The Rob Simone Talk Show

This year China became the world’s second-largest economy. Experts are currently arguing over when China will overtake the United States as the world’s largest. Most predictions place that event between 2020 and 2027. The good news has been that the manufacturing juggernaut our own consumer markets largely created still depends on us for the development of new products, processes and technology. According to recent studies, however, this should not be taken for granted.

We now live in a truly global economy where it is not unusual to work alongside people in other countries. Labor off-shoring has moved beyond manufacturing and customer service support, extending to value-added research and development activities. This means we are not losing jobs just for our unskilled labor force, but for our higher-paid, more-educated workforce as well.

The R&D tax credit is a highly effective targeted tax incentive that helps drive the global competitive edge that we need. President Obama is set today in Chicago to again propose making the research credit permanent along with increasing its value, costing approximately $100 billion over the next 10 years (see fact sheet provided on the White House Web site).

Although the program has been around for 30 years and enjoys bi-partisan legislative support, it has yet to be made permanent. The R&D credit has expired numerous times before being retroactively renewed. It has even lapsed for one year. The 2010 tax credit, widely expected to be renewed, has yet to be passed by Congress. The uncertainty of the credit restricts new projects, limits opportunities and curtails high-value job growth.

The other problem is that our R&D tax incentive lags behind other countries. According to a report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a non-partisan think tank, we are now ranked number 17 out of the top 30 OECD countries. That’s right. You will find us below China, India, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Korea, Spain, France and others. (We were No. 1 as recently as the 1990s.)

Besides contributing to global competitiveness, the return on investment is substantial. The R&D credit currently costs an estimated $7 billion a year, which is very little given its impact on the economy. A permanent credit coupled with just a 25 percent increase could boost real GDP by $206.3 billion, generate 270,000 manufacturing jobs and raise total employment by 510,000 within a decade, according to a 2010 report by the Milken Institute.

One of the great things about the R&D credit is that it does not discriminate. Companies of all sizes, from small businesses to Fortune 500, qualify. A research study performed by The Tax Credit Company of IRS data shows that although large corporations claim the majority of credits, the relative impact on small to mid-size businesses as a share of their total assets is significantly greater.

Bottom line: Strengthening the R&D credit is something all sides agree on. It is a priority for our economic future at one of the most uncertain times in our history. It’s time to put questions about the future availability of the credit to rest so that companies will stop discounting its value, take full advantage of it as a key driver of innovation and assure that the U.S. remains the world’s leader in research and development.

Brandon Edwards is president of The Tax Credit Company, which represents Fortune 500 companies, and small and midsize companies in maximizing the value of tax incentive programs.

More about the R&D Credit:

R&D Tax Credit Update: http://www.researchcreditupdate.com
R&D Credit Coalition: http://www.investinamericasfuture.org/
IRS: http://www.irs.gov/businesses/article/0,,id=101382,00.html

Read more: Technology and Innovation Foundation, R&D Credit Coalition, Milken Institute, Small Business, Fortune 500, Congress, Research and Development Credit, Irs, Research, R&D Credit, Mexico, President Obama, R&D Tax Credit Update, Canada, Permanent Credit, Obama, Tax Credit, Tax Credit Company, Japan, France, Korea, Research and Development, India, Spain, China, R&D, Politics News

Hard to know whom we’re supposed to hate the most. Mexican immigrants had the lead for most of the year, but Muslims are now at the head of the pack. I’ve seen some blather about “Jewish media.” And as for African-Americans — as Chris Rock says, “That train ain’t never late.”

It’s a good time to read the best book ever written about 9/11 and its legacy in America — even though it was published 30 years ago.

The South African novelist J.M. Coetzee writes with a pen that’s sharp as a knife, in ink made from his own blood. Or so it seems, for each word seems carved or cut, obtained at great price, offered as a sacrifice. “Fun” reading? Not at all. [His best book is the least fun: Disgrace, one of the more devastating books ever penned.] Necessary reading? Now more than ever — the 160 pages of Waiting for the Barbarians are eye-openers, and they’ll keep your eyes open long after you close the book. [To buy Barbarians from Amazon, click here.]

Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. That’s even more impressive because his literary career is comparatively brief; he didn’t produce his first book until 1974. Waiting for the Barbarians — the novel that established him as an Important Writer — was published in 1980. In those days, it was viewed as an allegory of South Africa, Coetzee’s homeland. To read it now is to read a very different book.

The title comes from a poem by Constantine Cavafy. It begins with great expectation of a visit from the “barbarians.” The Emperor awakes early, Senators gather, military men put on plumage. The day passes. Finally …

… night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
and said that there are no longer any barbarians.

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.

In his novel, Coetzee asks: Who are these barbarians? And what purpose do they serve?

The character who narrates the novel — and who tries to answer these questions — is not an exceptional man. Far from it. He says of himself:

I am a country magistrate, a responsible official in the service of the Empire, serving out my days on this lazy frontier, waiting to retire. I collect the tithes and taxes, administer the communal lands, see that the garrison is provided for, supervise the junior officers who are the only officers we have here, keep an eye on trade, preside over the law-court twice a week. For the rest I watch the sun rise and set, eat and sleep and am content.

When I pass away I hope to merit three lines of small print in the Imperial gazette. I have not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times.

Just like a great many people.

But to this dusty outpost of the Empire comes Colonel Joll. The Colonel has news: There are barbarians in the mountains. And he and his troops ride out to find them. When he returns, the Magistrate is surprised to see who they are: simple peasants and vagrants who represent no threat to the Empire.

Colonel Joll interrogates the prisoners. His methods are crude, cruel and effective:

First, I get lies, you see. This is what happens — first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth.

Or as the Magistrate sardonically restates the torturer’s creed: ”Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.”

Meanwhile, the Magistrate befriends a young female prisoner and, after a while, decides to return her to her family in the mountains.

That is a mistake. So is wondering aloud about the Colonel’s analysis of the situation and his interrogation tactics. Clearly, the Magistrate is not to be trusted. Indeed, he must be…a traitor. And so he is charged with treason and jailed:

When (the torturers) first brought me back here … I wondered how much pain a plump comfortable old man would be able to endure in the name of his eccentric notions of how the Empire should conduct itself. But my torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints of salt water are poured into it. … They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal.

In 1980, Coetzee’s allegory was a simple one. The Barbarians were the blacks of South Africa. The Empire was the white-ruled South African government. The Magistrate, a Christ surrogate, represented the good intentions of enlightened whites whose wish to “help” only led to more trouble.

Were this a limited historical allegory, we could read this book at a distance — or not at all. But Waiting for the Barbarians, like all great stories, has different meanings in different times. You cannot help but substitute “terrorists” for “barbarians” as you read this book. And the torture scenes….

But you know all this. So what’s in it this book for you? Only this: We live in a time when we will be tested (or are already being tested). Who are our barbarians? What purpose do they serve? And who, in the end, are we?

[Cross-posted from HeadButler.com]

Read more: 9/11, South Africa, Nobel Prize, Allegory, J.M. Coetzee, Terrorism, Nationalism, September 11, Patriotism, America, American Pride, Books News

More than one quarter of the translators working alongside American soldiers in Afghanistan failed language proficiency exams but were sent onto the battlefield anyway, according to a former employee of the company that holds contracts worth up to $1.4 billion to supply interpreters to the U.S. Army.

“I determined that someone — and I didn’t know [who] at that time — was changing the grades from blanks or zeros to passing grades,” said Paul Funk, who used to oversee the screening of Afghan linguists for the Columbus, Ohio-based contractor, Mission Essential Personnel. “Many who failed were marked as being passed.”

Read more: Afghanistran Translators, Afghanistan Interpreters, Afghanistan Failed Interpreters, Mission Essential Personnel, Afghanistan Failed Translators, Afghanistan, Afghanistan War, World News

Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticises the tactics of his opponents, in a BBC interview ahead of Sunday’s constitutional referendum.

Taliban leader Mullah Omar says his fighters are on the verge of victory in Afghanistan and the Nato-led campaign has been “a complete failure”.

Middlesbrough is the area of England least resilient to economic shocks, according to BBC-commissioned research.