‘We’ve killed investment banking, and now we are killing engineering’,
Intel chairman Craig Barrett, complains in a broadside against the US government in an
interview with Business Week in which he rails against the government’s failure to pass a $1.2bn R&D programme.
Barrett said the US government is ‘thumbing its nose’ at Intel’s advice on the issue pointing out that, in the light of agricultural subsidies, bail-outs and pork barrel projects it’s ‘hard to believe’ the government can’t find $1.2bn for innovation. Barrett said it was throwing the country’s future down the drain.
Barrett also said that the US is ‘abdicating our leadership in finance and accounting to the Europeans’.
He complained about uncompetitive education, uncompetitive basic research, a lack of immigration policy, high corporate tax rates, and the fact that 60 per cent of graduate students in engineering are from overseas. ‘We pay for their education but then we send them home.'
Politicians want a two year return on their political fixes, but every problem takes longer than two years to fix, according to Barrett.
The good news for Intel, said Barrett, was that 75 to 80 per cent of its business is done outside the US.
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