Rick Monteverde wrote:
> >> 2. It promotes economic growth according to Keynesian theory. > Let's agree to disagree on that point. > We don't disagree. You say the Keynesians are wrong and I say I don't have a clue if they are right or wrong. I am not taking their side. I am just reported what they say. Obama is definitely one of them. He has said so on many occasions. So was FDR. > What if it had a few hundred million earmarked for LENR research? I'd have > a terrible time going against it, but I know I should. It's supposed to > be an emergency stimulus response. > Well, as long as the few hundred million for LENR goes into the pockets of Americans, and is used to buy American-made lab equipment, that would make it a stimulus according to the Keynesian theory. It does not really matter what you pay these people to do. Building bridges, tutoring kids, insulating buildings or experimenting with palladium -- it is all the same stimulus. There are only 3 requirements: 1. The money stays here. Stimulus money used to by Chinese-made televisions stimulates their economy, not ours. 2. The people you pay have to spend the money. It does no good paying rich people because they don't spend. They put the money in the bank. The people I know who do LENR research at the NRL are all middle class scientists who don't earn much, and they will spend it. Instrument company engineers would also spend what they make. 3. The project has to improve people's lives and or economic prospects, short term or long term: the infrastructure, health and safety, education, energy, or what have you. We hope that LENR research would produce benefits but you never know. It might not pan out. Again, I have no idea if this actually works, but this is the theory Obama subscribes to. Paying American scientists $200 million to do LENR would help, and so would paying them to do plasma fusion, star wars, or the superconductiong supercollider. The latter examples seem dubious to me -- more like makework than research. So-called "boondoggles" or "pork" fail in category 3. They produce no benefit. But, as I said, WWII produced no benefit yet it seemed to succeed as a stimulus, so perhaps all you need are items 1 and 2. Either that, or postwar prosperity was coincidental with no connection to wartime spending. I have read revisionist historians and economists who believe that. - Jed
