Sen. Levin remarks to "Tech-knowledge-y 2012"
Saturday, April 14, 2012
UNIVERSITY CENTER, Mich. -- Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., delivered the following remarks on Saturday to "Tech-Knowledge-y 2012" at Delta College, an event sponsored by the Midland Section of the American Chemical Society and Delta College to boost careers in science, math and engineering:
Good morning, and thank you for your invitation to joint you at this important conference. The businesses, educational institutions, service organizations and government agencies represented here today, and the students here and elsewhere who will benefit from your efforts, are vital to the future of Michigan and the nation. Thank you for all you do.
I’d like to share with you this morning some thoughts on why encouraging and supporting science, math and technology education, and the careers that utilize those skills, is so important to America’s future, and especially to Michigan’s future, and also my view on how the outcome of the biggest debate taking place in Washington these days may help or hinder that important work.
It’s probably politically incorrect at a conference like this to question whether any of us who are older than 15 are qualified to comment on today’s technology. My 12-year-old granddaughter had a one-word description of my computer skills the other day. When she was trying to teach me something new, “Grandpa,” she said, “you’re hopeless.”
While my computer skills undoubtedly don’t earn my granddaughter’s seal of approval, in my job I regularly see the evidence of the central role of technology in every aspect of our lives. As chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I see constantly how America’s technological expertise and innovation helps our military accomplish their missions and defend our nation, and our allies and our interests around the globe. But science and technology are just as vital here at home.
Just this week, I visited a wind farm in Breckenridge that is a marvel of technology, as far removed from the farmstead windmills of days past as a jet fighter is from the Wright Brothers’ plane. I see over and over again how the advance of technology is helping Michigan’s economy, enabling us not just to recover from the setbacks of the past, but to lead us into a brighter economic future. Across Michigan we are positioned to lead in nearly every area of endeavor – advanced battery and vehicle technology, biofuels and alternative energy sources, life science and medicine, and the world of advanced manufacturing. Everywhere you look, Michiganians of all ages are at full throttle in the research and development of new technologies. Yesterday, I saw elementary school students in Alpena building and operating remotely operated vehicles to go underwater to survey shipwrecks at the great new Thunder Bay marine sanctuary.
Innovation and experimentation are nothing new for Michigan. Innovation has been integral to our prosperity and way of life from our beginnings. As the state that put the world on wheels, as the world’s leading hub of vehicle-related research and development, and as the arsenal of democracy, our ability to put knowledge and innovation to real-world use has been on full display during our lifetimes.
But long before that, 180 years ago, a Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville came to America, traveling to our great Eastern cities and to the Western frontier, the West at that time meaning Michigan and Wisconsin and Ohio. One of the places he visited on the frontier was Saginaw, then a town of a few hundred, which one American told him was “the last inhabited place till the Pacific Ocean.”
Tocqueville was to write one of the great chronicles of the American character, “Democracy in America,” and in that book he wrote of the way Americans threw themselves into the task of making a nation from wilderness. He was amazed at the railroads and canals and bridges he saw. He wrote: “The Americans arrived but as yesterday on the territory which they inhabit, and they have already changed the whole order of nature for their own advantage.”
And he continued: “What astonishes me in the United States, is not so much the marvelous grandeur of some undertakings, as the innumerable multitude of small ones.” Every farmer and craftsman on the frontier, he wrote, was trying to come up with some new way to solve practical problems, first to survive, then to thrive and prosper on this new frontier.
Tocqueville found a nation nearly obsessed with the idea of turning scientific knowledge into practical uses. He believed that the freedom Americans enjoyed from the despotic governments and class distinctions that plagued Europe also freed our minds so we could become a nation of innovators, where every American believed that he or she could prosper by coming up with the right idea at the right time. He wrote: “An American taken at random will be ardent in his desires, enterprising, adventurous, and above all an innovator. … Nothing prevents [an American] from innovating,” he wrote. Everything leads him to innovate. He has the energy it takes to innovate.”
This generation is adding to that legacy of innovation, a legacy of applying our minds to the new frontier – the technology frontier. Michigan remains at the center of that process in part because we are among the leaders nationally in the numbers of engineers we produce, and in the number of graduates in science, math, engineering and technology.
But to remain a nation of innovators, we must keep the pipes open for the flow of the next generation of innovators. And this is where current events should concern us.
STEM education is the down payment on the progress we must make. It is the foundation of our prosperity and our security. It is among our government’s most important responsibilities.
The president has outlined ambitious goals for STEM education: to prepare more than 100,000 first-class STEM teachers for the classroom; and to train 1 million new STEM college graduates over the next decade. Overall, the budget the president proposed earlier this year would dedicate $3 billion in 2013 to STEM education programs, a significant increase at a time when we’re cutting back on many worthy programs.
Whether the President’s STEM supporting effort will advance, and whether other important priorities, from education in general to our national defense to our commitment to our veterans to health care to job training to energy alternatives to our roads and bridges will advance, is the question we will debate in the weeks ahead in the United States Senate. The challenge we face is how to protect our important priorities while we must at the same time, by law and by common sense, reduce the federal deficit.
There are currently two schools of thought on how to approach the deficit. According to one school of thought, we must focus exclusively on cutting spending, and cut it almost everywhere, to accomplish by next January the more than $1 trillion in deficit reduction we must make.
That school of thought is best represented by the budget resolution that the Republican majority in the House of Representatives recently passed. That budget would make major cuts to important priorities, such as programs that make college education in science and other fields affordable for thousands of families every year.
I believe that if we make such drastic cuts, we would be like a farmer who eats his seed corn. He can feed himself for a day or a week that way, but he’ll have no crop come harvest. Slashing spending on research and education will only ensure that other nations making these investments will prosper while we fall behind. It would be a sad decline in the legacy of innovation and technological advancement that Tocqueville so admired in America, a retreat from the technology frontier.
There is an alternative way, a way in which we can protect the investments that will keep America strong in the years to come. The alternative way acknowledges that reducing the deficit will require sacrifices of all sorts, and that prudent, prioritized spending cuts will have to play a role. But at the heart of the alternative approach is the belief that we can’t protect those investments, and reduce the deficit, without additional revenue.
Federal tax revenue is the lowest it has been, as a share of our economic output, in decades. Historically, federal revenue has amounted to about 19 percent of our gross domestic product; today it’s closer to 14 percent. Nearly every independent budget expert you can find, of any ideological persuasion, acknowledges that we must add new revenue as well as cut spending to achieve meaningful deficit reduction. The American presidents I have served with who have tackled deficit reduction – from President Reagan to the first President Bush to President Clinton to President Obama – all have promoted balanced deficit reduction, including revenue as well as spending cuts. We have many opportunities to increase revenue, without slowing down the recovery or hitting the middle class. We can close some egregious tax loopholes, and we can ask the wealthiest among us, who as a group have done very well in recent decades, unlike the middle class, to contribute to deficit reduction. We can do that by restoring the 3 percentage point higher tax rate for incomes above $250,000, as was the case before the Bush tax cuts.
I talk about this issue of balanced deficit reduction to a lot of groups – I mention it to Michigan farmers, to auto workers, to corporate executives and to community activists. I do so because if we address our deficit the right way, the balanced way, we can protect the important priorities that Michigan families and communities need us to support. In no area is that effort more important than in science and technology, and especially STEM education. The effects of cutting education may not be immediately apparent, but the terrible price will become clear in the years to come, when future generations bear the burden of the decisions we make today.
You, your companies and your institutions, your students, will play an important role in helping Michigan pave the way to a more prosperous, more secure future. Thank you for carrying out that important work, and for your encouragement of efforts to promote innovation, technology and education as the road to that future.