ROUNDTABLE | In a special roundtable, we at Ideas@Innovations have collected four different contributions from individuals in different fields, asking them to provide their innovation prescription for either the President or the newly-sworn-in 113th Congress on an issue of their choice.
Dr. Hahrie Han is the Knafel Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences at Wellesley College and specializes in the way citizens connect to politics. She is the author of Moved to Action: Motivation, Participation, and Inequality in American Politics.
Congress has brought the country to the brink of disaster, yet again, and the American people are almost entirely fed up. Recent polls show that instituting communism in the United States is more popular than our democratically elected congressional leaders. How did we get to the point where Congress is less popular than the airline industry and the two parties are so gridlocked that keeping the lights on in government is a major accomplishment? More importantly, what will it take to break the cycle?
What’s most disconcerting, particularly in light of the “supercommittee,” is that its 12 members are caught in a “Filter Bubble” of their own making. As a result, the most likely solution will be to split the difference, with one side accepting a reduction of the federal safety net, and the other side accepting some increase in federal tax revenues.
With all due respect to the members of the ”supercommittee,” this solution is less than Super.
There are a number of obstacles in the way of the U.S. government’s ability to fully capitalize on a growing number of Latin American citizens’ access to technology and social media. One of those obstacles is the very same U.S. technology industry that produces the hardware and software that Latin American governments and U.S. officials are eager to leverage.
“In the current cast of characters, the Republicans are on our side, our local Democrats support us because our arguments are obvious, and the other Democrats don’t—because they don’t get it. The president understands the argument and would like to support us, he says, but there are various political issues. That’s roughly the situation. That’s been true for twenty years, through different presidents and different leaders. It’s stupid. So my point is that if you want to get a sense of how to screw this up, to put it negatively, then make it harder for us to bring in the world’s smartest people.” - Google’s Eric Schmidt
President Obama just finished his address to a joint session of Congress, announcing a $447 billion jobs plan. Did the President go radical in his jobs proposal as Post columnist Vivek Wadhwa called on him to?
Dear Mr. President, We don’t have an engineer shortage. Sincerely, Vivek Wadhwa.
