Washington Post, December 30, 2009 page A8

Steven Pearlstein published "Big Business,Big Government and the Big balancing act: An analytical article with insights.

The following passages are quoted with comments for readers of Sino-American economics.

"At its most simplistic level, this debate plays itself out as the choice between big government and small government, between regulation and deregulation, between European-style socialism and Anglo-American free-market capitalism. The one side takes its intellectual roots from Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and the recently departed Paul Samuelson, the other from Adam Smith, F. Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter and Milton Friedman."

In China, Confucianism has influenced the expansion of the middle class as traditional culture plus the reforms with global outlook in evidence.

"Americans undestand that free markets are the best vehicles for generating innovative products and ever more efficient ways of producing them."

In China, the market system works well to improve the standard of living for most folks and such continuing reforms have generated sanguine prospects as known to the world.

"And while it is now beyond dispute that labor markets today are generating incomes that are increasingly unequal, governments have found it remarkably difficult to come up with cost-effective programs that successfully offset those effect."

"The Future of Community Colleges" was published by the Congressional Record,July 18, 1974 to provide educational and training opportunities for the grassroots to stress vocations or transfer to universities for professions with cost-effective programs in America.

China has been stressing vocational education as well to produce para-professionals that are in dire need. There is the common goal for Sino-American economics especailly in apprenticeship programs for the labor market in socio-economics i.e. social cohesion by expanding the middle class as the backbone of nations for stability.

"The next decade is not only to strike the proper balance between the political and economic challenges but also to perfect the public and private institutions that can deliver on those promises."

Such conclusion is worthy of note as it is evident that the tuitions are extremely high beyond the affordability of the middle class but public institutions such as community colleges are reasonable in cost with work and study opportunities to validate and implement "Work and Study Cycle Theory" Cf.www.ask.com for reference.

Francis Shieh aka Xie Shihao, a lifelong graduate student with intellectual roots at St. John's university in Shanghai since early 1940s, focusing economic philosophy at Georgetown Graduate School plus five decades of teaching in USA and in China. And as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Hong Kong, 1989-1990.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009 at 10.10 a.m.