Someone else seemed to think the previous bailouts were not a monetary problem as they are loans and will be repaid – this assumes they will be repaid, something that looks increasingly unlikely. But bailout money aside – Bush did 160B in stimulus last year and Obama is about to do 860B. Thats 1.020T buckeroos. Nominal GDP? 14T. When will that money be paid back and from where? What about the debt service? And with the bailout of last fall, total federal debt is 11.3T, while the public debt is over 40% of nominal GDP. Add on top the present value of social sec., medicaid/medicare obligations (40-50T) and its quite frightening.

I suspect few people here realize it, but you could eliminate the entire discretionary portion of the US budget and we would still have a deficity this year (about 1T of which 480B is defense). Whenever speaking to this topic I strongly recommend people read http://www.fms.treas.gov/fr/08frusg/08mda.pdf which is the ‘Financial Report’ of the US and is based on accrual accounting (like a business would use), not cash based accounting (like the Federal Budget). Please take a quick spin and check out the charts, paying attention to years 2015-2030. We are upon the brink.

Indeed, shoveling money on labs, especially govt. labs, can have some egregiously wasteful consequences if it’s not done with extreme care.

Given massive funding and resources – meaning a significant portion of the money mentioned in this article, whatever the exact fraction – a proof-of-concept fusion reactor could be brought online in:

a) less than 10 years
b) 10-25 years
c) 25+ years but doable
d) it’ll never work

?

(proof-of-concept reactor must create positive net energy and not fail catastrophically, other parameters may vary)

http://www.itif.org/files/2009-stim-novation.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/education/28educ.html?_r=1&hp

The education stimulus, like the science investments, is sorely needed. But lots of cash now is likely to be wasted.

A fellow physicist told me this anecdote from his 2 years teaching in the DC school system. The principle shows up with a new laser printer, saying he had extra money that he had to use or lose. Everybody gets one. My friend replies that he had a perfectly good printer, but he could use some basic lab supplies. The principle’s response? Tough luck, this is what you get.

If we’re going to put the government into massive debt to invest in critical areas, lets make sure its spent wisely.

Since its for ‘economic stimulus’, the science community will have to use it or lose it. It takes time to develop useful plans for that kind of money. The money will either be taken away or the funding agencies will be called to account before congressional committees in three years for wasting taxpayer money on projects that neither stimulated the economy nor provided ‘clean, American energy’. Somehow, I doubt long term funding increases for science agencies will fly in future budgets after that.

I’m with ccous that this stimulus could be reckless, and dangerous for the long term health of science funding.

Has Obama discovered the secret of Dark Energy?

We can go 100% electric cars tomorrow. The government just gives everyone with an auto an electric vehicle. Of course it would crash the grid, but that is a small price to pay to destroy the economy.

Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion

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I’d go further and say its far from a certain thing that throwing billions of dollars at ‘creating clean renewable energy sources’ is actually going to amount to anything.

Judging by the physics of many of the proposals, I strongly suspect that in fact it is not. There are a lot of pie in the sky proposals that are at best hail marys, and worse, ones we know cannot work, even in principle, yet still get funding.

So we’ve gotten the money now, its time to be scientific and judge things dispassionately and with realism.

If things don’t turn out well, we should hold ourselves responsible for a failure of judgement.

in watts a TW , as done e.g. here http://tinyurl.com/bbwxb3

instead of mtoes, BTUs, etc etc

I do believe that is a FIRST necessary step to

“Develop clean, efficient American energy” which is actually well defined concept, for example fusion or SPS …