to his right, hall sirkin, managing director of the boston group and then to the far right, dave thompson, chief executive of orbital sciences. i'm just going to give a little bit of introduction. the title of our session is "competing around the world." i would suggest this is a particularly fluid time to be trying to address this question. just to sort of frame it, on the positive side some of might have seen a recent article in "american interest." it makes the argument the u.s. is poised to become an export powerhouse, notes since the end of the recession exports have accounted for fully half of total u.s. economic growth. so the rather weak recovery that we've had would is been positively anemic without the strong growth on the export side. and he notes that the obama administration surprisingly appears to be on track to -- even starting from the depressed face of 2009, there were very few economists thought that was achievable. so barring a real down tun, that number gets hit in 2014. that's the positive story. on the negative side, would i point you to a recent survey by the u.s. c