Answer: Destroy the industrial base of most of the rest of the world, import 1600 top Nazi scientists, find a nuclear-armed expansionist global-superpower enemy with a fundamentally incompatible political ideology, and raise the top marginal tax rate to 91%.<p>Worked last time.
What I'd LOVE to see is a federal grant program to fund work on popular or promising open source projects. Think how many jobs the LAMP stack has created? We need to find the next-gen of open source tools and make them more robust, better documented and more accessible to others. (Hint: Mochiweb could use some documentation love! :)
It's a nice idea but it's not compatible with our political landscape. It doesn't help anyone right this second. The laid off auto worker or construction worker probably aren't top candidates for a tech startup staff. Voters want easy answers and instant gratification. In their minds we should have been able to create 10 million jobs last year and fix all of our problems while cutting taxes and reducing the deficit. Why? Because they've been sold on decades of political non-sense from both parties. Easy answers, quick fixes, idealogical extremes. Politically the Republicans claim to support small business but they aren't too keen on giving <i>anyone</i> assistance in the form of government handouts. If the Democrats try it they'll be called communists and the American people, predictably enough, will be scared and oppose it. Maybe the Democrats would do it but it will be so watered down it doesn't actually work as intended so it looks like a gigantic, expensive, failure. I think this country has become so crippled by political fear and hatred that we just don't have the capacity to govern ourselves anymore via a democratic system.
Q: “What legislation, what tax incentives, do we need right now to replicate you all a million times over?”<p>A: Instead of taxing productivity, why not tax consumption instead? <a href="http://www.fairtax.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.fairtax.org/</a>
The idea that you could somehow "round up" the country's leading innovators in order to ask them questions, is itself the problem.<p>Innovators seem to appear out of nowhere; by the time they are well-known enough to find them, they have already done the bulk of their innovating.