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Brain Drain-Dollars & Cents

By Cliff Johns

A lot of our hard working and well-intended politicians are acting as great ambassadors and working diligently to stem our local “brain drain.”  However, they are increasingly challenged, in that at the same time as they are cooing young and highly skilled college grads (their limited definition of the brains that have been draining away), they have little, if any, real “brain food” back home with which to feed all the brains that they would like to actually move back to, in our case, ‘Luville.  They even go as far to spend your and my tax money (ouch) for brains in what is effectively a welfare program created especially just for brains.  We call this brain welfare program “Bucks for Brains”.  I call it $brain or $brains after they got the second one.  $brain and $brains is of course my personal abbreviation, no association with the Dollar General Store or the $1store (me again) is intended. 

These $brains are reportedly skilled researchers, scientists, and more who usually come with a PhD or two, other advanced degrees, and the typical alphabet soup of letters intended to show these guys are, in fact, well, brains.  Well, these are the general sort of brains that we get into the $brain welfare program.  Now apparently the $brains were at one time perfectly happy and busily working away in a distant city doing important research or other such work until one day their $brain phone rang with a call and proposal probably from our great mayor or governor.  Since the mayor and the governor are not always technical guys (except the last gov. who became most famous for cheating on his wife, but never on the citizens of the Commonwealth…right) unless it comes to aspects of promoting ‘Luville or KY they are forced to speak in the language immediately recognized by $brains.  To us non-$brains, that would be US currency, cash, and lots of it.  Since US currency is the exclusive and principal diet of $brains, the $brains quickly swarmed here.  Much like the dreaded Africanized Killer Bees who are feared as their presence extends, we had the equivalent of the even more dreaded human version, yes, the Tax Spending $brain.  Once these $brains had gorged themselves, they told their $brain colleagues about our wonderful welfare program, and, faster than a Kentucky republican gubernatorial candidate can yell scandal in a crowded nursing home, ‘Luville became a virtual beehive of active $brains.  Every update regarding their activity is ju$t buzzing, but I$ it really $o?

Let me see if I can get this right; the thinking goes sort of like this:  find a smart person doing research (the brain), introduce them to the seductive commodity of our newest welfare program (cold hard cash), thusly creating $brains, entice them with the $weet nectar of $ thus making them an official state and other taxing organizations sponsored $brain, plug them into a network with other $brains who came before them.  PRESTO, get out of the way, because the jobs and high-growth companies will start popping up like tulips at the Derby.  However, there are other brains too, lets call them regular brains.  Compared to $brains they would be lacking some of the tax and advanced degree-polished credentials and be more in line with your average bargain brains or proportionally, one-cent brain or ¢brains (my abbreviation again). 

The ¢brains would be the ones not lucky enough to earn the designation as $brains and thusly deprived of all the wonderful tax (ouch-ouch-ouch) benefits of our welfare program that the $brains get.  It remains to be seen what the long term affects of a $brain participating in the welfare program for an extended period of days, months or even years, that while there appears, at least to this ¢brain, to be the whole purpose in life of the $brains which is to stay on the welfare dole for as long as possible.  Rubbish, who said they had to get off the dole?  Nonetheless, it is only the responsible thing for us to do to kick the $brains off the dole after we get them on their feet.  After all, we want to protect their dignity and self-image, and if we can get just the first $brain off the welfare dole and into independent business where they actually make a real and working product or service that others will actually buy, then, and only then, will we have been successful.  Finally, we will all certainly feel better (and say ouch, less often). 

The ¢brains are the ones that actually make the food consumed by $brains as with your and my tax money (ouch again), that our politicians use as feed to spend to travel to, meet with, entertain and ask brains who have drained away (the brain-drainers), who themselves are actually fellow ¢brains.  They are encouraged to pull up their roots, dump their job, close their lease or sell their house, wave new friends and colleagues goodbye and then move themselves, pets and young families back home where everything is just so, well,  ‘Luville.  But what is a brain-drainer to do?  (A brain-drainer that moves back is simply known as a ¢brain.) They are told to simply Forgetaboutit, with respect to any commitment, promise, oath or pledge that young brain-drainer made when accepting their  brain-drained-away job after being hired in that distant brain-drain-away city.  That employer was probably just like most small, medium or large business, who created a job, then took a chance and filled it with a promising person from some place-with-a-brain (‘Luville) who accepted, what at the time, at least as far as that ¢brain thought, was the opportunity of a lifetime.  Don’t these leaders know that the same brain-draining technique can later be used on the same ¢brain again and again only to have them to go somewhere else!   These leaders, God bless them all, just do not get it.

I don’t know about you, but I think some of our leaders have had one-two-many mint juleps after the 9^th race at Churchill Downs.  What are these guys thinking?  Don’t get me wrong.  I am concerned that so many of our ¢brains think or believe that they have to move to a brain-drain-away city to take a brain-drained-away job, but aren’t these leaders, what I will now call our $brain managers, missing the point? 

This ¢brain, like many others before and after him, moved away from ‘Luville to take a job and to go to school in various brain-drained-away cities.  This ¢brain also moved to other far-away places too, called further-away-brain-drain-away-cities.  In my case, and for many of my ¢brain colleagues and peers, we never moved because a brain-drain-away city had a better standard of living (I like living as well as the next ¢brain and even as good as the best $brain for that matter), or because it had great arts program (I love the arts) or because it had lower-cost housing (I bought a home in Massachusetts where home prices are 2-3x compared to ‘Luville and when interest rates were 14%!), or because of the varied and great restaurants (does anyone really believe we have better seafood than can be found all along the Gulf Coast?) or because a place had such great parks, recreation, museums, pro teams, college teams…..no, this ¢brain moved for one reason,  brain food.  I need brain food.  In fact I live on brain food.  Brain food consumes my life, my every waking moment.  When I dream, you guessed it, I dream about brain food.  Simply put, I love brain food.

As a ¢brain, I also require a regular daily input of the same dietary component as $brains do, cash, just not quite as much of it.  However, unlike $brains whose brain food is exclusively cash and preferably cash that can be ingested in the redeemable form of state and federal grants often in super-size portions even to the extent of project obesity, waste and well you don’t even want to go where brain food has expired.  My esteemed fellow ¢brains have had to evolve a much higher standards of dietary brain food as the $brains sucked most of the cash out of the area much like a forest sucks air into itself as it consumes everything it its path.  Also, ¢brains, highly refined specimens as they are, are known to reject all dangerous additives such as government beauraucracy and regulations so typical in the gluttonous diet of the $brain.  

¢brains have had to work hard to overcome discrimination by the $brains, even enduring financial epitaphs by the $brains in securing only the minimal allowance of brain food just to get by.  ¢brains have adapted to a diet of brain food that is primarily composed not of just cash but of sweat, hard work and a shared ingenuity common to all ¢brains.  Oppression has motivated ¢brains to excel, in many cases, beyond the well-funded pork-laden programs of $brains.  State and federal commerce organizations and even the President continually recognize that the primary growth in US business is in small businesses, mostly created not by the well funded $brains but by the simple ¢brains. 

Nevertheless, the leaders continue to push cash down the hungry throats of the $brains.  Well, there is always the next election, right?  It is, after all, the ¢brains that built this country, bit-by-bit, processor-by-processor, why they literally broke the back of their ¢brains to build much of what we have today and have made our modern world possible.  We all owe the ¢brains a debt we can never fully repay.  You would think the $brains would be more grateful!  Now you know what they mean when someone says, “A penny for you thoughts.” 

The human brain is damaged after just minutes without oxygen.  If oxygen to the brain is interrupted and not restored, it will die in just a brief time.  The brain-drain of skilled and talented people in a community occurs because there is no brain food.  The brain food of cash is a like a shot of adrenaline and can produce impressive and even lasting results if administered at the right time, in the right dose, by a skilled provider.  To the $brain’s credit, this occurs from time to time.  Cash as a brain food can also be fleeting.  If the appetite is just cash, someone or the next brain-drain-away city will always offer more (United Airlines Maintenance Hub).    Our own $brain welfare program has made some good progress, but in this ¢brain’s view, it is overrated by not being paired with a program for the ¢brains that is not just another welfare program but one that creates actionable results and not just more requests for funding (our tax money).  Perhaps we could create not welfare but a new type of funding for lets call it…BuzzBrains to enlist the ¢brains who could work alongside the $brains (of course we would be helping some of them get off and stay off the dole and we would certainly want to kill those we just could not stand if only just to make us ¢brains feel better.  A bee can only be what it will be.) Imagine an economy that buzzes all the time, with the activity of jobs, opportunities, entrepreneurs, the legions of other business people that make business happen.    We clearly need more people with the vision, commitment, and willingness to put their money where their mouth is, like Henry Heuser did with his Vogt Awards program that encourages innovation and invention right here in the ‘Luville and surrounding areas. 

I moved back to ‘Luville when I realized that my hometown had plenty of brain food not just for me but for my family as well.  In fact, I came to realize that ‘Luville had so much of the basic components of brain food that I could build a company and then another company and that my employees could be satisfied and rewarded with all the brain food they could stand. 

‘Luville ¢brain

Cliff Johns

President and Founder, TubeMaster, Inc

President and Founder, VESCO Engineering, Inc.

Editor’s note:  Cliff’s company recently won the Vogt Award.  Cliff also has a recently-issued patent that is causing a stir in the industry.  We hope the market will provide Cliff plenty of brain food going forward.

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