The perfect campaign speech with promises that can't be checked for years.

Vice President Joe Biden has unveiled a new report that claims last year’s politically unpopular – and, gulp, $787 billion — Recovery Act contains $100 billion in investment in innovation that is not only “transforming the economy and creating new jobs,” but helping “accelerate advances” in science and technology.

More than the usual political folderol is involved here, in my opinion, as the Democrats turn up their rhetoric in defense of their management of a sputtering economy in the face of what appears to be an upcoming huge political backlash directed at tax and spend incumbents in the mid-term elections this fall. Biden’s assertions could also be the forerunner of a new move to propose another gigantic stimulus package if the Democrats remain in Congressional power after November.

The claims in the report, “The Recovery Act: Transforming the American Economy through Innovation,” are dubious in my view given the current state of the technologies involved, but ideal from a campaign perspective since they cannot be verified until years after the election – if anyone bothers or remembers.

And of course, there is no taxpayer “money back guarantee” offered from the Administration if the promises vanish into the ether and the companies and universities receiving the funding don’t deliver the innovations.

Remember the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, which channeled millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars into national labs and the Detroit Three automakers in search of an 80 mpg car? Not one has been built to this day.

Worse, the real outcome was that Toyota, which was excluded from the pork festival for political reasons, went on its own innovation tear and with the help of the Japanese government developed its world leading hybrid technology while Detroit went back to investing in and building gas guzzlers and issuing press releases about a green future car that never arrived.

So there is precedent in my view to be skeptical of politician’s promises that government spending and subsidies are the way to stimulate innovation. And there remains a real argument that the government should get out of design standards business and just set regulations for national goals.  Then let companies and consumers work it out in the marketplace.

According to this new “analysis,” the United States is now on-track to achieve four major breakthroughs as the result of Recovery Act investments:

• Cutting the cost of solar power in half by 2015, putting it on par with the cost of retail electricity from the grid.
• Cutting the cost of batteries for electric vehicles by 70% between 2009 and 2015, putting the lifetime cost of an electric vehicle on-par with that of traditional vehicles.
• Doubling U.S. renewable energy generation capacity and U.S. renewable manufacturing capacity by 2012.
• Bringing the cost of a personal human genome map to under $1,000 in five years, allowing researchers to sequence 50 human genomes for the same cost as sequencing just one today.

“We’re planting the seeds of innovation, but private companies and the nation’s top researchers are helping them grow, launching entire new industries, transforming our economy and creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the process,” claimed Vice President Biden, who failed to note that the lack of an industrial policy for successive political regimes going back decades has cost millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs that create real wealth for the U.S. economy, which is now being surpassed by the Chinese economy as the world’s largest because of  their very successful industrial policy.

The issue that voters are wrestling with in the U.S.  think involves a serious debate about what is the proper role of the Federal Government in directing what is an allegedly free market in a world dominated by countries with actual industrial policies — long in place — that protect and create jobs in their homelands while eliminating them in ours.

Then, there’s the thorny issue of just how much debt should accrue in our ongoing attempts to stimulate the U.S. economy. Unemployment rates remain at post war highs and the economy now shows signs of slipping back into a recession once again. This unwelcome prospect arrives after a trillion dollar taxpayer investment last year  – with borrowed money – designed to prevent such an occurrence. And before the scathing anti-Dem comments arrive, let me note that the previous Republican Administration during its eight year tenure turned a $237 million Democratic budget surplus into $1.4 trillion in debt, quadrupling it, under their non-management while allowing the reckless practices of Wall Street financiers to go unchecked, which led to the global Great Recession we are still living with. Poxes on both houses say I.

Vice President Biden was joined by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and representatives from more than two dozen companies and research institutions that are using borrowed taxpayer money “to help make America a global leader in high-growth industries like electric vehicles and solar power.”

Taking the first three claims – since genomes are outside our focus – here’s a detailed look at Biden’s boasts:

• Cutting the cost of solar power in half by 2015

The cost of solar energy is forecast to drop by half between 2009 and 2015, as power from rooftop solar panels will drop from $0.21 per kWh in 2009 to $0.10 per kWh in 2015, which is equivalent to typical household electricity rates it’s claimed. (My cost in Michigan is more than 15 cents/kWh.) The cost of power from utility-scale solar projects would drop from $0.13 per kWh today to $0.06 in 2015, which is equivalent to the cost of wholesale utility power now.

• Cut the cost of batteries for electric vehicles by 70% between 2009 and 2015

The cost of batteries for an all-electric vehicle will fall from $33,000 to $10,000, while the cost of typical plug-in hybrid batteries will drop from $13,000 to $4,000. The Administration claims that a $10,000 battery for all-electric vehicles and a $4,000 battery for plug-in hybrid vehicles will mean that electric-drive cars are affordable and cost competitive with similar non-electric vehicles.

At those battery costs, it’s claimed, electric-drive cars actually will be less expensive over the life of the car than similar non-electric vehicles, but the conclusions, as noted in the fine print, come from excluding the additional cost of an EV and using only operating costs in the equation. Question, if states lose the revenue from taxes on fuel sales, why wouldn’t they increase the taxes on electricity if, big if, electric cars become popular. And I’ll leave aside the fact that half of U.S. electricity is generated by coal, which is an environmental disaster.

What’s more, it’s claimed these investments will make these new batteries lighter and more durable. The weight of a typical electric-vehicle battery is forecasted to decrease by 33%, from 333 kilograms to 222 kilograms, by 2015. The lighter battery means a lighter car, which means less energy is needed to power the car. A typical battery is expected to last 14 years in 2015 – more than three times as long as the current 4-year lifetime.

Unmentioned in the Biden press release is that outside the enormous spending of the Recovery Act, the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program is providing more than $2.4 billion in loans to Fisker, Nissan, and Tesla to support three of the world’s first electric car factories in Delaware (Democratic Biden), Tennessee (Republican Shelby – who opposed bailing out Chrysler and GM), and California (Democrats Pelosi, Waxman, Boxer) respectively. These investments will increase U.S. manufacturing capability in the near future, it’s claimed. Why would we support these companies, when as taxpayers we have substantial equity interests in General Motors Company and Chrysler Group? Shouldn’t the subsidies go to them? And GM is not sure that it will qualify for such loans.

• Double U.S. renewable energy generation capacity and U.S. renewable manufacturing capacity by 2012

The U.S. will double renewable energy generation by 2012. More than $23 billion of Recovery Act investments support renewable energy from wind, solar, and geothermal. (This means installing as much renewable energy generating capacity in the next three years as the U.S. had in the previous thirty.) This requires doubling renewable energy capacity from the 28.8 GW of solar, wind, and geothermal generation that has been installed as of 2008, to 57.6 GW by the end of 2011. That’s enough capacity to power 16.7 million homes.

This also requires the doubling of renewable energy manufacturing capacity from an annual output of 6 GW of renewable equipment from wind turbines or solar panels and the like to 12 GW by the end of 2011. It’s said that this will increase the U.S. share of global manufacturing of solar photovoltaic modules from 8% of all production, to 14% by 2012.

So there are the promises set down here because we will be keeping score, and attempting to keep track of how the government is spending your, borrowed, money.