, nonessential or obsolete skills that are not very relevant to the 21st century’s global marketplace. What’s keeping us afloat today are the residuals, the Boomers, inheritance and a small but extremely wealthy group of Americans that still invest here as they do elsewhere.

Fortunately, all is not lost. We simply need to retool, dramatically improve education in America, solve the crushing government debt burden, restructure all health care and Social Security, shift from fossil fuels to renewables, close out two wars and turn the Pentagon into a lean, mean 21st-century fighting machine. Who believes Congress can do all that? I don’t.

We need a cohesive national movement, a coming together and a dedication to excellence that we haven’t seen in 50 years. We are engaged in two detrimental nonshooting wars. The first is a great ideological divide that keeps the country in deadlock and, if not resolved soon, this paralysis will cripple us all. The second is between us and the world for economic dominance. We can sing to high heaven that we’re No. 1, but without money we’re nothing. So it’s time to fish or cut bait — the rest of the world is on a roll. We need to get our act together; Congress isn’t the answer, we are.