$500 Billion Dollar new Stimulus Bill: How Would You Spend It?

[Tom Lowe]

So Congress is getting ready to spend another $500 billion or more on "stimulus."

Instead of giving that money to states so they can waste it or sending $500 checks to consumers so they can buy useless foreign-made crap at Walmart, how about this....

At around $3,000,000 per unit (plus transmission lines, etc) I think the biggest, most baddass GE wind turbines cost something like $3,000,000 USD a piece. That means you could build 100,000 wind turbines across the most wind-abundant stretches of the US, and still have plenty of money left over to build thousands of acres of solar farms in the mojave and deserts of the southwest, dozens of new nuclear plants and hydroelectric dams, and a nationwide "smart" power grid to store and distribute the power.

Doesn't that sound better than cutting people checks so they can blow it on junk at Walmart?

 

[Jaime Vallés]

I vote Tom for Secretary of Treasury.

 

[Curran Giddens]

I vote for the wind turbines, solar dishes, and new grid, but not for the dams and nuclear plants.

The SES SunCatcher TM is a good solution for solar.

 

[Andrew McCarrick]

Except then you nationalize the entire power system of the country, which should be just the opposite; Power plants should be privately owned. And I've developed an alternative to dammed hydro power and more efficent solar power.

And they need to use this cable for the power grid...

http://www.amsc.com/products/htswire/HTSCables.html

 

[Curran Giddens]

Except then you nationalize the entire power system of the country, which should be just the opposite; Power plants should be privately owned.

Not if the power is sold directly to the power companies at rates comparable to what it used cost them to make it.

I've developed an alternative to dammed hydro power and more efficent solar power.

Did you build a perpetual-motion machine in your basement that creates unlimited free energy? :sarcasm:

 

[Tom Lowe]

Hey Curran, thanks for reminding me about SES. I just talked to them and put in a request to shoot their demo SunCatcher units in New Mexico in Jan or Feb. Should be an awesome shoot if they approve me and the weather works out.

 

[J. Bernard Vallon]

I love clean energy, but I think our infrastructure would be better served with some large scale improvements to our public transit systems. Our cities are built around cars, so its no wonder everyone drives one everywhere they go.

$500B would do a hell of a lot of good to our transit system, and help us get off foreign oil—and oil in general. Tom, we can even make the new system solor/wind powered!

 

[Curran Giddens]

Hey Curran, thanks for reminding me about SES. I just talked to them and put in a request to shoot their demo SunCatcher units in New Mexico in Jan or Feb. Should be an awesome shoot if they approve me and the weather works out.

Hope it works out for you Tom. I think it will go nicely with the clips you already did with the dish and the wind turbines.

 

[Tom Visser]

Spend $1 billion of that on a focus group to determine how to make the military, both DOD and civilian sides of it, more efficient and to dismantle the cold war remnants of today's military, in the long run, saving us trillions of dollars. The Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its military expenditures, and so are we, just in a different way.

some of my thoughts...

reducing manpower ratios so that there is at least a 1:1 ratio of combatants to support personal. the large preponderance of the US military is made up of support people, not combatants. privatize non-essential jobs into the civilian sector. (up to hundred/s of billion/s saved)

eliminate "blue water" Navy assets and focus more on the "brown water" Navy and more practical littoral operations. flag rank admiralty should probably be drawn more from amphibious forces and those that have extensive training with joint operations, especially ground forces - rather than the incumbent "old school" surface warfare officers. (up to hundred/s of billion/s saved)

eliminate the Air Force and combine with the Army. (up to hundred/s of billion/s saved)

eliminate all service academies and focus more on enlisted officer accession programs and college / university ROTC assets. perhaps one or all of them could be sold off to private interests and their tradition can be carried out through private funding, rather than at the expense of the U.S. citizens. (tens of billions saved)

Eliminate all SSBN nuclear missile submarines, their crews, support craft, training programs, and the outdated function of patrolling the worlds oceans ready to deliver a nuclear second strike to a country that happens to annihilate the US in a surprise first strike. (tens of billions saved)

This one I really hate to say, but I think now technology has made it practical... eliminate manned fighter / attack aircraft and utilize unmanned aircraft and missile systems exclusively. The biggest challenge to advancing anti-aircraft technology is politics. The airwings of the US military prohibit ground forces from possessing anti-aircraft platforms. For example, in the Marine Corps, a tractor or HMMV based stinger missile battalion is actually part of the airwing, rather than part of the ground division organization, where it really belongs. Pilots are no longer fast enough, physically fit enough to withstand the maneuvers that are now required to evade missile systems... and they are too expensive. This artificial barrier to technology is only a temporary stopgap measure of the proponents for piloted aircraft - and this artificial barrier will eventually fall, with or without our blessing. (tens of billions, maybe hundred billion saved?)

the Federal government should claim ownership of state lands that are used for military bases (not lease from the states as they are in certain instances) and defense contractors should cease to exist as privatized operations. If anything, the fed should run the military and have complete ownership in that, rather than in our civic banking infrastructure. This would help alleviate the special interests of states that rally for military assets, especially the ones that will happen to land in their own state.

It may seem that I'm not addressing the problem specifically, but I do believe that the US's military expenditures is one of the core reasons we as a country are strapped for cash. Or at least making the cash flow flow into a very limited number of pockets. The DOD has a much larger budget than the $440 billion or so would indicate, as so much is tied in with other departmental spending and the way that DOD money is spent is not all explicitly budgeted. It is true that much of that money goes into the communities, but it would be more efficient and beneficial to us if that money went into education and productive industry assets vs defense contracting. This $500 billion is a bandaid to attempt to stop the bleeding, and is needed, but we need to look deeper to heal the actual wound.

 

[Joseph Ward]

#1 Plan Stop Spending!

 

[Tom Lowe]

I love clean energy, but I think our infrastructure would be better served with some large scale improvements to our public transit systems. Our cities are built around cars, so its no wonder everyone drives one everywhere they go.

$500B would do a hell of a lot of good to our transit system, and help us get off foreign oil—and oil in general. Tom, we can even make the new system solor/wind powered!

Bullet trains! :gun:

The fact is, though, that Americans love their cars, and the country is so big, you're not going to get a public system that would really work. The better bet, IMO, is to move to all-electric cars with a smart power grid so vast that you could drive to the grocery store, for instance, and plug in your car in the parking lot while you shop. Or stop at Denny's on a roadtrip and charge your car while you are enjoying your Eggs Over My Hammy.

 

[Rick Darge]

Sounds great Tom, but how would the bankers continue to survive.

We must always put the bankers before the people because they have nice suits and shiny shoes..

So Congress is getting ready to spend another $500 billion or more on "stimulus."

Instead of giving that money to states so they can waste it or sending $500 checks to consumers so they can buy useless foreign-made crap at Walmart, how about this....

At around $3,000,000 per unit (plus transmission lines, etc) I think the biggest, most baddass GE wind turbines cost something like $3,000,000 USD a piece. That means you could build 100,000 wind turbines across the most wind-abundant stretches of the US, and still have plenty of money left over to build thousands of acres of solar farms in the mojave and deserts of the southwest, dozens of new nuclear plants and hydroelectric dams, and a nationwide "smart" power grid to store and distribute the power.

Doesn't that sound better than cutting people checks so they can blow it on junk at Walmart?

 

[Matthew Rogers]

Why aren't we throwing more money at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGg0ATfoBgo

Solar, I believe, is also where we need to be focusing on. Seems like we have many more sunny days than windy days.

Matthew

 

[Tom Lowe]

You know, another thing we could do is throw $500 billion into a massive Manhattan-style project to cure Cancer. It could employ millions of people and create untold new technologies.

I wish our leaders would think BIG.

 

[Mark Thorpe]

I wish our leaders would think BIG.

With the privatization of war I am sure most of them by now have BIG bank accounts h34r:

Cheers,
Mark.

 

[Zack Birlew]

Solar and wind energy sources must be the first big expenditure we have to make. I remember the Architecture students at UNLV had posted up concept models based around solar energy using stuff that is available today and they were really impressive. One of the best things they displayed was window treatments that combined windows with solar panels, so you could have the entire Las Vegas strip treated with solar panels on each window versus just plain glass and they could theoretically power themselves once they get on a roll. Plus there's so much dessert in Nevada, it's unbelievable why they haven't dedicated 3/4 of the state to solar panel fields alone, plus the fact that Nevada can get pretty darn windy, so you could have wind turbines too. That, combined with the Hoover Dam could potentially allow Nevada to power itself. Only problem is the water! =X

But let's not forget, all electric is a nice thought but, as California has shown in the past, blackouts can mess all of that up. Remember the whole "Energy Crisis" thing? Bah, what a scam! But if all buildings were treated with solar panels on their roofs and with those combo window treatments, you would have power all the time. There are also solar panels coming out that absorb energy at night from the moon, not much they say, but it's better than nothing.

Battery technology needs to be enhanced though. If we're going all solar, wind, turbine, whatever, we need to be able to store that energy and batteries are all we're capable of at the moment.

Water filtration needs to be looked at too. Public water is terrible. Chlorine can not be the only way to clean it. We need new ways, even if they're expensive. By this day and age, there's no reason why we can't drink water from the kitchen faucet, the hose out back, or in a hotel room for the weekend. Bottled water is no excuse.

 

[Tom Visser]

Alternative energy sources are of course an important component to our future, but don't forget it is how we use the energy... nothing is free. If suddenly we have X amount of extra gigawatts of power on our grids, does that automatically mean that we are doing something positive? Without mechanisms in place to limit wasteful use, that extra power would just be sucked up, creating more heat, powering more devices that have to be manufactured, disposed of, rechargeable batteries that eventually have to be discarded, AC units turned up higher, etc...

At the core, we have to not only make energy production more efficient, but also energy consumption more efficient.

Tax incentives for corporations to not locate their workers in massive complexes that cause people to commute hour(s) to / from their home and actually be able to work at local smaller facilities or even their own homes.

Make non-essential power use for luxuries, such as air conditioning / heating (some climates of course, cooling could be more than a luxury, so exceptions could be made) be paid for at a premium or if you live in a sunny location, perhaps provide credits to install a local solar collector for your own luxury power consumption and feed back into the grid any excesses.

Tax incentives for people to actually keep cars for more than a couple of years, assuming that they are efficient cars in the first place.

Eliminate (through taxation of course) WalMart and other corporations who's whole business model is impossible to promote green behavior, since they depend on cheap disposable plastic items that must be bought cyclically. Make it profitable for small business and craftsmen to make more expensive items, but items that you can keep for more than 10 years, maybe more.