Stimulus
lborkowski | August 10, 2010Senators John McCain and Tom Coburn have released a report on "100 Stimulus Projects that Give Taxpayers the Blues." Their introduction rails against "torrential, misdirected government spending," and short descriptions of the 100 projects singled out for ridicule are evidently supposed to disgust readers. What disgusted me, though, was an apparent lack of respect for scientific research.
Around one-fourth of the 100 projects involved scientific research, and I have to wonder whether their criteria for inclusion was a word that might make a sixth-grader giggle. Monkeys! Ants! Hot flashes!…
eklemetti | April 10, 2009
Active US volcanoes and volcano observatories
After all the well-publicized words of "a certain governor in the lower forty-eight" (as Sen. Begich (D-AK) likes to call him) the "wasteful" spending on volcano monitoring improvements in the U.S. have become reality. Sec. of the Interior Ken Salazar announced $15.2 million dollars to modern the infrastructure of the nation's volcano monitoring networks (that is out of the ~$3 billion that went to the Interior - making volcano monitoring a whopping 0.5% of the stimulus that went to that department). Much of this money will likely go to one of…
gregladen | March 19, 2009And I'm not talking about new building projects such as the Bell Museum, though such projects certainly are shovel ready as well.
I'm speaking about the simple fact that funding higher education, mainly by funding students, is one of the best possible ways to stimulate the economy.
The American workforce is under educated and under trained. This is almost always true to some extent, but in times when the centers of gravity in industry and business are shifting, it becomes even more true. The simple fact that the nature of the job market has changed dramatically over the last 20 years…
esiegel | April 26, 2008Stop wastin' my time.
You know what I want.
You know what I need,
or maybe you don't.
Do I have to come right flat out and tell you everything?
Gimme some money!
My fellow Americans, are you impatient about getting your "stimulus package" from the government? First off, a lot of people are going to be getting $300 instead of $600; and I gotta now right now! So go here to have the IRS calculate how much money you're getting first.
Then, you'll probably want to know when you're going to get your money! This is important stuff, people; we rarely get benefits just for being working Americans,…