From a friend who works in a local scientific lab comes word of the kind of economic stimulus that might have been better spent building, say, a truly world-class miniature golf course, or perhaps drilling for oil in the men’s room of the county court house. While either of these ventures might at least have created a few new jobs, the government has instead chosen to buy an MRI scanner for $1 million-plus and give it to a lab that has no budget to hire a technician to operate it. Our source notes that the lab already has an MRI machine and could urgently use some far less costly instruments, such as $50,000 spectrometers. But don’t bother telling that to the feds, since they apparently are hell-bent on shoveling as much money as they can at high-tech factories that build super-pricey machines such as MRI scanners.
We’ve all heard stories about government waste, but in the days ahead, Americans had better brace themselves for stimulus stories so appalling they will make LBJ’s mind-bogglingly wasteful Office of Economic Opportunity seem like the Manhattan Project in comparison. With the news media obsessing over each and every trivial sign of economic recovery, one could forget that The Government will continue to proffer tumbleweed and algae slime as long as it can pass them off as green shoots. This it does with the help of a credulous news media and a phalanx of vainglorious politicians more eager than ever in these hard times to assert that every dollar flowing into their respective congressional districts achieved nothing less than an economic miracle.
All for the Tax Man
In fact, like nearly all government spending, the huge sums that are being haphazardly poured into the maw of this Great Recession can only reward inefficiency and subsidize waste. And whence could the revenues to pay for the bailout conceivably come, other than from the relative handful of businesses that until now have remained above water? If this is how economic recoveries are propagated, then we should implement the Swedish model with all possible haste, ceding the lion’s shares of our personal and corporate income to the government so that it can provide for us those things that we as individuals can no longer afford.
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From whence, wherever, whither we come, not hard to learn MRI, although invented in USA by FONR, economic loser, another failing industry held up by guv. Of the list of MRI deep pocket companies, including GE, Hitachi, Philips, Siemens, Toshiba, most offshore. FONR fundamentals negative, while Medtronic, which owns Louisville, CO Odin subsidiary, positive, but no pure play on MRI.
Best MRI products come from ONI, private company in Wilmington, MA. Maybe govt subsidies will keep the wolf from the door a little longer, but guv funding notorious for disappearing and leaving beneficiaries stranded. And then there is the question of possible side effects: The results of some animal and cellular studies suggest the possibility that electromagnetic fields may act as co-carcinogens, leukemia or tumor promoters, but the data are inconclusive.
Enjoy your well-deserved vacation Rick.
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