End of Obama's silicon honeymoon

I also think that in general, a president's power tends to be overstated. People give Clinton a lot of credit for the 90s boom, but I think he was largely riding a technological wave that he had nothing to do with. Dubya did screw things up, but many of the things he screwed up were already set in motion before he took office. Obama fixed a few things, but he's also made things worse in ways that we probably won't see the ramifications of until several years down the line. I shudder to think of the next financial bubble, now that we've set the precedent that wanton recklessness will get you bailed out by the federal government.

Small businesses also get a tax credit for 35-50% of their health insurance costs. I think there was also a provision for low-income health insurance subsidies that may affect many startup founders, since oftentimes your technical "income" when you're getting the company off the ground is near zero.

I suspect that no matter how unhappy people are with Obama, many of them will still pull the lever for him in 2012.

That's an unanswerable question. In order to determine how much taxes will have to be increased to pay for current expenditures, you would need to be able to predict what the economy will be like in a year. If the administration's economic initiatives were successful, there's a possibility taxes will not have to be raised at all. So you're getting angry at Obama because he can't predict what your company's revenues will be in a year, which is totally unreasonable.

I think that applies more generally to most of the points you raised. The Obama administration didn't make the world unpredictable, it has always been that way. I don't even think another failure in the economy makes anything the administration has done categorically bad decisions. I don't think we're in a worse position now than a year ago, and I don't think the fall can be any harder now than it could have been. (Because it could have been atrocious.)

In general I think it's reflective more of business leaders' politics, and those on the left will say that times are hard, and those on the right will say that Obama and the Democrats are making times hard, which again, is totally unreasonable.

And by the way, how do you know that "enough" people in business think these things are true? Yours is a very dangerous type of reasoning. It allows one to spread lies and disinformation, and then say "well it does not matter whether all these stories are true, it matters that people may think that they are true" ...

By now it is an obvious fact that any democrat president will be relentlessly attacked from certain corners of the media regardless of what he does. So saying that a bunch of stories or statements are out there is not saying much at all. These stories will always be out there for any even slightly liberal president.

For example, it is clear by now that the Clinton administration was very good for most business and especially silicon valley. But if you listened to certain media outlets at the time you would think that Clinton was a Maoist dictator that rounded up all business people and sent them into gulags.

What about doing things to help more people reach this level? I don't have any suggestions in particular, and I think think that this is a hard problem, but it is certainly a worthwhile one.

Also,

1) Only larger companies can sponsor H1b's, not startups. The so-called "startup visa" would be a small step forward, but it sets a pretty high bar.

2) We rank towards the bottom of developed countries in math and science, and by college it's too late; by then you either got a good education in these areas, or you didn't.

3) I agree that government is super inefficient, and in some ways it may appear incompatible with the near-opposite agility of the startup world. That said, small businesses of all kinds need capital, and often credit, and the short-term effects of banking reform was to tighten capital markets even more.

-In a vacuum, you might be right, but companies in the US increasingly compete on a global scale, and since other countries are more friendly to immigration of skilled professionals, we risk losing our global competitive edge.-

That there is a "global economy" and that this is somehow a new thing is a myth perpetuated by Milton Friedman's view of the "flat earth." What is a new thing is the USA relaxing tariffs and trade restrictions so that American companies can outsource work to other countries and not pay taxes on their goods if they manufacture them abroad. Besides that, there has been a "global economy" for many hundreds of years. It's at least as old as the British empire. What the US has been doing over the last thirty years has not so much been "opening markets", as it has been destroying our country's internal regulations that protect American workers from competing with the workers of foreign countries. In my opinion, such regulations were a good thing, and they built the strongest economic power the world had ever seen.

In brief, we don't have to compete on global scale if we choose not to. Your statement assumes that we do.

-It's a nice idea to think that artificial barriers will result in us ramping up education, but that's a process that will take decades.-

USA, 1945: "It's nice to think that if we eliminate artificial barriers to education, we'll have a skilled workforce that will build America into an industrial and economic superpower, but it would be easier to keep all the money in the hands of a few wealthy people. It would take decades to accomplish being an economic superpower, so it's really not worth the effort." I'm glad this wasn't the prevailing attitude then. I'm sure the country I live in would look a lot different.

-You can't just start teaching advanced computer science to high school seniors who can barely read and struggle with basic math.-

Again, reframing. The correct question is, "Why are so many American high school seniors barely able to read and struggle with basic math?" There are many facets to this problem, I'm sure, but I think a large chunk of the problem is that for many American families, there is a culture of anti-intellectualism. School, teachers and education are derided, and with this derision comes an unspoken message that being educated is not that important. And it's not just families. Our culture as a whole doesn't value education. Even in the tech industry, we have superstars Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as the problem's biggest contributors -- they are both college drop outs, yet they are both ridiculously rich and famous.

I think that we could undercut this whole sociocultural phenomenon by having our government step in and do something really drastic, like waive the student loans of anyone who gets a tech degree and holds a job in the industry for some number of years. The more ridiculous the price of an education becomes, the more American teenagers you're going to have who feel that the path of least resistance to a good life doesn't lead through a university.

-So what's more likely is that the lack of skilled professionals in this country will gradually reduce our pace of innovation relative to other countries and cause a relative decline in our wealth, causing us to fall further and further behind.-

-It's far faster and more efficient to let the hoards of skilled professionals in other countries come here, especially since many of them are willing to risk almost anything to move their families here and would stay forever if we let them.-

The assumption made here is that we simply don't have enough skilled labor in this country to meet our demand, and that the only way meet it is to import that skilled labor. I disagree with you. I think we can easily create a social and economic environment conducive to creating the demand we need. Is importing it easier and cheaper? Yes. But it doesn't pay out in the long term.

Here's an example situation. Let's stay Startup X has one American engineer, but it needs fifteen more of him. For the sake of argument, let's say his skill set is utterly unique in the US. No one knows what he knows but him. So, Startup X needs fourteen more of him, but they don't exist in this country now. There do exist internationals with the skill set, and it would be really cheap to get the internationals to come over, and Startup X would have all the labor it needs within a matter of weeks. Cheap labor, lots of profit. The CEO is seeing dollar signs. But, his partner points out something else. They've got the one American engineer. The government just recently instituted a bunch of economic incentives for students who get tech degrees. Under the same bill, Startup X could also get money to pay the salaries of interns learning a skilled technology trade. Bingo! Their one American engineer could train the new engineers. Each of them might further innovate, have new ideas, form his own startup one day, and they'd be American startups. Yeah, it'll take longer. And, you might not be able to pay them the same as internationals. Since they're American, they're likely to have higher standards for pay. Oh, but right, I forgot. Using international labor is cheaper and faster, our country be damned.

Again, this kind of tunnel vision is really damaging to our industry, because all of the negative societal consequences of conservative economics come back around to bite us in the ass. If we keep addressing our problems with the same kind of thinking that caused the problems in the first place (lower taxes, fewer trade restrictions, etc.), we'll be perpetuating a vicious and dangerous downward spiral.