re: #205 Thanos

Wrong, it wasn’t just monitoring. It was also repair of infrastructure, stream bed systems and other regional federal critical infrastructure needs. People will go to work doing that. It’s a regional project of the sort that the Feds should do, just like highways because they affect the general good of multiple states, not just one.
If you have to have federal spending, better that sort than state by state earmarks.

By that twisted ruler, anything is stimulus.

Stimulus was mainly supposed to be about helping parts of the economy that were suffering most, such as construction. There were supposed to be a lot shovel-ready policies. The Vulcanism project looks like a lot of $ for specialized equipment that may take a while to design and produce, but will produce few jobs and take years to spend. And it won’t help the hardest-hit areas of the economy, such as construction. Disagree? Show me the math, please… the estimated $s per job for this. If nobody knows, then it shouldn’t have gone in the bill.

That’s not to say we don’t need to spend money on volcanic monitoring. This nation does already, maybe we need to spend more. But it didn’t belong in a must-have-an-effect-immediately stimulus bill.

Like me, Jindal did not say that we should never spend money on volcanic monitoring. Like me, he said it didn’t belong in this stimulus bill. His stand for fiscal responsibility doesn’t mean he’s anti-science. I’m very pro-science and I am a Catholic. If you haven’t noticed before, Catholics have no problem with evolution at all.

But hey, don’t let me keep you from putting words in his mouth. Calumny is fun. Wrong, but fun.