A Push for Government Investment

Fareed Zakaria laid out his hopes for President Obama's SOTU speech in Monday's Washington Post. It's a forceful call for government investment in research and development, as well as a call for scaling back obscure and harmful regulations. It's really short and definitely worth a read:

During the Cold War, the United States spent 3 percent of its gross domestic product on research and development; the government and private sector each contributed about half. Today, the private sector spends a bit more but government spends less. Obama should propose doubling federal spending on research and innovation. Three percent might have been enough in the 1950s, when Americans could still get millions of jobs in basic manufacturing. Jobs of the future lie in knowledge industries, and that means doing better than we did in the 1950s at knowledge creation.