Cold Fusion Back From The Dead 635
misterfusion writes "Looks like the IEEE is warming up to cold fusion with the latest story "Cold Fusion Back from the Dead". This has been a good year for this field with several leading science journals (Physics Today, MIT Technology Review, etc) contributing stories. Things are warming up and if science Research & Development funding can be stimulated with a positive DoE report (due soon), it might be an interesting rebirth."
Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What if Slashdot was right... (Score:4, Insightful)
Let science work. (Score:5, Insightful)
With ITER in a political freeze, there is ample time to study cold fusion concepts further. I don't see how one can create fusion conditions at room temperature. But if we understand how to control the collisions of the atoms better, then we may lower ignition temperatures. If the temperatures required were only several tens of thousands of degrees, then we do away with the complex containment systems and have a very viable energy source without multi billion dollar energy stations.
Bottom line: Let real science work. The worst case scenario is that we have a better understanding of the atomic interactions that will be used in whatever fusion reaction processes that we eventually use.
This statement always scares me... (Score:1, Insightful)
When someone says that progress depends on funding it scares me. This is one of the most vaporsearch/vapordev discoveries in history. There have fabrication after fabrication and pseudodiscovery after pseudodiscovery.
I'm SURE that the companies/universities that are doing this research are well funded or have such active "life work" people involved that MORE funding really isn't necessary or even requested.
I'm also relatively sure that the people that are making progress in this field are keeping it mum - this will be one of the greatest discoveries of all time and will make someone very rich - and people think this is going to be just broadcast that someone contactable/killable has achieved it?
Re:Article Summary for lazy people (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this mean Pons-Fleschmann used the 100 percent ratio? Why in the world didn't the other scientists use this exact same setup when trying to reproduce the results? If you're trying to repeat a result, don't you make sure all variables are the same?
How do they know it's fusion? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Aha! This must be cold fusion."
Is it just me, or does that seem to be a bit of a leap of faith? After all, if one sets light to petrol one gets more energy out than a match puts in. Surely there are other possibilities.
Occam's razor [princeton.edu] anyone?
I'm not sure about "strong evidence" from a single research laboratory either...
Aaargh, not again! (Score:1, Insightful)
Surely there are better things [interactions.org] to be spending time and money on?
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
Cold fusion was dropped because it could never be replicated, and perhaps because of Pons and Flesichmann's attitude. Science is not done by press conference, and you don't call an anomalous heat effect 'cold fusion' and cause a global hoo-hah without some damn good evidence.
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How do they know it's fusion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Will anything major pop out of this research? Maybe, maybe not. But we are learning. At the very least, this should train another generation of people to not buy into hype one way or another. First it was "COLD FUSION IS HERE!" then it was "COLD FUSION IS A TOTAL SCAM!". Neither is correct. But with the attention span of the media this is all you will get.
Be patient. Let science work.
Re:Article Summary for lazy people (Score:5, Insightful)
Scientific papers and experiments are just as susceptible to bugs as software. Generally peer review and repetition and further work on the subject of the papers catches these eventually, but it can take time. The claims of cold-fusion were so startling (and hyped), there wasn't an awful lot of attempts to sort mistakes and understanding out before it was declared unscientific.
Best analogy I can think of is a software project that launches, claiming it will revolutionise user interface or something, but that only works on the developers own system, as they've hacked up much of their OS and hardware. It could be years before the software would work on a general computer, but if nothing works to start with, then most people won't be interested in developing and improving it.
Look how long it took to get the linux kernel reasonably mainstream supporting common hardware, and compare to Hurd...
Re:Article Summary for lazy people (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Better title... (Score:2, Insightful)
However, I'm afraid that 'Cold fusion warmed over' is also an illogical statement. This has connotations with hot coffee, or some other drink or food item that is customarily hot, that has gone cold and has once more been made warm.
Both statements fail abjectly to address the issue at hand. The optimal statement here would be 'Cold fusion might yet be viable'.
Regarding this particular issue, I can only state that I, along with many of my contemporaries, know various facts about cold fusion that are yet unknown in your time. This includes the fact whether it is viable. However, reporting these facts here would be a direct violation of the Prime Directive.
Re:Aaargh, not again! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. Physically impossible. It would be cool if you could just, oh, 'tunnel' through the barrier or something, but that would be absurd...
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:2, Insightful)
Good news / Bad news (Score:2, Insightful)
What worries me is the military interest. It's all a push to build bigger and better ways to kill people, now powered with more efficient means! Don't get me wrong, historically we have many great things coming from military driven technology (space program, wireless comm., nuclear power, etc.) but at what cost?
Slow down (Score:3, Insightful)
It does not describe the entire economic input. That palladium and tritium has to come from somewhere, and it's expensive.
Until this can be done with non-exotic materials, it will probably be a push as its worthiness.
Re:Should be looked at regardless (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Better title... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Probably not fusion . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
What is with this idiotic groupthink that if its nuclear it must be radioactive? Not everything involving a nucleus is radioactive, and not everything radioactive causes cancer and kills people. For example, at princeton plasma physics labs, they deal a lot with fusion experiments, and there is radiation present... FROM THE TRITIUM AND DEUTERIUM THAT THEY STARTED WITH. The beginning materials in this case are radioactive. It's all this kneejerking nonsense about radiation that makes people pissy every time you try to discuss fusion research with a layman.
And for the record, until I see better results otherwise, I still think cold fusion is horseshit
Re:Slow down (Score:3, Insightful)
Technology Review (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Better title... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oil companies would be richer than ever if this pans out. The oil won't stop being needed, it'll just stop being burned. And quite a few "oil companies" have figured out that they are in the energy business, not the oil business. And would probably be in the forefront of providing high-grade deuterium for your cold fusion units.
"Mr. Fusion", anyone?
Conspiracy theories (Score:4, Insightful)
I love this notion that "the POWERS THAT BE suppressed the IRREFUTABLE EVIDENCE for their own evil ends!" It's such a charming fantasy.
The Evil Vested Interests of the world are regularly blindsided by new technology. The usual pattern (*cough*RIAA*cough*) is that they ignore it until it really starts to hurt them, and then they try to make it go away through legal action. Those folks do not have a magic ability to predict the future. In fact, they demonstrably suck at it.
When "cold fusion" was announced, the people who discredited it were academics who tried like hell to reproduce the effect, and found it to be irreproducible based on the information they had at the time. This is called "peer review". Scientists are supposed to be profoundly skeptical. In that respect, they differ from conspiracy theorists.
If you RTFA, you'll notice that no extravagant claims are being made. If it turns out that there's something there which really is both reproducible and interesting, we'll hear more about it.
Re:Article Summary for lazy people (Score:5, Insightful)
If you believe that you are studying the effects of an electrical current on two metal electrodes submersed in water then you would make note of the current strength, the composition and dimensions of the electrodes, the temperature of the water and that kind of thing. You don't often record what kind of shoes you are wearing when you set up the equipment, what you ate for lunch or how long the fluorescent lights in the room had been on before you started taking measurements. Why not? Because it never occurs to you that it would be important.
Good experimental procedure is to document everything as well as you can, but if you are investigating something entirely new you can't always know what matters.
Sometimes even very smart people overlook small things that turn out to be important. Ask Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee about that if you see them.
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, lets just judge the science on its merits, not on conspiracy theories. If it has merit, you can be pretty sure theres lots of investors are going to start seeing the potential for a lot of zeroes after those $$$ signs and jump on it, and that probably the first companies to jump on the bandwagen will be the energy companies you claim are holding it up.
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:3, Insightful)
Why should there be a "war surcharge"?
Fossil fuels are not subsidized in the USA, just taxed at a lower rate than European countries choose to tax gasoline.
Price at the pump is based on the owners of the oil selling it profitably. If they can do so even during a war, more power to them.
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that's the rub, isn't it? It doesn't matter if it's a nuclear effect "in your mind". Your mind doesn't enter into it. Neither does Pons or Fleischmann's minds. What matters is whether nuclear fusion is actually occurring, and that is to be settled by experiment.
Pons and Fleischmann might have seen a real effect. Certainly, carefully-constructed experiments have consistently given hints of excess heat. But that doesn't make them "right". Lucretius wrote about "atoms" centuries before Dalton. That doesn't mean the ancient Greeks invented modern chemistry.
Pons and Fleischmann violated just about every tenet of the open, peer-reviewed scientific process. In so doing they abandoned any claim to legitimacy. If this effect turns out to be real, they didn't "get it right". They just got lucky. And if this effect turns out to be real, it will be the paintstaking, not-by-press-conference slow work of real researchers who understand how science works, that will ironically provide actual justification.
Re:Come on... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
The only people who claim there is a conspiracy to shush up cold fusion are crackpots.
The physics community would have carried Pons and Fleischmann on sedan chairs to Sweden if they'd really discovered cold fusion. But they didn't, and they ignored all scientific process. They refused to share details of their experiment and refused to acknowledge errors in their experiments.
Read Taubes' _Cold Fusion_ or Huizenga's book for a clear understanding.
Re: use of exotic materials (Score:3, Insightful)
I beg to differ. Palladium only costs about as much as gold, and is used commonly for things like spark plugs and catalytic converters for cars. It's also not consumed by the reaction, so it's a one-time cost.
In regards to tritium, I'll agree that it's expensive now. This may not always be the case, though, especially if there's a use for it besides thermonuclear devices and glowing keychains. The article seemed quite optimistic about the possiblity of getting the needed heavy water from the sea ("Much of this work was carried out at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, where the idea of generating energy from sea water--a good source of heavy water--may have seemed more captivating than at other laboratories." - emphasis added).
If cold fusion turns out to be the Real Deal (TM), then there will be scientists and engineers falling over themselves to find economical ways of producing the fuel, I guarantee it.
Re:Let science work. (Score:3, Insightful)
The issue was not that "mainstream science" crushed down those noble researchers explorer "the bizarre". Contrary to popular myth, most scientists are delighted at the unexpected discovery of new phenomena, even if they pose a threat to established theory. But there are rules that have been evolved, over several centuries of painstaking effort, to give us some hope of knowing the validity of claims -- which is the root of all scientific progress.
Some of these rules involve repeatability (which even Pons and Fleischmann, with their own equipment, could not reliably achieve), open publication, peer review, and so on. The original researchers and their rabid fans felt that the process of science slowed them down too much, so they ignored that process. They were doomned not by the "hostility" of "the establishment", but by the failure of other labs to reproduce their results in any significant and reliable manner.
If honest, peer-reviewed work shows excess heat, it will be an interesting and possibly tremendous discovery. But Pons and Fleischmann will remains just as wrong.
Re:Bob Park (Score:5, Insightful)
All hail Robert L. Park, the keeper of scientific orthodoxy!
I think the article sums it up -- there is clearly *something* going on to produce the excess heat. Apparently the researchers have now figured out how to get more reproduceable results, so others may now verify the effect and thereby focus on studying the effect itself rather than just trying to reproduce it.
Now what that *something* is, is another matter. Maybe it is a chemical reaction of some sort, or maybe some other energy-release mechanism based on the thermophysical or thermochemical properties of the palladium substrate. Or maybe it is some unusual type of catalyzed nuclear reaction ("cold fusion".) Or maybe it is something else heretofore unknown. Now that the effect appears to be more reliably reproducible, it will now be possible to study the effect itself and solve the mystery. Although I am skeptical it is "cold fusion", it nevertheless appears to be interesting enough to study it in earnest.
Regarding "the Second Law" as Mr. paugq mentions, I suggest he brush up on his thermodynamics since I assume he is uttering it with respect to energy conservation, which comes under the First Law.
Re:Slow down (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, even that isn't the question. The question is "can we come up with a theory to explain "cold fusion"?"
Re:Bob Park (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing is impossible. If you think the limit of our knowledge is already in textbooks, you have quite a rude awakening coming.
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:2, Insightful)
Allow me to reiterate; turning out to be right is not the sole pillar of good Science.
I did not assert that their "experiment was made up," but that it was not reproduceable.
I suppose whoever "made" them hold a press conference in spite of this fact does owe them an apology.
-Peter
Re:Bob Park (Score:2, Insightful)
The second law of thermodynamics is more abused on slashdot than copyright law.
Or do you think fusion bombs have to use five million tons of TNT as primer to release the other five megatons of energy?
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, that is precisely the hallmark of junk science: experiments that appear to show amazing results that cannot be explained by conventional theory and as a result the exact requirements to duplicate the experiment are unclear. The crackpots are then free to argue that negative results by other researchers are due to a problem with their experiment. Scientists have good reason to be skeptical of discoveries with these characteristics.
Now, Pons and Fleischman may have just been unlucky in having discovered a real effect that happened to have these characteristics. On the bright side, if they turn out to have been right their place in history is secure.
Cold Fusion probably from experimental mistakes (Score:3, Insightful)
About five different highly respected labs, including at UMD and
Caltech, tried and failed to reproduce the results.
BUT.
Here's the thing: at least one (maybe two?) of the labs noted that
Pons & Fleischmann's results could be reproduced if one neglected one
of the steps needed to reproduce it (stirring?). If one failed to do
that step, you would get a chemical reaction of about the magnitude
P&F described.
Note well that the likeliest reason for any other researcher to
observe the reaction P&F describe would be a similar carelessness.
Could it be cold fusion? Could be. But it's very, very, very
unlikely. The chances of human error are alot higher than the
chances that physical theory is so wrong.
There was one embarrassing mistake. The funding agencies had already
promised funding for cold fusion. Thus, a (sometimes persuasive)
constituency was created for keeping cold fusion research dollars
flowing. That constituency is basically being paid to keep the cold
fusion myth alive. That's anothing thing you should keep in mind when
you hear about cold fusion nonfailures (because it's as likely that
you'll see cold fusion generators as it is that you'll get a real
opportunity to own the Brooklyn Bridge...)
Re:Bob Park (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't about creating energy from nothing, it's about finding a suitable high entropy form of energy to convert to lower entropy kinds, thus allowing physical processes to occur. Physics cannot prove anything impossible by the way, but it can measure how unlikely something is.
Re:Probably not fusion . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
secondly, if it were as simple as this chemical reaction, then we would have known by now. We're incredibly knowledgable about studying chemical reactions, and could simply look at the terminal to tell if it were oxidized. Plain and simple.
Re:Bob Park (Score:3, Insightful)
It is impossible to say with scientific rigor that cold fusion is "impossible". It doesn't seem likely under current theory, but one can never rule out errors in our current theoretical understanding. The quantum mechanics of solids (like the palladium lattice) are complicated. It's possible (though unlikely) that there is something going on there that we don't yet understand.
I don't think cold fusion is likely, but if researchers are now getting reproducible results, the effect they are observing merits a second look. It might not be fusion. It might be some other interesting effect. Whatever is going on, if it is reproducible it can be studied by science, and will become better understood with time. If the effects turn out not to be reproducible still it will quickly die again, and little will have been lost by checking.
No... (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree.
The oil won't stop being needed, it'll just stop being burned.
The question isn't "will oil still be needed", it's "HOW MUCH oil will still be needed?" And the answer (quite obviously) is "much less than is needed right now."
Yes, some oil will still be needed, but the fact that a great deal of it is burned means that the *demand* side of the "supply and demand" equation will drop. Significantly.
And guess what happens then?
quite a few "oil companies" have figured out that they are in the energy business, not the oil business.
Oil companies currently have it pretty good - why would they want to actually have to go out and *compete* if they don't have to? It's just like the RIAA and the MPAA - when new technology comes out that creates competition for their current business model, they're more inclined to fight the technology, rather than embrace it, even if embracing it would provide a new revenue stream that will dwarf their current profits.
Ballpark figure: (Score:3, Insightful)
It takes 100,000,000 times that energy to get a proton just within 1E-13 m of another proton.
Now consider that the tunneling rate is exponentially dependent on the barrier. Uh-huh.
really.. (Score:4, Insightful)
With all due respect to the above journals, they are not peer-reviewed journals where research results are reported. If the journals had been Nature, Science and Physics Review, then I'd be excited. But they aren't, so I'm not. Besides, I read the articles, and I didn't get the impression they were all that enthusiastic...
Re:Bob Park (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:RTFP: He said "aneutronic". (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh please. "Creation science" isn't science at all. Science makes predictions based on theories, and often has applicable uses. "Creation science" just attacks an evolutionary strawman. Nothing useful has come out of it, and no predictions can be made from it, and its practicioners don't follow the scientific method of empirical research.
To believe that crap, you have to discard physics (radioactive dating), astrophysics (age of the universe), biology (evolution and DNA), geology (age of the earth), paleoclimatology (ancient weather), and probably several other scientific disciplines that I just can't think of at the moment. Every one of THOSE sciences actually produce results. The atomic clock which you set your watch by in the morning is based on the same rate of radioactive decay which allows us to date rocks and sediment and fossils. The rockets that we send into space calculate their trajectory based on the same science which tells us how old the universe is. DNA and evolutionary research have given us new prescription drugs that are used to treat diseases. Paleoclimatology tells us what happens when the cabon dioxide levels get too high and cause global warming.
Has "Creation science" contributed anything to mankind, other than a bunch of wrongheaded thinking? Can you use "creation science" to make a better retrovirus drug? No. It's not science, it's muddle headed philosophy, and it will never be any more than that because it is fundamentally wrong.
When scientists say the earth is billions of years old, that theory is not based on pseudo-science, but cold, hard facts that "creation science" doesn't deal with, because it can't. If we used "creation science" geology to build our buildings, they would collapse. If we used "creation science" nuclear physics to build our nuclear reactors, they would explode. The only way you could possibly believe that crap is if you are woefully or intentionally ignorant of the facts.
Re:Better title... (Score:5, Insightful)
The same thing happened to Henry Bessemer when he produced high-quality steel by blowing air through it. When others couldn't reproduce it on a regular basis, he had to go back and review what he had done. It nearly broke him, but in the end he found that by pure chance, he had used low-phosphorus steel in his experiments. Once this was shown, uptake was initially slow, but as soon as it was proven to be reproduceable, it caught on and allowed the widespread use of modern steel -- and allowed Bessemer to become very wealthy.
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope. Apologies are for scientists who publish their work in good faith in peer-reviewed journals. Apologies are for scientists who submit a short manuscript to Phys. Rev. Lett. saying that under such-and-such conditions we observe extra heat and neutrons.
Apologies are not for scientists who first present a phenomenon they don't understand at a press conference and enjoy being media darlings until other people can't replicate their results.
If you're going to short-circuit proper peer review and go straight to the lay press, you have to accept the risk of being badly burned. If this effect does turn out to be real, by their profound lack of restraint they probably held back any research in the field by a decade or more.
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:3, Insightful)
To be fair to them, I think that the media storm that erupted from their first press conference took them completely by surprise, because I never saw it as being pushed by traditional media. I was in college at the time, and Cold Fusion was the first big 'internet phenomenon' that I can remember. If you were a reader of Usenet (as a great many scientists were), it was inescapable for a good month, at least.
Lots of information (of widely varying quality) circulated almost instantly, and so people were able to argue about it and hash it out and make their minds up much sooner than had been the case before.
Nowadays we expect that, and know how to filter appropriately. I don't think it's fair to have expected P&F to foresee that, since it had never happened before.
Re:No... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then explain to me why the solar panels on my roof are made by British Petroleum [bpsolar.com].
The RIAA and MPAA aren't selling a product whose source will eventually run out.
Oil people might differ on when it'll happen, but every oil company CEO knows that eventually we'll run out of easy-to-reach oil and the rest will cost so much to pump out of the ground that it'll be economically impossible to use as a commonplace energy source.
Any oil companies that haven't diversified into other, more sustainable businesses when that happens will be toast, no matter how much lobbying money they spend.
Don't get me wrong, they'll fiercely defend their current business for as long as it's profitable! But there's a limited amount of life left in that business, and they all know it.
Re:Almost had a heart attack! (Score:4, Insightful)
Right now, CFML is the only language that will run on either a Java Server or the .NET framework [newatlanta.com]
Sure, there are better cheaper tag-based languages out there, but CFML is still one of the easiest languages I've ever come across. If anything, it's too easy, that's why there is so much disdain for it, in many ways, it's so easy -- it doesn't feel like a real computer language.
Re:How do they know it's fusion? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Better title... (Score:3, Insightful)
They also own massive amounts of coal and oil shale. And, believe it or not, they've done solar cell research in the past.
The only difference between ExxonMobil and the friendlier "oil majors" like BP is marketing. BP has gotten incredibly good at fooling gullible people into think that it cares about something besides making money.
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, but that didn't exactly happen by accident...
Re:How do they know it's fusion? (Score:3, Insightful)
LOL! you just keep living that dream. (yes, i AM a particle physicist)
Re:Article Summary for lazy people (Score:3, Insightful)
I have no personal stake in this. It is an interesting bit of physics if it turns out to be true, but it is a very long way from a workable power source. And I'm not in the energy business anyway. I've never heard that P&F spent a lot of time trying to keep things secret. Nor that they tried to prevent others from duplicating their work.
You seem to be assuming that they were scammers, who, upon hearing that people insisted on proof of their claims, quietly gave out bogus information so that noone COULD prove their claim, then gave up on the claim when people failed to duplicate it. Which they had ensured themselves by withholding information. A bizarre picture of reality, to say the least. Frankly, if *I* were trying to scam someone this way, I'd not make a Press COnference, I'd quietly approach some reasonably rich person who wanted to be even richer, make a few carefully doctored "demonstrations", and ask for a few hundred thousand a year to develop the idea. I expect that with a little care in choosing the sucker, and not too much greed, I could get 5-10 years of comfortable living out of someone that way. Then "discover" what had really been happening, tell the sucker "Sorry, turns out that there was something else going on, and we have nothing".
Then go look for another sucker.
Going public is not the action of a conman. The conman wants to keep a low profile, because there's more chance of someone crying "Bullshit!" if there are more people aware of what is happening.
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:2, Insightful)
Cold fusion does not deserve the label "junk science", which refers to pseudoscience and experiments performed in defiance of known standards and practices. At worst, early cold fusion experiments were "science performed poorly", with inadequate control of variables that were not known at the time to be important.
Re:Have ANY of you naysayers... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, I'll bite. Why aren't these people now all billionaires, having developed and sold their new fusion technologies as a practical energy source?
If it is reliably reproducable, someone ought to be able to make a practical 'cold fusion reactor' and sell it, even if we don't entirely understand the effect. People were burning wood for energy long before we knew anything about combustion chemistry.
Re:Dump the Scientists in the ocean. (Score:2, Insightful)
None of these were "technologists" working on something they didn't understand, but scientists who actually used the full power of modern physical theories to predict and discover useful phenomena.
And I haven't even reached back to the 19th century to mention a guy by the name of Maxwell, and all the great things made possible by his theoretical research. Like, oh, I don't know, radio.
Even Edison wouldn't have gotten very far if it hadn't been for Ampere, Coulomb, and Faraday. All that funky telegraph stuff that gave Edison his start depended on what was once cutting-edge physics.
I'll freely admit general relativity hasn't (and almost certainly won't) lead to technological breakthroughs. But quantum mechanics has pretty clearly kicked ass.
Re:How do they know it's fusion? (Score:1, Insightful)
That's a rather snobbish, closed-minded, and non-scientific attitude.
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:3, Insightful)
Consider: if I were to hire my wife to keep house, and pay her 40% of my salary, and hire my daughter as her assistant, at 20% of my salary, and deduct those salaries from my income (which I can do if I incorporate, and cause my salary to be "corporate income"), the three of us would be paying considerably less taxes than I do now. So I'm paying MORE than I would have to, if I chose to treat my wife as a servant. I'm paying extra taxes for treating the mother of my child with some respect ;-)
Well, they come out of every one of my paychecks, so I have to assume that "Pay as You Go" has some specific meaning I don't know since I have no idea what could be said to the contrary.
Social Security and, to a lesser extent, Medicare were sold to the American public as an investment into retirement. The theory was that you put money into the system, that money comes back to you later on when you get old enough to take money out of the system.
This was done, mostly, because back then, taking handouts from the government was considered embarrassing. So it was dressed up as an annuity that you invested in.
It is possible that it was so treated early on, but very quickly, the Social Security taxes were just tossed into the General Fund, and IOU's written to the Social Security Administration.
This, by the way, is why the "budget surpluses" of the Clinton years were illusory - the government was balancing the budget by ignoring future liabilities (which is a crime if you are a business and have a pension plan), and lending money to itself. Taking a few dollars from the left pocket, putting them in the right pocket, and calling it extra income.
Just curious, assuming you believe that taxes are necessary at some level (I do), what kind do you approve of?
Income taxes are pretty much the only acceptable taxes, though it is arguable that sales taxes (which tax the income in a different way) are just as usable. Taxes on capital are bad, as it is possible to be "land-poor" (own a lot of things, not have a lot of money), and thus find yourself really strained to pay property taxes of any sort.
Actually, other than arguing rates, I have no real problem with our current income tax system. You pay, essentially, whatever the going rate is on your income over the poverty level. So it pretty much guarantees that taxes won't be sufficient to drive people into poverty (you stop paying taxes at that point). Note that the taxes imposed by the States change that whole picture, though most are patterned after the Federal tax structure to a certain extent.
As an aside, I was pretty surprised how much that varies from state to state.
Yah, taxes vary wildly from state to state. I've lived in ten that I can think of off the top of my head, and all of them different from the next. Some states believe in investing more in infrastructure, assuming they will get a return in the long run. I can't argue with that idea, I wish more states would do it. Some states believe that if the state gets involved in more than it absolutely has to, it will just get intrusive, annoying, and generally ruin more than they improve. Can't argue with that either. A middle ground is ideal, but how to get the government bureaucrats to stop building their little empires?
Re:Have ANY of you naysayers... (Score:1, Insightful)
Mysterious "vested interests" can't stop you from building one whopping big fusion device and unequivocally demonstrating the effect to all comers. And if you can do that, then there's no shortage of money that will be available. The "vested interests" will be more than happy to buy your company and use it to make even more money than they do now.
Heck, it's not like all the "vested interests" are even all on the same side. They're often bitter rivals, and one of them would fund you just to spite his enemy.
And if you really want to torpedo the "vested interests", you can just release the detailed engineering drawings on the Internet after they threaten to kill you.
If it were as obvious and practical to do as you say, it would be in the market already.