The Obama administration’s stimulus plan is commendable for its size, its urgency, and its impact.  At Wallet Blog, we believe that it will be a powerful force in getting us out of the recession.  We do not, however, agree with the areas and projects to which the money is being funneled because the concentration is not on innovation.  The competitiveness of our country comes down to how much the world wants to buy from us, rather than how much we want to buy from the rest of the world, and the stimulus plan does not concentrate on the development of new products.

Instead, the areas of spending are aimed at areas like increasing the quality of America’s roads and bridges, providing incentives for the weatherizing of homes, and providing tax cuts. All of these improvements are good in the plan’s short term goal of ending the recession, but they do nothing towards making the rest of the world want to buy things from us.  Part of the reason we are in a recession is America’s inability to sell new products in the international marketplace. 

While it is a good short term goal to end the recession as quickly and as painlessly as possible, what the stimulus plan misses is a golden opportunity to produce innovations to sell to the post-recession world.  We would have liked to have seen a stimulus package that offered the funding of new projects and new technologies so that America could come out of this financial crisis again supplying the world with a vision of the future, and the breakthroughs necessary to make that future a reality.