Of course, but if it's falsifiable then once it's falsified it will go away. If it's not falsifiable then it's "not even wrong" and it's impossible to convince people to stop repeating it as if it's fact (or worse, an 'undeniable possibility').
The author is arguing that the proposal to replace the LHC with a 100km replacement isn't worth the cost considering the low probability that any of these theories it could prove actually turn out to be true. We have little to gain by them being false and little reason to think they are true.
When doing this sort of calculations, you have to take into account that you're taxing THE WHOLE population: completely destitute people, people near the poverty line, children who ear exactly $0, etc. For some of these poeple, $40 can be way too much. In practice, if you tax a child that doesn't earn an income, you're taxing the parents. Of course it's possible that on average you can tax $40 from each person, but that might require taxing $400 from some people and $0 from other people.
That said, there might be better ways of spending that money than on this.
So let's indeed spend the $20B- but spend it on 20 other $1B programs that will each provide better results and answers than what we'll get from poor theories that a $20B project can answer.
That said, it's not always a bad thing. Sometimes you get two interesting discussions going on for one submission...
learning is when our belief system changes in the face of evidence.
how should we hypothetically (in a thought experiment) measure this education of humanity?
strawman proposal: lets measure learning by voting on predictions, and then after measurement we can observe the discrepancy between collective prediction and actual measurement results.
problem with the straw man proposal: most of humanity will make wrong predictions, because most of humanity has not been trained in most disciplines.
so we want the "prediction of humanity" to somehow give most weight to the experts. obviously it will be contentious to define "expertness". Instead of trying to define "expertness" we could weigh the human predictions by the individual's success rate at previous predictions. Now we get a modified prediction distribution of humanity.
Nothing currently forces falsified predictions to go away, look at chapter 28 of Feynman lectures vol 2 on ElectroMagnetic mass. There's known inconsistencies in our theories, virtually no one highlights these, because everyone is trying to underscore their understanding and never lack of understanding of the universe...