Obama: Technology, Innovation and Creating Jobs

p-did · #1 (**permalink**) 03-29-2008, 12:15 AM

From Obama's website:

Quote:

Technology, Innovation and Creating Jobs

Obama will encourage the deployment of the most modern communications infrastructure to reduce the costs of health care, help solve our energy crisis, create new jobs, and fuel our economic growth.

* Support Job Creation: Barack Obama believes we need to double federal funding for basic research and make the research and development tax credit permanent to help create high-paying, secure jobs. Obama will also make long-term investments in education, training, and workforce development so that Americans can leverage our strengths - our ingenuity and entrepreneurialism - to create new high-wage jobs and prosper in a world economy.
* Invest in U.S. Manufacturing: The Obama comprehensive energy independence and climate change plan will invest in America's highly-skilled manufacturing workforce and manufacturing centers to ensure that American workers have the skills and tools they need to pioneer the first wave of green technologies that will be in high demand throughout the world. Obama will also provide assistance to the domestic auto industry to ensure that new fuel-efficient vehicles are built by American workers.
* Create New Job Training Programs for Clean Technologies: The Obama plan will increase funding for federal workforce training programs and direct these programs to incorporate green technologies training, such as advanced manufacturing and weatherization training, into their efforts to help Americans find and retain stable, high-paying jobs. Obama will also create an energy-focused youth jobs program to invest in disconnected and disadvantaged youth.
* Boost the Renewable Energy Sector and Create New Jobs: The Obama plan will create new federal policies, and expand existing ones, that have been proven to create new American jobs. Obama will create a federal Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) that will require 25 percent of American electricity be derived from renewable sources by 2025, which has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs on its own. Obama will also extend the Production Tax Credit, a credit used successfully by American farmers and investors to increase renewable energy production and create new local jobs.
* Deploy Next-Generation Broadband: Obama believes we can get broadband to every community in America through a combination of reform of the Universal Service Fund, better use of the nation's wireless spectrum, promotion of next-generation facilities, technologies and applications, and new tax and loan incentives.
* Protect the Openness of the Internet: Obama supports the basic principle that network providers should not be allowed to charge fees to privilege the content or applications of some web sites and Internet applications over others. This principle will ensure that the new competitors, especially small or nonprofit speakers, have the same opportunity as big companies to innovate and reach large audiences.
* Invest in Rural Areas: Obama will invest in rural small businesses and fight to expand high-speed Internet access. He will improve rural schools and attract more doctors to rural areas.

Obama is focused on improving our information infrastructure to be accessible to a greater percentage of Americans, which allows more people to be productive from remote locations, making our workforce, and with it our economy, flexible as the job market changes.

p-did · #2 (**permalink**) 03-29-2008, 12:37 AM

Keeping infrastructure competitive with other nations is important to both the economy, and national security. You can't win if you're behind in technology.

Ronin-Talgar · #3 (**permalink**) 03-29-2008, 12:42 AM

Liking net neutrality.

Blade · #4 (**permalink**) 03-29-2008, 12:43 AM

Quote:

From Obama's website:

Quote:
Technology, Innovation and Creating Jobs

Obama will encourage the deployment of the most modern communications infrastructure to reduce the costs of health care, help solve our energy crisis, create new jobs, and fuel our economic growth.

* Support Job Creation: Barack Obama believes we need to double federal funding for basic research and make the research and development tax credit permanent to help create high-paying, secure jobs. Obama will also make long-term investments in education, training, and workforce development so that Americans can leverage our strengths - our ingenuity and entrepreneurialism - to create new high-wage jobs and prosper in a world economy.
* Invest in U.S. Manufacturing: The Obama comprehensive energy independence and climate change plan will invest in America's highly-skilled manufacturing workforce and manufacturing centers to ensure that American workers have the skills and tools they need to pioneer the first wave of green technologies that will be in high demand throughout the world. Obama will also provide assistance to the domestic auto industry to ensure that new fuel-efficient vehicles are built by American workers.
* Create New Job Training Programs for Clean Technologies: The Obama plan will increase funding for federal workforce training programs and direct these programs to incorporate green technologies training, such as advanced manufacturing and weatherization training, into their efforts to help Americans find and retain stable, high-paying jobs. Obama will also create an energy-focused youth jobs program to invest in disconnected and disadvantaged youth.
* Boost the Renewable Energy Sector and Create New Jobs: The Obama plan will create new federal policies, and expand existing ones, that have been proven to create new American jobs. Obama will create a federal Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) that will require 25 percent of American electricity be derived from renewable sources by 2025, which has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs on its own. Obama will also extend the Production Tax Credit, a credit used successfully by American farmers and investors to increase renewable energy production and create new local jobs.
* Deploy Next-Generation Broadband: Obama believes we can get broadband to every community in America through a combination of reform of the Universal Service Fund, better use of the nation's wireless spectrum, promotion of next-generation facilities, technologies and applications, and new tax and loan incentives.
* Protect the Openness of the Internet: Obama supports the basic principle that network providers should not be allowed to charge fees to privilege the content or applications of some web sites and Internet applications over others. This principle will ensure that the new competitors, especially small or nonprofit speakers, have the same opportunity as big companies to innovate and reach large audiences.
* Invest in Rural Areas: Obama will invest in rural small businesses and fight to expand high-speed Internet access. He will improve rural schools and attract more doctors to rural areas.
Obama is focused on improving our information infrastructure to be accessible to a greater percentage of Americans, which allows more people to be productive from remote locations, making our workforce, and with it our economy, flexible as the job market changes.

All of these things are simply massive, costly, tax-funded boondoggles which will create nothing of value if history is any guide. Creating such a WPA project for engineers merely underlines Obama's complete ignorance of how innovation happens.

p-did · #5 (**permalink**) 03-29-2008, 12:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Blade

All of these things are simply massive, costly, tax-funded boondoggles which will create nothing of value if history is any guide. Creating such a WPA project for engineers merely underlines Obama's complete ignorance of how innovation happens.

How do you suggest we upgrade our infrastructure, which is falling behind the rest of the developed world?

Blade · #6 (**permalink**) 03-29-2008, 01:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by p-did

How do you suggest we upgrade our infrastructure, which is falling behind the rest of the developed world?

Like it has always been RATIONALLY upgraded - by market forces, not by means of fiats based on the imaginings of uninformed bureaucrats who have limitless supplies of tax money. People who would have economic interests in these projects are obviously feeding all this dreck to Obama. He's either too stupid to recognize it for what it is, or he does understand it, but knows it makes good political propaganda for naive voters.

p-did · #7 (**permalink**) 03-29-2008, 01:43 AM

Quote:

Like it has always been RATIONALLY upgraded - by market forces

Not in every case. The government programs like Obama's played a major role in building the original infrastructure that made the Internet possible.

You're right, in that most cases, we don't need the government's help to conduct business. But when it comes to major transcontinental infrastructure, the taxpayer funding plays a crucial role in making it possible.

I pay a lot of taxes, but I recognize that roads, water systems, electrical grids, and other vital systems tend to fail if they are split up between competing companies.

In other words, we don't have enough space so that private firms can each build their own competing road system, underground water pipes, and electrical grid.

The same goes for major communication projects. While private funds can achieve great things, the government must also be communited to keeping infrastructure upgraded if we are to compete with other nations, whose infrastructure is well funded by their governments.

Obama recognizes these truths; and that's another reason he should have your vote.

p-did · #8 (**permalink**) 03-29-2008, 01:49 AM

Quote:

good political propaganda...

What you mean is propaganda that delivers a positive message and an emphasis on updating this country which is rapidly falling behind other developed nations in both technology and productivity (which is why our currency keeps losing ground).

I guess it is naive to believe that all Americans could see that well funded infrastructure is a key to a fundamentally strong economy and cutting edge national defense.

Blade · #9 (**permalink**) 03-29-2008, 02:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by p-did

Not in every case. The government programs like Obama's played a major role in building the original infrastructure that made the Internet possible.

You're right, in that most cases, we don't need the government's help to conduct business. But when it comes to major transcontinental infrastructure, the taxpayer funding plays a crucial role in making it possible.

I pay a lot of taxes, but I recognize that roads, water systems, electrical grids, and other vital systems tend to fail if they are split up between competing companies.

In other words, we don't have enough space so that private firms can each build their own competing road system, underground water pipes, and electrical grid.

The same goes for major communication projects. While private funds can achieve great things, the government must also be communited to keeping infrastructure upgraded if we are to compete with other nations, whose infrastructure is well funded by their governments.

Obama recognizes these truths; and that's another reason he should have your vote.

J.C.R. Licklider, the person one is most able to call the "inventer of the internet", conceived his own ideas, and then got government funding to pursue research on them, the most natural course for him since he already worked for the government. To use this to say an imbecile like Obama can create marvelous new technologies by fiat is a real howler.

You are also regurgitating the standard statist "infrastructure" view, something that I some day hope to debate an exceptionally smart liberal here, so that I won't waste my time listening to stupid arguments, or offer arguments that cannot be grasped by my opposite, but that would exclude you.

DuH2 · #10 (**permalink**) 03-29-2008, 02:36 AM

The internet was primarily made by those right wing warmongerers the left hates.
IOW it was made mainly for military communication.

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