House Passes NASA Authorization Bill 149
simonbp writes "The US House of Representatives has just passed the Senate version of the FY2011 NASA Authorization Act. This bill is a compromise between Obama's proposed budget and earlier House bills. It cancels Ares I in favor of commercially-operated crew transportation to ISS, adds technology development funds, and keeps a version of Orion and a new heavy-lift 'Space Launch System' to both be operational by 2016. The timing of this bill was crucial to keeping key NASA personnel and contractors from being laid off."
Re:Great (Score:0, Informative)
Yeah, there is a problem in your stats... The largest expenditure in the US is military expenditures at 25.5%. Interest on debt is 13.6%. 39.7% of that interest payment is on military expenditures alone.
If the US was busy killing people and trying to be the police force for US corporations exploiting countries abroad, we would have a lot less debt and a lot more money for useful things.
Re:Budget or 'plan'? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Budget or 'plan'? (Score:3, Informative)
It does help prevent layoffs. There is continued funding in the continuing resolution. The problem was that no one knew what that money was going to be used for until the authorization bill passed.
The layoff risk came not to NASA civil servants, but to contractors. While NASA could allocate CR funds to keep their employees even without knowing exactly what they should be doing, no contracting manager would have been able to keep people around without some indication of the direction of NASA, since NASA couldn't pay them and the company would have trouble justifying the risk to stockholders.
Re:Badastronomy blog on bill (Score:3, Informative)
Speaking on the House floor before the vote Wednesday, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Arizona, said the legislation "lacks serious budgetary discipline" and includes an "unfunded mandate to keep the shuttle program going through all of fiscal year 2011 even after the shuttle is retired, which NASA estimates will cost the agency more than half a billion dollars."
-- Source [spaceflightnow.com].
You see that? Right there a Democrat from Arizona was one of the prime champions of Constellation and derailing funding to commercial spaceflight development. Do you want more proof? Take a look at the article linked to in the summary.It goes into plenty of detail about how that bitch Giffords took up most of the debate time in the proceeds to complain about what a bad bill it was. Does that register to you? This bill, and most bills in Congress, are no longer about those darn Republicans vs. those darn Democrats.Both parties are corrupt, pandering, lip-servicing morons that can't tell their head from their ass. That doesn't change just because the bill involves NASA. Take your two-party political bickering elsewhere you misinformed douche.
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
See a problem? I do. You're lumping welfare and social security together. That makes no sense; not only are they very different programs, they are financially different animals.
It also misleadingly suggests that half our budget is going to welfare queens. That is simply not possible. The total budget of Administration for Families and Children (otherwise known as welfare) for 2011 is 17.48 billion, which is actually less than the 18.7 billion outlay in the fiscal year for NASA.
Medicaid is a big program, but still nowhere near 50% of the budget. For FY 2011, the Medicaid budget is 297 billion. Medicare is even bigger at 491 billion. If you added up Medicaid, Medicare and welfare, you still less than the money spent on defense, so these can hardly break the 50% of the budget mark.
To do that, you have to add social security into the mix, but that's inherently misleading from a budget balancing standpoint. Social Security brings in income. A *lot* of income. In fact it runs a surplus. To get an accurate picture, you have to look at both the expense *and* income side.
Here are the top sources of income in the US budget (in billions of dollars):
Individual Income Taxes: 1,121 or 43.7%.
Social Security(payroll) Taxes: 934 or 36.4%.
Corporate Income Taxes: 297 or 11.6%.
Excise Taxes: 80 or 3.12%.
Federal Reserve Deposits:79 or 3.08%.
Customs Duties:29 or 1.13%.
Estate Taxes: 24 or 0.94%.
Everything Else (roughly): 10 or 0.39%.
See the problem? Since Social Security expenditures are 730 billion, if you waved a magic wand and made that program disappear, you'd add 204 billion dollar to the budget deficit. That's on the same order of magnitude as *all corporate taxes* added up. It's fairly safe to say that without the Social Security surplus, there wouldn't be 18+ billion dollars lying around to spend on NASA.
If we had a sensible approach to this, we'd set social security to one side and offset the cash influx with the expected liability for future payments. Then we'd invest the surplus in an instrument that paid interest, the goal being to ensure the cash flow remains balanced over the lifetime of the bulk of the people in the system.
But we don't do that. Instead we wring our hands about an entirely foreseeable and manageable problem, then take the money that could deal with that problem, the working man's 204 billion dollar contribution to deficit reduction, and throw into things that don't benefit him. But to truthful if we did manage the social security surplus responsibly, there probably wouldn't be money for NASA under that scenario either.
Now it *is* a politically conceivable scenario to get rid of Social Security and Medicaid (the notion of Medicare going away is fantasy). The 200 billion in surplus lost would be more than offset by 297 reduction in outlays. But if you think that anything like a proportionate share of that 97 billion dollars is going back into your pocket, you're either dreaming, or a member of a very small group of very wealthy people. So in that scenario, the working guy loses the programs that provide him security against tough times, but the programs that benefit the wealthy aren't going anywhere.