In hindsight it’s hard to believe, but there once was a time when I thought I knew where President Obama stood on free trade. Just a year ago he was on the campaign trail in Ohio, claiming that “one million jobs have been lost because of NAFTA” and pledging as president to “renegotiate” the treaty to the satisfaction of labor interests in the U.S. In front of crowds of unemployed workers in Ohio and Texas, his beliefs were as simple as they were hyperbolic: free trade agreements “ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart.”

Early this April, President Obama unveiled his vision for strengthening the world’s nuclear non-proliferation regime: renewed arms reduction talks with Russia and the creation of an international fuel bank in Kazakhstan to provide fuel services to non-weapons states. Both are excellent ideas which are long overdue, but neither will resolve the major proliferation threats facing us today.

Take it from a nuclear engineer: there is no future in fusion power. It will never be economical. Even if the very sizable technical hurdles were surmounted — magnetics, plasma physics, materials, and tritium availability to name a few — the capital cost of fusion’s heat island (the reactor sans turbines and other accouterments), would still be 2-3 times greater than that of a fission reactor, on a per-MW basis.

By any measure, the $787 billion stimulus bill will fall well short of solving the problems facing the economy. Over the next two years, the expected shortfall between potential and actual gross domestic product is projected to reach $2 trillion — this legislation doesn’t even come to half of that.

Obama’s muddled thinking on foreign policy will walk him into the same pitfalls as his predecessor

When it comes to health care policy, two viable economic theories are battling it out across the left-right spectrum.

For the GOP, it really wasn’t that bad of an election, considering the circumstances. Amid corruption, scandal, and mismanagement of affairs both at home and abroad, Republicans still managed to pull in 45.7% of the popular vote. That they did so is a testament to the enduring conservatism of America’s electoral landscape.

It’s “recessiontime” in America. The sweet scent of bailout is in the air, the auto companies are performing their courtship rituals in Congress and the bears are frolicking in the marketplace. This is the time of year when a young economist’s fancy turns to thoughts of financial stimulus … BIG financial stimulus.

Illinois produces more megawatts of nuclear power than any other state in the union, accounting for nearly 12 percent of the national total, and Barack Obama, the junior senator from the land of Lincoln, has had a very cosy relationship with the state’s nuclear industry over the years. The employees of the Exelon Corporation, the largest operator of commercial nuclear power plants in the U.S., have donated at least $300,000 to Obama since 2003, and for his part, Obama has danced with those who brung him.

I’m a positivist. I believe in the power of empirical evidence. I believe that political issues, such as healthcare and education, deserve to be analyzed through the lens of scientific inquiry.