The thinking about debt ("credit"), savings, and investment has become so distorted that one must deconstruct statements carefully to realize how absurd they are. One blatant example is the recent talk about funding the future decommissioning of nuclear plants around the country by waiting (decades) for investments of the funds to gain in value.

The assumption of endless "growth" is so engrained in our thinking about economics that it becomes hidden. Contraction, the opposite of growth, is so unthinkable that these days it is talked about as "negative growth". Temporary of course. The word "recession" also hints that in a short time the bell will ring and "recess" will end, we'll go back to the classroom, or something.

So "everybody knows" that investments are "guaranteed" to gain in value over the long haul, faster than inflation. Never mind that inflation is systematically underreported. Beyond that, there is the question: if every individual, every corporation, every government body and sector of the economy, is spending tomorrow's gains today, getting ever deeper into debt, where will those gains come from? "Money" is just a symbol and can be printed, but the actual physical resources needed to, e.g., decommission a nuclear plant, cannot be printed, they have to be brought to the task, removing them from other possible uses.

Not only are the "gains" fictitious in this environment, even the "principal" has no intrinsic value. As somebody explained recently on The Oil Drum, if you save all your life for retirement, and the computer in the bank reports your balance using plenty of digits, still there have been no storehouses filled with food and clothing and fuel for your use in your old age. Rather, that sum of "money" only represents a societal agreement that other people, who are still working and producing those physical assets, will agree to forego the use of a portion of those assets, leaving them to other, non-producing, people. This societal arrangement can unravel in many ways, inflation being the most common. When most people insist on using everything up right away, foregoing net savings and fighting all taxation, they are implicitly reneging on that societal agreement. An orgy of "negative savings" based on a hallucination of everybody striking it rich by "flipping assets" is what brought us to the economic disaster we are in now.

Thus you can imagine my disbelief when an "expert" on the "Vermont Edition" program on VPR today, talking about the Vermont Yankee decommissioning fund, about the waiting around 20, 30, perhaps 60 years after the plant is shut down (and no additional contributions are made to the fund), waiting for the insufficient funds to accrue the expected gains - and called that waiting-around non-activity "saving". I almost barfed my lunch when I heard that. Saving is when you don't spend what you could, saving it for later. That is the exact opposite of what they are proposing: they want to spend most of their profits now, leaving too small an amount in the fund. And what is the fund invested in? Companies that behave in the same irrational manner? Citigroup and General Motors?

The truth of course is that they are banking (pun intended) on the taxpayers and ratepayers to bail them out. The nuclear wastes will forever remain in a hazardous state unless "we" get our act together and clean it up. As we slide down the energy-scarcity slope due to depletion of nonrenewable fuels, we will have less and less economic wherewithal to do that. If nuclear power is as clean, efficient and economical as claimed, it must be called upon to, at the least, set aside the necessary decommissioning funds by the time the plant is shut down. Otherwise it will be dirty, inefficient and uneconomical.

Nature doesnt do bailouts