Lockheed CEO: Science and Tech Excellence Necessary to Create Jobs – The "Rising Above the Gathering Storm" Report

A pessimist is a person who wants to be an optimist but has a grasp of the facts.

On the bright side, he said, Winston Churchill once said, "You could always count on the Americans to do the right thing– after they have tried everything else."

Augustine is particularly pessimistic about America’s ability to compete for jobs. The job is the basis for our standard of living and quality of life. It’s important to the government because the tax base is dependent on citizens having those jobs, he said. National security and social security are therefore dependent on jobs.

"We may be entering a period of sustained structural unemployment in this country," he said, particularly "real" unemployment, that doesn’t include people who are underemployed or have given up looking.

The "Rising Above the Gathering Storm" http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11463 (download free PDF) report, which Augustine helped develop, concluded that the only way to solve this problem is by promoting innovation.

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