In general, the world would be a better place.

Obama continued the wars and DID NOT create more jobs, instead he fed the banks with mandatory insurance (banks own insurance companies) and further eroded the skills of our working class by extending unemployment to 99 weeks!

Since I was 16, I haven’t gone more than 2 months without a job.

I was personally against even Afghanistan, but I’ll give Bush a pass for that as it seems to have been what Americans wanted at the time.

Iraq was just plain wrong. Maybe it was a terrible place, but so are a lot of places in the world, like Somalia. The pretense for going in was very weak.

The above two are the expensive tickets. I’m not even going to count Libya, as that was downright economical in comparison.

Let’s say the wars cost $2 trillion. That’s 2 x 10^12 dollars. 100 million households in the US, or 10^8. Doing the division, that’s $20k for every home in the US, enough to give a free grid-tied solar system to every family. It wouldn’t be practical to do that for a number of reasons, including technological (the existing grid would not withstand that much solar connected in most places), but I’m just illustrating the magnitude of the number.

Are these Obama’s wars? He inherited them, and he is now commander-in-chief. I think he made close to an optimal decision, considering the tiger we had by the tail. To withdraw suddenly would mean chaos and possibly war which would inflame the whole region, and a blow to our economy besides. Obama did get us on track to get out of Iraq, so he was directionally correct in my book.

Throwing money at a problem doesn’t solve it, especially TAXPAYER money. That being said, R&D is important, but propping up a technology, with limited application, with government subsidies is wasteful. The private sector can be used to supply R&D funding with much more quantities of cash and gets the government out of it. Regardless, the idea that, in just two and a half years, solar technology could advance so much from it’s current paltry level that it could out do the power of fossil fuels is naive.

Would be enough energy to power every single house in America, effectively, cheap, and it’s renewable.

What did the government do? They said NOPE. And people have the gall to claim America has a free market.

Private companies have proposed that California could solve it’s energy problems by building geothermal reactors all over the state. California is an ideal place for Geothermal energy, because they have plenty of fault lines and that’s where Geothermal reactors are most effective.

Could heat and cool every single house in California cheaply, and effectively. Easing the burden off the tax payer significantly, while also being reliable and cheap. What did the US government do? Shut it down, and people have the gall to claim we have a free market.

A recent discovery from some private company in the New England area found a way to power cars with ethanol and manure, safely. It’s been about 6 months now and I haven’t heard a single thing about it since. The government probably shut them down too.

South Eastern America could utilize coal and biofuel, since the South has plenty of coal mines and cattle farms. The West Coast could be powered by Geothermal and solar energy.

But the Federal government won’t let these companies pursue alternate technologies. And people have the gall to say America’s market is free… America’s market is FAR from free. The oil lobby is so powerful in Washington that the only free energy market is for Oil. Hell even Nuclear Reactors are hard to get up and running with out the lobby fodder in Washington putting in their two-cents.

America could be energy efficient right now and independent. But the oil companies and the international bankers, and stockholders that invest in crude oil would lose a lot of profit.