Gov. Ed Rendell thinks America is crippling its competitiveness in the foreign market in three… Gov. Ed Rendell thinks America is crippling its competitiveness in the foreign market in three areas: health care, education and trade practices.

Rendell said Americans lose billions of dollars annually because countries like China and India steal our “intellectual property” and jobs. He spoke about western Pennsylvania’s economic future to a crowd gathered in the Benedum Engineering Auditorium in May.

“The free market doesn’t have a conscience,” he said. “We have to fight back. We like free trade, but damn it, free trade has to be fair trade.”

Rendell served as Philadelphia’s mayor from 1992 to 1999. As mayor, he ended a six-year period of job losses, generated five straight years of a budget surplus and erased a $250 million deficit.

Al Gore dubbed him “America’s Mayor” after Philadelphia’s turnaround.

The governor said he now wants to do for Pennsylvania what he did for Philadelphia.

In 1977, Pittsburgh was home to the third most Fortune 500 company headquarters in the country. By 2005 it dropped to eighth, while the city struggled economically.

Rendell said the lack of a proper federal health care system severely hurts companies like the automobile manufacturer General Motors. Recently GM said it could not possibly compete on the foreign market anymore because of the soaring costs of providing health care to employees.

Rendell said that many other nations place the burden of providing health care on the government, not the private sector, which puts American competitors at a disadvantage and impairs their ability to compete on the free market.

“We are getting clobbered in the arena of free trade,” he said. “The time has come for us to have a national health care system. It is my belief and hope that by the end of the decade, we can do this.”

The governor also discussed the losing battle Americans face in education. Rendell said the educational process starts by age 2 in European countries, whereas some Americans don’t begin school until ages 6 or 7.

The United States used to produce the most engineers and doctors, Rendell said, adding that it has fallen to third on that list.

Rendell said that, for these reasons, he has supported President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and pressed state legislators in Harrisburg to support his Early Childhood Education initiative.

Rendell’s early education legislation would create all-day kindergarten, smaller class sizes and allocate $250 million to pre-kindergarten programs.

“An American education used to be second to none,” he said. “Every study shows the more quickly you start the educational process, the easier it will be to learn. We are dangerously falling behind in one of the most important topics today.”

But Rendell’s experience in Harrisburg and Washington, D.C., has taught him some hard lessons in politics.

“The moral and right thing to do doesn’t even get attention,” he said.

Rendell said he wasted no time in attempting to eliminate all of these problems for Pennsylvanians; he immediately enacted The Plan for a New Pennsylvania upon taking office in January 2003. The plan advocated an increase in educational funding, reduced property taxes, expanded programs for senior citizen prescription drug policies and provided economic stimulus packages to impoverished towns and cities across the state.