State of the Union Address & Thomas Friedman's recommendation

Math and Science and Importance of Engineers in the future
President Bush outlined a number of initiatives nothing more important than the one about American Competitiveness Initiative, highlights of this initiative are given below:
1. Double the federal spending on the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences over the next 10 years in the areas of nanotechnology, supercomputing and alternative energy sources
2. Make permanent the research and development tax credit, to provide incentives for private sector investment
3. Train 70,000 high school teachers to lead advanced-placement courses in math and science, bring 30,000 math and science professionals to teach in classrooms, and give early help to students who struggle with math.

Thomas Friedman in his book "The World is Flat" alluded to the slient crisis relating to Americans not taking up math and science and not pursuing advanced degrees. The above recommendations will get things started but in order for America to lead in the world each individual family should encourage the children to take up math and science. It is prevalent in most of the family's that immigrate from India or China that they emphasis the importance of math and science education and most the third generation immigrant family children are becoming Engineers. That is what needs to happen in American families.

Alternative Source of Energy and the Middle East
It is important to see the consequence of America stop importing oil from the middle east and other OPEC members. This is going to be a serious problem for the region, without the world buying oil the middle east will become insignificant. No-one would really care about what is going to happen in the middle east. The muslim leaders and countries in that region need to really start thinking what their competitive advantage is going to be in the future. They don't have best of the breed financial markets, property laws, productive enterprises or for that matter human capital. With globalization and flattening of the world, countries that do not have a productive identity would become obscure and go out of existance. Maybe that is what the terrorists and the muslim leaders want or maybe they have not thought through the problem, either way middle east is not going to be in the breaking news in the years to come!