TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says we're trying to repeal what happened financially last year. Will it lead to strength industrially?

How low were we really? What was the real baseline pre-Lehman Brothers? What was going on in the country and the world before that financial atomic bomb dropped?

I struggle over that now, about what the true price of copper should be, about what the true price of oil should be, about the price of steel, all kinds of things. I try to figure out what the prices for everything were going to be before Lehman.

The Department of Energy announced it was throwing some money at the electric car dream yesterday. They'll spend "up to $30 million in funding over three years" on three projects they hope will produce a viable electric car by 2014. Wow, that's a whole $10 million a year!

The DOE is funding three projects they hope will produce an electric car that can go 40 miles on a charge, enough for 70% of daily commuters. They made the announcement at a conference on Plug-in Electric Vehicles 2008: What Role for Washington? Apparently the Energy Department decided the role was to make a token amount of funding and let other countries take the lead. The plan is to split the cost 50-50 with industry. General Motors (NYSE:GM) is going to work on a Lithium-Ion battery. Ford (NYSE:F) will work on a way to speed up mass production of electric cars. And General Electric (NYSE:GE) will try to figure out a two-battery, 40-mile system.

I'm sure everyone's working on all sorts of other projects, but this one just seems tiny, especially in context of the current oil crisis and the $40.1 billion requested Department of Transportation budget for FY2009. As cNet's Elsa Wenzel helpfully points out, Toyota (NYSE:TM), working with Matsushita Electric Industrial (NYSE:MC), thinks it can mass market an electric car by 2010.