There are some important questions. First, how much would it cost to do something like this?
We need to send about 160 million kilograms of material into space (See Birch's boot strap estimates in part 2:
http://www.orionsarm.com/fm_store/OrbitalRings-II.pdf)
We have rockets available at $2000/kg costs to LEO today in "mass production" mode, which is only about 10-20 launches per year. Compared with the couple thousand launches necessary for a space elevator, $2000 is an unreasonably high upper bound for launch costs.
We also need to include the cost of materials. A space elevator is about 98% steel and aluminum, 1% kevlar, and 1% other such as superconducting magnets. Most of the mass (98%) cost around $1/kg, with an average cost per kilogram of no more than about $10 per kilogram.
Summing the above up, we get about $430 billion in launch costs plus another $1-2 billion in material costs.
In other words, we can have a space elevator for less than $450 billion - significantly less than one year worth of DoD spending, one bank bailout, many times less than a variety of pointless wars, etc. This is well within our reach financially in other words.
