05:30 PM CDT on Saturday, April 23, 2005

You're worried that America is not taking care of business. You should read what David Gergen wrote in U.S. News & World Report. We are now borrowing $2 billion a day from Asians. Standard & Poor's predicts that unless we change course, our debt will be downgraded to junk bonds within 25 years. Do the math on that. It comes down to every man, woman and child in this country owing $2,433 each to Asia at the end of this year. If you take that year after year and compound the interest, it's scary.

Before you were a presidential candidate, you were an education reformer. It seems like no matter what we do, we can't get our school system right.

A newborn child is like an unwired computer. There are trillions of neurons that wire the brain. The ability of these trillions of neurons to connect starts to shut down at 6 years of age, when we start our public schools. We know this is a medical fact.

Now, an uneducated Chinaman can recognize 2,000 symbols. You've got to have this tremendous hand-eye coordination to read and write their language even minimally. That's what makes the Chinese factory worker so productive: Their hand-eye coordination is just off the charts. In India, I don't care how poor you are, if you want to talk to everyone in your neighborhood, you have to learn 12 different dialects by age 2. Now that's a neuron connector!

In the best American universities, more and more of the engineering students are from India and China. They are financed by their government and are going back home. If you look at where the future is headed, you get a pretty clear picture, right? We're in denial.

Where will the next Ross Perot-style reformer come from? I have no idea. That's not the real issue. The real issue is to get this message to the American people so that they understand that time is critical. You can either wait until after some terrible event occurs in your life that was predictable and spend months or years fixing it, or tackle it in advance. We must start now.