3 ms·

Debt isn’t always bad. If you take on a trillion in debt but invest it in science and get cold fusion, you’d be endless trillions ahead

cogman10 2y ago
Debt is actually what cements the dollar as the world currency. It's not only not bad, it's a huge positive driver of the US economy. T-Bills are a bedrock of most portfolios. Eliminating them over some bad analogies to household budgets is just misunderstanding what debt actually means for a country/government. Heck, even inflation isn't bad. You need a little bit of it to keep companies and individuals from simply hording assets.
blindriver 2y ago
Debt isn't always bad. But our current debt load is bad and will never be paid off. 50% of our tax revenues are going to be used to pay interest from our debt. That is a huge curtailing of spending because of this unsustainable debt.
kjksf 2y ago
In abstract, arguments always sound great. As far as I know majority of research on fusion / future of nuclear is financed by NOT government. Spending $50 million on housing immigrants or $2 million on DEI programs that result in wasting employees times with "training" about white privilege will not create fusion. If fusion is commercially viable, it doesn't require taxpayer (i.e. mine and yours) money to be developed. Not to mention that universities are grifting on science grants and using half the money for "overhead", not for actual research. It's also an open secret that grants don't necessarily go to the best scientists but to best grant proposal writers and those are not the same people.
- rsfern 2y ago
  > If fusion is commercially viable, it doesn't require taxpayer (i.e. mine and yours) money to be developed. This is the reason that NSF exists - many exciting and potentially promising future technologies are not commercially viable. We invest in NSF to fund the foundational research to get to a place where ideas are commercially viable enough for industry to fully develop and implement them. Also, there is also (internal) overhead in industrial research organizations, and there are similar problems of optimal resource allocation in any organization. That’s not to say we shouldn’t strive to do better, but I think it’s selective logic to apply these critiques only to the public sector.

cogman10 2y ago

Debt is actually what cements the dollar as the world currency. It's not only not bad, it's a huge positive driver of the US economy. T-Bills are a bedrock of most portfolios. Eliminating them over some bad analogies to household budgets is just misunderstanding what debt actually means for a country/government. Heck, even inflation isn't bad. You need a little bit of it to keep companies and individuals from simply hording assets.

blindriver 2y ago

Debt isn't always bad. But our current debt load is bad and will never be paid off. 50% of our tax revenues are going to be used to pay interest from our debt. That is a huge curtailing of spending because of this unsustainable debt.

kjksf 2y ago

In abstract, arguments always sound great. As far as I know majority of research on fusion / future of nuclear is financed by NOT government. Spending $50 million on housing immigrants or $2 million on DEI programs that result in wasting employees times with "training" about white privilege will not create fusion. If fusion is commercially viable, it doesn't require taxpayer (i.e. mine and yours) money to be developed. Not to mention that universities are grifting on science grants and using half the money for "overhead", not for actual research. It's also an open secret that grants don't necessarily go to the best scientists but to best grant proposal writers and those are not the same people.

rsfern 2y ago
> If fusion is commercially viable, it doesn't require taxpayer (i.e. mine and yours) money to be developed. This is the reason that NSF exists - many exciting and potentially promising future technologies are not commercially viable. We invest in NSF to fund the foundational research to get to a place where ideas are commercially viable enough for industry to fully develop and implement them. Also, there is also (internal) overhead in industrial research organizations, and there are similar problems of optimal resource allocation in any organization. That’s not to say we shouldn’t strive to do better, but I think it’s selective logic to apply these critiques only to the public sector.