Absolute nonsense ...

You are driving right past my point. The federal government has no business foraging into the energy sector in that form, hydrogen or otherwise. The nuclear and coal examples I used were to demonstrate the inherent obstructionist role our government has played regarding domestic energy recovery, thus highlighting my resistance to they being anything but that with hydrogen.

In addition Hoover Dam, etc, in comparison are very small scale compared to what you are suggesting. The point here, with all this money being spent, IS NOT to argue over WHERE, WHEN AND HOW the government spends this money, it is to fight over it being spent at all! I mean does the Hoover Dam justify the economic failure of the New Deal as a whole? Hardly. I am not conceding the argument to them that bigger government is inevitable, less we fall into the McCain mistake of being a "them lite." If the trend towards big government is the way the pendulum is swinging, fine, but I'll resign myself to fighting that trend, rather then squabble over what shape big government takes. The point is to have the federal government create the environment for the private sector to most efficiently do this, NOT do the hands on work themselves. That's the feds proper role here, the government leading by getting out of the way, not a federally employed worker picking up a hammer.

You guys voted for Clinton, supported him. Was it not he in his first SoTU who declared emphatically, "THE ERA OF BIG GOVERNMENT IS OVER."

On paper or in theory you can make almost anything work, like your federal hydrogen plan. What I am commenting on is the reality of accepting this responsibility as that of the federal government's (THIS federal government in particular). You can make it work on paper (electronic or otherwise) all day long. In practice I'm confident it would be a disaster.

And tariffs during a recession? Didn't we try that already? How did that work out?