Discussion on:

Government R&D budget cuts, a jobs killer?

Instead of the US government wasting billions of taxpayer dollars trying to play investment bank for companies like Solyndra, that $500 million should have been spent on R&D.

Instead it went to pay huge bonuses for Solyndras board of directors and upper management and to pay for the purchase of Photon Solar in India.

A purchase that allowed them to outsource the $4 billion in solar farm contracts from California that Solyndra won the bid on solely because they claimed to be an in state production company.

That $500 million would have funded a lot of R&D.

http://www.nextgov.com/mobile/2012/08/pentagon-shutters-joint-tactical-radio-system-program-office/57173/

Troops in combat should not have to wait 15 minutes for a radio to boot up before they can call for help.

major RF issues. bad bad stuff

there's multiple contractors and multiple radios. one works fairly decently...

If a radio is not capable of communication the moment it is turned on, it is useless.

All of the proposed systems have boot times ranging from 45 seconds to 15 minutes. All of them have higher power consumption demands than standard radios meaning larger batteries or shorter battery life.

Pure and simple, those weaknesses are unacceptable for use in a combat environment.

This stuff is nice as augmented capabilities in a vehicle or a man portable size, but they cannot be the routine day to day radio for the military.

That $500 Million was borrowed money...

The US taxpayer LOAN you speak of is not even listed as a debt in the companys bankruptcy paperwork. We should be at the top of the list to get paid before the cleaning company that mopped their floors.

The cleaning company will get a cut from the asset sale, but the taxpayers will not.

The fact is that LOAN was written as a grant that never had to be paid back.

Solyndra is just a made up controversy for election purposes. After the election everyone will forget about it. The loan program that Solyndra's loan was a part of budgeted for a 12% or 13% loss rate. With Solyndra and the 2 other failures I'm aware of the loss rate of the program is still under 5%. The loan program was designed to be somewhat like a venture capital fund. You don't expect all of your investments to work out. I'd also like to point out that the Solyndra loan application was started under the Bush administration and they pushed pretty hard to get it done before they left office but couldn't get it done.

"they pushed pretty hard to get it done before they left office but couldn't get it done. "

The Bush administration denied the application in December 2008 saying it needed further review. Solyndra officials were still chasing it with the Bush administration in January of 2009.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/09/16/solyndra-pestered-bush-administration-over-delays-in-approving-federal-loan/

The Obama administration resurrected it and approved it over the negative recommendation from the people doing the screening process.

The bureaucrats who rejected the application made a prediction of when the company would fail. They nailed it to the exact month and year.

"runs out of cash in September 2011"

http://betweenthenumbers.net/2011/09/535-million-u-s-loan-to-solyndra-was-predicted-to-be-a-failure/

All we have to do is remember the bad decisions the idiot made this term and not be stupid enough to vote in the antiamerican scum for a second term

"Travel budgets were cut by 30%"

Keep in mind two things: (1) A government budget "cut" is merely a reduction in the amount of increase. (2). Smart Planet usually tells us the great benefits of telecommuting. Will all of the online collaboration tools available, why travel? I just virtually attended a product launch, and never had to travel.

So, "Proponents of U.S. government-funded scientific research are alarmed about existing budget limits "

Perhaps they should be alarmed that for the past four years we have had over $1 TRILLION dollar deficits each year, and that the "funds" they want are borrowed in large part from foreign governments and financial interests. They might also be alarmed that the national debt has risen from $10 Trillion to $15 Trillion under the current administration.

Reagan was a spendaholic and so was Bush2. By percentage Reagan and Bush raised their starting debt the highest and Bush was clever enough not to include a lot of his in his budgets. They spent most of this money on government expansion like defense and for that purpose I guess debt is fine since the republican solution to Obama is Romney who still feels the need to spend trillions greasing the defense budget when millions are way more efficient at fighting terrorism. Bad math and history have a lot to do why we only talk about 600 million as being important Obama waste and why trillions of republican waste is the NEW ANSWER as we go " back to the future" with Romney another Bush thinking plutocrat. The truth is depressions dont fix themselves without governments and countries that are in trouble go to who they have to fix what they have. You can't compete on a WORLD economy without government investment when everyone else is doing it and kicking our ass. Then when you have a system that embraces vulture capitalism and then on top of that gives the super rich a free ride This is what your left with. A dumb argument about 600 million here or 500 million there with a goal of creating wealth and industry in the peace market vs 2 trillion in waste destroying things in the " war market " its as dumb an argument as there will ever be. But in the end if you are going to fund the military at 720 billion + more that the next 10 countries combined at the cost of R & D like 600 million and giving super profitable oil companies and corporate farms billions while the people who consume for our economy go broke as the super rich absorb all the money you will be left with the strongest most broke country in the world. We will have a boat load of ships and tanks and no people to protect. Im sure the super rich will move by then and start the process all over again to another group of suckers

The Repbulicans only want to spend money if it is on war or the war machine, but when it comes to helping out Americans or making America better, well then, we don't have the money, we have to balance the budget!!