Is Paul Ryan
Qualified to be President?
Global American Series
14 August 2012
Ronald Reagan once said he was surprised how much the job
of President involved international
affairs. So every election I ask the
same question: Do these politicians in Washington DC really know the real world
in which we compete? Advisers often disagree so it is vital that the officeholder
have international experience to gauge good advice from bad since we are
competing in a high-tech, global space-age economy (simply parking money
overseas is not “experience.”)
Is Rep. Ryan qualified to step into the shoes of the
President if the unthinkable happens?
Reviewing the history of past presidential tickets,
Jonathan Bernstein in Wikipedia concluded that "depending on how one
scores these things," Romney/Ryan is "certainly the ticket with the
least foreign policy and national security experience since at least 1948, and perhaps as far
back as 1912.” In 2012 we face a much different world than
we did a hundred years ago.
According to Wikipedia, Mr. Ryan has spent his entire
adult life as a member of Congress, elected in 1998 at the age of 28. Before that he worked at a McDonald’s and at
one time drove the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.
There’s nothing wrong with that, except the world is vastly more complicated
than selling wieners and coming up with economic theories inside the Washington
beltway. During his time in Congress, Ryan’s sole international experience has
been his going on seven junkets to foreign countries with other members of
Congress. Getting wined and dined at the
top is not the same as seeing a country from the street.
Mr. Ryan has said “I was born in Wisconsin and never left
it.” Like Mr. Ryan, I too was born in
the Midwest – in Iowa. Later we moved to Texas when I was 15. But unlike Mr.
Ryan, I got out of Iowa and Texas and saw the real world.
At the same age of 28 I didn’t go to Congress. Instead, I
was hired by a Fortune 500 company (Dresser Industries) and spent five (5)
years traveling to about thirty (30) countries on international business
negotiations. I can tell you that the
world is a lot different than what you might think from seeing it on TV or in a
book. I first saw China in 1982 when they had nothing but bicycles jamming the
streets. Now they are the third country in the world to put astronauts safely
into space and the largest car market in the world. They have advanced Magnetic
Levitation trains that run over 260 miles per hour from the Shanghai airport. I’ve seen vast changes from Europe to Asia,
and how America has changed in that same time. It’s shocking.
On a Congress junket you learn only what they tell you and
want you to know. When you are doing business deals on the street level you
have to learn the local laws and customs. You have to know the people and build
a relationship of trust with them. If
you don’t, your mission will fail. I discovered
that what you read in a book about a country is not what you find when you actually
get there.
I went to Norway in 2011 for the first time. Despite
being in nearly 50 countries and reading about Norway before the trip, when I
got there I found I had no idea what it was really like. That came only after I
traveled there and spent considerable time educating myself.
We live in a global economy. What happens in Europe, or China, does impact
the U.S. economy directly. The Euro
disaster hurts U.S. sales since 20% of our exports go to Europe. We do not live
in an isolated economic bubble. Europe
is today following an “austerity” program that has caused unemployment to
skyrocket and growth to decline. Under President Obama, the U.S. took a
different course similar to what FDR did to escape the Great Depression, and
the U.S. has been lowering its unemployment rate since the worst financial
disaster since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. The Europeans would love to
have our economic situation instead of theirs.
Mr. Ryan’s proposed solutions (in the “Ryan Plan”) are to
cut education and space investments every year for years to come. How do we lead a high-tech world without
investing in education and space? We can’t.
We either lead it, or China will. Being
No. 2 in the technology race is not a winning hand. It’s disaster for our
future.
Unfortunately, I have to conclude Rep. Ryan is not qualified
to be President in a global economy.
Next week: Will the “Ryan Plan” promote a recovery, or make
things worse and put us an additional $5 Trillion in debt?
Michael Fjetland
Global American Series
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