United States' Leaders Vs. The World's Leaders - Who Wins This Smackdown?

It can get pretty depressing talking about the American political class. Problems such as the failed war on drugs, public schools that do not educate, lack of a national energy program, escalating health care costs, skyrocketing national debt, annually increasing budget deficits, higher and higher taxes, unacceptably high unemployment numbers, trivial partisan bickering and sniping, continuous political ethics violations, of which the alleged Charles Rangel and Maxine Walters scandals are just the two latest in a long series of ethics lapses, moral lapses such as those committed by Clinton, Spitzer, Foley, Ensign, MacGreevey, Sanford and others can really bring you down. And we as taxpayers, pay for this shoddy behavior to the tune of TRILLIONS of dollars over the past few decades.

But are we the only country that suffers these types of politicians or do other countries have real leaders instead of real politicians? Are other countries moving forward on the major issues of the time or are they also bogged down in mud slinging re-election campaigns and working on trivial issues that never positively impact a significant portion of their populations? In a non-scientific survey of what other nations are doing on major issues of our time, I came up with the following areas where foreign politicians actually display leadership traits and actually get things done on issues that matter:

• Portugal's leaders took the courageous step a few years ago and decriminalized possession of illegal drugs. As a result, drug usage actually went down when possession was decriminalized, more users went into rehab programs, and drug enforcement costs went down. In the United States, nothing has been done to address our failed war on drugs, resulting in increasingly large prison populations based on illegal drugs and the development of a violent, almost narco state just south of our border with northern Mexico. Over forty years after Nixon declared war on drugs, we are no closer to having a sane drug policy in this country that is enforceable, logical, and compassionate.
• Argentina's leaders recently passed legislation that legalized gay marriage. They recognized that we are all humans with distinct values and tastes which should not be isolated and condemned but should be recognized and given the full benefits of other citizens. In the United States, the Federal government maintains the ant-gay marriage law, Defense Of Marriage Act, and refuses to repeal the discriminatory "don't' ask, don't tell" policy of the armed forces. We are all Americans, we should all be treated equally in all aspects of life. Unless of course, acting against homosexuals, or any piece of our culture and society, can get politicians some cheap, discriminatory votes.
• We have known that our public school system was a failure relative to educating most of America's kids back in the early 1980s when a Reagan commission issued the landmark report, "A Nation At Risk." Despite the warning, almost thirty years later, public schools continue to eat up large chunks of taxpayer money while turning out mediocre students. The National Center For Educational Statistics, a part of the U.S. Department of Education, tracks how well 4th and 8th graders are doing in math and science education around the world. Their website contains the latest results of country by country comparisons and the results for the U.S. are not good. In science, we ranked 8th for fourth graders and 11th for eighth graders. In math, we ranked 11th for fourth graders and 9th for eighth graders. In all four categories we trailed Russia, England, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan and in some of the categories we also trailed Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary and South Korea. Thus, some countries' leaders have been able to put together higher quality education systems than the United States, despite our spending the most money on education than any of those nations ahead of us.
• In the 1970s, we as a nation became painfully aware of how dependent we are on foreign sources of energy as a result of the oil embargoes. Since then, our political class has done virtually nothing in developing a national energy policy and strategy that would result in less expensive and less vulnerable sources of energy. While our politicians did nothing, what have foreign leaders done in the area of solar power? According to the website, http://www.pvresources.com/, which tracks large scale solar electricity facilities around the world, the United States is soundly beaten in the area of generating electricity from the sun. According to the website, 52 of the largest, top one hundred world wide facilities generating electricity from the sun are in Spain, 24 of the top one hundred facilities are in Germany and only 5 of the largest facilities are in the United States. The Spanish solar facilities generate over 800 megawatts of electricity a year or 17.3 megawatts per million Spaniards, the German solar facilities generate almost 500 megawatts of electricity a year or 5.9 megawatts per million Germans, and the United States solar facilities generate only 91 megawatts of electricity or .29 megawatts per million Americans. From another view, these numbers show that on a per person basis, Spain gets almost 60 times more energy from solar than the U.S. while Germany gets over 20 times more energy from solar than the U.S. Clearly, some nations' leaders have been able to accomplish energy independence much better than our political class.
• Moving from solar to wind energy, consider a Time magazine article from February 25, 2009 about wind energy in Denmark. In the late 1970s, right after the oil embargo shocks, the Danish government implemented a program to take advantage of their winds. As a result, the Danes now get almost 20% of their electricity from wind turbines (Spain also scores a success story here, getting 10% of their electricity from wind), the Danes have reduced their carbon emissions over 13% from 1990 as a result of their wind energy, and they are the market leaders in wind technology and manufacturing. We get very little of our energy needs from wind technology. Oops, our politicians lose again relative to having a long term vision in both the wind and solar world relative to other world leaders. Imagine if our politicians had the strategic and long term energy vision of the Germans, Danes, and Spaniards. Imagine if we were getting 20-30% of our energy from wind and solar, numbers that seem very realistic given what other countries have accomplished. Do we think that our failed invasion of Iraq would have happened and the TRILLION dollars or so we incurred as a result of the invasion could have been used to offset our deficit or lower our taxes? Would we have stationed U.S. troops throughout the Mideast, deployments which inspired bin Laden to launch the 9-11 attacks? So much good could have happened if our politicians had acted intelligently and with urgency over the past four decades in this area like other nations did.
• An article in the September issue of Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine reviewed the economic situation in Brazil. Economists expect the Brazilian economy will grow over 7% this year while the U.S. economy will struggle to grow 3%. Credit rating agencies have raised the credit rating for Brazil based on the growth policies instituted by Brazil's leaders and their ability to keep their national debt levels under control, unlike the politicians in the United States who have run up dangerously high debt levels. As a side note, the top income tax rate in Brazil is only 27.5%, 7.5% less than the U.S. top tax rate. Do we think that Brazil figured out that high taxes stifle growth while our politicians have not yet figure that out? the article goes onto explain how many economies in South America are looking stronger and stronger as we go forward, based on how well their leaders have managed their respective financial affairs.

I am not an international expert, much more scientific work would have to be done to accurately figure out who has the most functional leaders in the world. But consider just the following small set of examples. If we had leaders that had the illegal drug foresight of Portugal, the compassion of Argentina, the energy strategy of Spain, Denmark and Germany, the educational wherewithal of the Far Eastern nations, Russia, England, Latvia, and other countries, and the economic skills of some South American nations, we would have it pretty good in the United States.

Also, with these skills and results, I doubt Congress would still have its current dismal approval rating of only 20% since they would have actually accomplished something to benefit the country and it's citizens, and not just themselves. Reading the news reports and listening to the news shows, one is left with the impression that American politicians see getting elected as the end game. It used to be that getting elected was the means to the end, you got into office to make noble changes. Now you get into office to enrich yourself. As a result, the world moves ahead of us in so many areas while our politicians look inward for their own benefit and not outward for our well being. Can anyone say term limits?


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http://www.flipcongress2010.com/