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The Election November 5, 2008, 3:33PM EST

James Goodnight

(page 2 of 2)

James Goodnight, CEO of SAS

Visas/American Competitiveness

We as a country should be trying to attract the best and brightest minds from around the world. The current Administration's attitude is we don't want them here. We want to get rid of them as quickly as possible. So when we have, I think, over 50% of our PhDs in this country from other countries, when they get their PhD, we ask them to leave very quickly. We don't want you to hang around, because we won't issue enough visas to allow them to stay. Countries like Canada have a policy of welcoming foreign people with PhDs and highly trained workers, whereas for some reason our country doesn't want them anymore.

Either get rid of it entirely or at least quadruple it. Apr. 1 this year was H-1B visa opening day, with 85,000 positions and 135,000 applicants. If we're going to be an innovative country, innovation is most likely going to come from your most highly educated people—people working in computer science, biopharmaceutical areas, in all the high-tech areas. Now I would hope at some point we can graduate enough of our own students, but we're doing terrible right now. We don't have enough math and science and engineering, we call them the stem skills, our kids aren't really much interested in that anymore.

When I was in junior high school, middle school as they call it now, the Soviets put up Sputnik. That woke this country up. We've got to really encourage kids to get into these areas, and it happened. Huge amounts of money and resources [were put] into all levels of schools to encourage math and science and engineering. If you look back at Silicon Valley, that's pretty much where Silicon Valley got started. We need to have programs, whether it be advertising programs or additional funding to the schools, for math and science. We've got to get our kids back interested in math, science, and engineering. Otherwise, right now a lot of our goods are made in China and India, they're going to be designed and engineered there if we don't get rolling on getting more engineers and scientists in this country. Any way we can do it, we need to do it. China is outproducing us in engineers and scientists; so is India.

What do you want, do you want a service country where all [we] do is service and look after service stuff, we don't invent stuff anymore? We have to import everything? That's what's going to happen if we don't get our kids better-educated, if we don't try to hold on to every scientist and engineer that graduates in this country, and if we don't actively try to import more scientists and engineers into this country. This country is getting weaker and weaker and weaker, year by year, and nobody in Washington seems to be concerned about it.

Global companies are global. They are not restricted to using the talent just in one country. They can use it wherever it exists. And so much of the talent today is being grown in China and India. They've got a lot more population than we do, those two countries have 10 times the population of the U.S. We're going to have to fight to keep our place in the world, and we can't do that without the highly educated workforce that we need.

[The first priority is] to get today's economy rolling. But then you've got to worry about tomorrow's economy, next year's economy, and that takes talent. We need the talent to come in, we need to create it ourselves, and we need to bring it in to enhance what we have. Without that, the economy's probably going to keep needing to be fixed every few years because we're losing our edge in the talent race. That needs to be recognized as part of any economic stimulus. It's good to get people back to work as soon as possible, but then what happens the next time the plant closes, because the engineers designed something in China and they designed it for Chinese people to make it? That's going to keep happening, it's going to keep continuously happening until we get more PhDs in this country, until we try to keep the ones that are graduating from college.

Energy

They've already renewed the tax credits for wind and solar. There's not a lot more they can do other than create some multibillion-dollar project to undertake alternative energy. As the price of oil continues to fall and our gas prices are less than they were a year ago, all of a sudden that's going to disappear as something important. It needs to stay up there on top of the list of important things, but you know how things are. When the price goes down, it's going to disappear.

Health Care

Clearly, health care, this is a problem that we need to face. ... The idea of trying to make sure everybody has insurance—what are you going to do if somebody doesn't have insurance, put them in jail? It's not an easy fix. It's not a quick fix. We need to go very slowly as they tackle that particular problem. Let's take it one step at a time, not try to overhaul the entire system at once.

I think it would be good to have maybe some statewide pool that anybody out of work or between jobs could get health coverage through an organization. Preferably, [it would] use existing organizations like Blue Cross Blue Shield. They cover probably half the people in North Carolina already. We have insurance companies—Aetna, all these others that do this already—we don't need a federal government bureaucracy to do it. We've got companies already in place that can provide the coverage, it's just a question of funding. I would like to see a lot of these insurance companies funded by the government for any uninsured people they cover. Give these professional providers that are already getting big discounts from hospitals, let them do the work. Set up a pool of coverage for everybody that is not covered, but let the government pay for it. Split the cost between the federal, state, and local, like it's done with Medicaid right now.

The biggest use I see of technology [in health care], something that would be incredibly great for this country but which probably will not happen, would be a national health-care database. Every single person in this country, their entire medical records are kept in one central location on one enormous computer system. The reason I say that is because there is so much data that we could glean from a system like that [SAS makes software that could analyze such data]. We could spot clusters where people were getting cancer, or maybe clusters where they weren't getting cancer. It would be great for medicine, but there's too many concerns about privacy issues. Privacy is funny, somehow we trust our medical records in a manila folder more than we do on a national database, which really can be controlled.

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