Stimulating the Postdocs

Like a lot of folks in the science biz, I've been wondering about the outcome of the science spending in the stimulus package. The econ crowd argues that an effective stimulus should be both fast acting and temporary. Common sense also dictates that the spending should be something that will eventually either reduce spending in the future, or grow the GDP. There's much speculation that some fraction of the NSF and NIH spending will go towards funding recent proposals that were very highly ranked, but fell just below the funding cutoff. Given how ridiculously oversubscribed the individual investigator grant programs are, there will be no lack of worthwhile projects to fund. On the other hand, these types of grants are not necessarily fast acting. Notifications take a while to process, and by the time the funding becomes secure, job "season" for academics would be well over, causing a significant delay ...