Congress Dumps James Webb Space Telescope 409
Teancum writes "On the list of items on the upcoming federal budget for 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives has announced they are going to cancel the continued development of the James Webb Space Telescope. While this debate is certainly still very much a preliminary draft, the road ahead for this project is now very much uncertain. In this time of budget cuts, it seems unlikely that this project is going to survive at this time. It certainly will be an uphill battle for fans of this telescope if they want to keep it alive."
Science loses again (Score:5, Insightful)
Knowledge and Progress... Short list for cuts
Not surprised the least
Re:Science loses again (Score:5, Insightful)
It's too bad you posted as AC, because it's true.
And it's funny how the people who cut this will take pride in how our country is on the so-called cutting-edge of technology and science.
We're on the fast track to becoming a banana republic.
--
BMO
Re:Science loses again (Score:5, Insightful)
From the appropriations document [house.gov]:
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) – NASA is funded at $16.8 billion in the bill, which is $1.6 billion below last year’s level and $1.9 billion below the President’s request. This funding includes:
$3.65 billion for Space Exploration which is $152 million below last year. This includes funding above the request for NASA to meet Congressionally mandated program deadlines for the newly authorized crew vehicle and launch system.
$4.1 billion for Space Operations which is $1.4 billion below last year’s level. The legislation will continue the closeout of the Space Shuttle program for a savings of $1 billion.
$4.5 billion for NASA Science programs, which is $431 million below last year’s level. The bill also terminates funding for the James Webb Space Telescope, which is billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management.
Meanwhile, in the same document:
Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) – The bill provides $2.7 billion for the PTO – the full requested level. This funding is equal to the estimated amount of fees to be collected by the PTO during fiscal year 2012, and is an increase of $588 million or 28% above last year’s level. The bill also includes language that allows PTO to keep and use any fees in excess of the estimated collected amount, subject to standard Congressional approval, and includes language requiring PTO to report on efforts to reduce the patent application backlog
(Bolding is mine)
Stop a space telescope, cut back NASA funds while retiring a space shuttle... increase patent office funding... This is just a normal day in the office chaps...
Re:Science loses again (Score:5, Informative)
Yep. Other winners in this budget include the International Trade Administration, FBI, DEA, and the Bureau of Prisons. Other losers include NSF, NIST, NOAA, the Economic Development Administration, and programs to aid state and local law enforcement. You can draw your own conclusions about what set of priorities that reflects ...
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if I wasn't looking, I'd swear there was a republican in office.
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Congress writes the budget and sends it to the White House, the White House approves or rejects. If it is rejected, Congress can overrule the President's veto.
Sucks when life is complicated, isn't it?
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the leader's job is to LEAD.
see any of that?
I don't. I see same-old same-old. he is NOT standing up for his so-called principles.
you can say its the system but if the president can't accomplish his goals, I blame HIM. backroom deals, etc - just make it happen.
but he does not. he's useless. /dev/null would be as effective.
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"...Military = good (protects God-given rights.)"
Um, which ones are those?
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Sanity loses again!!!
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This is the budget submitted by Congress, which by the Constitution must originate in the House, which is run by Republicans. Parent mentions that the President's requests were different.
Re:Science loses again (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is the republicans wont budge. They are the ones who all of the sudden decided agaisnt' raising the ceiling. For reference the ceiling has been raised almost 50 times in order to keep up with inflation. With the recovery act this year the number is much much higher than normal and the republicans are seizing on it. ... correction the Tea Party is seizing it. When Bush expanded government the Tea Party didn't even exist. When somone with a D next to their name comes into office all of the sudden this grass movement appears. Give me a break. Half the bailout was designed by Paulson under Bush, not Obama.
Either way the intended effect is done and we are going to create an artificial austerity measure on purpose rather than necessity to make sure another R is in the White House next year regardless of America's bond rating going into the toilet and another 3,000 point crash. Sigh
For the record I am in favor of some of this deficit reduction and think government is too large. I just hate the slimy politics of this with lies and deceptions. Please republicans raise the darn taxes if you are going to walk the walk on the upper class and save 3.8 trillion. It makes me mad as the Tea Party is not dictating Obama's policies as well as the Republicans do not want to lose their seats to this small minority crowd who is active in the primaries.
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Isn't it a common complaint on /. that the PTO is understaffed and underfunded, hence all of the bogus patents that get granted?
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Isn't it a common complaint on /. that the PTO is understaffed and underfunded, hence all of the bogus patents that get granted?
No.
The complaint is that the PTO is being funded, hence all of the bogus patents that get granted. You'd see celebrations here if the funding was cut to zero.
Re:Science loses again (Score:4, Informative)
Except that:
Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) – The bill provides $2.7 billion for the PTO – the full requested level. This funding is equal to the estimated amount of fees to be collected by the PTO during fiscal year 2012, and is an increase of $588 million or 28% above last year’s level. The bill also includes language that allows PTO to keep and use any fees in excess of the estimated collected amount, subject to standard Congressional approval, and includes language requiring PTO to report on efforts to reduce the patent application backlog
(Bolding is mine).
The USPTO funds itself from fees it collects.
Re:Science loses again (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't disagree that there is other shit that needs cutting. Do we REALLY need a military that can stomp two of any other conventional armies on their own land at once? I personally think not. Self defense the ability to act WITH others in the world community is more than enough for me. I don't think the US needs a military designed to fight China and Russia on their own shores, considering that the only possible end game to that kind of 'victory' are a few thousand nuclear missiles up the arse.
That said... the Jame's Webb telescope, while being an awesome piece of potential science, is a poster child for being a catastrofuck of poor planning and budgeting. They are going to miss both their launch data AND the cost by at least a 4X factor. Maybe canceling a few of these messes will convince people not to write rosy prediction of cost and time. Firing all of the management involves, killing the project, and proposing a realistic budget and timing is hardly the worst fate that cold befall NASA.
Now if only we could fire all of the congressmen shit heads who propose their own unrealistic budgets on absurd timetables...
Re:Science loses again (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing that's threatening to bust the budget is entitlements. Medicare and Medicaid speciically [cbo.gov]. Just the growth predicted for entitlements between now and 2035 will exceed the entire defense budget. Go read the CBO's long-term outlooks [cbo.gov] if you don't believe me. I'm not saying entitlements have to go, but any budget plan which refuses to change entitlements is doomed to fail before it even starts.
Re:Science loses again (Score:4, Insightful)
Healthcare cost growth is a huge long-term problem, and it's one we're going to need to address. But it has precisely nothing to do with what we spend in 2012, 2013, 2014, etc.
Military spending, on the other hand, really is great issue to address in the yearly budget. We can decide in 2011 how many overseas wars we should be fighting over the next fiscal year. We can decide in 2012 how much we want to spend in 2013, and so on.
As best I can tell, the reason we spend so much time discussing "entitlements" is because politicians don't want to discuss issues that we can address today. So instead we have a stupid and fruitless conversation about problems that we're not facing yet. The inevitable outcome is that nobody wants to put their neck on the line to cut these programs, and all the serious decisions fly under the radar.
Which, when you think about it, is the entire point.
There's a pretty simple way to deal with Medicare spending in the future (note: it's not "entitlements" --- Social Security does not share Medicare's cost growth). Basically, leave it to the future. Oh sure, do what smart things we can do now to make healthcare costs grow less quickly. But when the costs themselves become unmanageable, let the voters and representatives of that time deal with it. Their problem, their decision. Cutting Medicare only requires one Congressional vote, it's not magic.
If they can afford Medicare as it is now, good for them. If they can't, they'll have no choice but to cut it. That'll be unpopular, but in that case it'll also be necessary which means it'll happen.
Re:Science loses again (Score:5, Insightful)
But when the costs themselves become unmanageable, let the voters and representatives of that time deal with it. Their problem, their decision. Cutting Medicare only requires one Congressional vote, it's not magic.
If they can afford Medicare as it is now, good for them. If they can't, they'll have no choice but to cut it. That'll be unpopular, but in that case it'll also be necessary which means it'll happen.
Well, if I'm not going to get Medicare in 30 years, why not just cut it today so that I can stop paying all those taxes for the next 30 years? If it will work for me to pay taxes for the next 30 years and not collect a dime, then it will work fine for the previous generation to do the same. Besides, we don't need to cut it so much as we need to reform it (raise retirement age, only spend money where we have clinically proven results, etc).
On the other hand, US foreign policy today will impact the kind of world I live in 30 years from now. I don't see a need to be as engaged overseas as we have been, but the fact is that an army is actually one of those things that the Federal Government was created for in the first place.
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Nearly every other industrialized country offers universal health care for all of their workers and retirees. For the most part these countries are less well off than the US, and yet they can provide these benefits without drowning themselves in debt.
In my opinion there's no question about whether we can "afford" Medicare. There is a question about our budget priorities, tax levels, and how we manage our money.
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Generally your are correct, but the first picture is totally misleading. Three things.
First, medicare/medicaid are a serious problem, 20 years from now. That said, its nothing that cannot be fixed with a few tweaks to the funding and eligibility models. The fundamental problem is that the government pays for services at whatever rate the medical community claims they are worth. Naturally, this an under damped response curve which will do what they always do, break the system. Furthermore, tweaking the bene
Re:Science loses again (Score:5, Insightful)
It's ridiculous to measure military spending as a percent of GDP. The necessary expenses do not scale with GDP. We aren't facing any real military threats; the BS "terrorism" scare was just a marketing campaign to keep the gravy train rolling. We don't need the expenditures of the cold war today, yet we're spending much more in level dollar terms. We could cut $200B out of the DoD budget tomorrow and still be spending more than in the late 90s or the 70s. The accumulated interest on old military expenditures and increase in the veterans affairs budget due to idiotic wars of choice almost doubles the official budget, to over $1.1trillion a year, even before counting DHS, State Dept., DoE, etc. We're borrowing all that money, including the interest payments. Social Security and Medicare, on the other hand, pay for themselves, and have money left over to lend to the rest of the government. They'd have more but the rich don't pay Social Security tax on most of their income, and Medicare is forbidden from negotiating volume discounts with the pharmaceutical companies.
We're going to spend $2.8 billion this year on the V-22 Osprey, which is a complete dog, unreliable, unmaintainable, dangerous. We're going to spend over $10 billion this year on idiotic, unworkable, destabilizing ballistic missile defense schemes. We're going to spend more on fucking air-conditioning for the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos than the entire NASA budget. And it's worse than completely useless- it soaks up engineering talent, manufacturing capacity and materials and produces nothing of value - it actually destroys value at home and abroad by killing and maiming people and destroying property. It's fucking psychotic.
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But the fun doesn't stop there. The graph ends in 2001. Hmm, can't think of any large military expenditures between 2001 and 2011...
Put a recent CBO graph up there, and we can talk. Of course, he's right about entitlement spending. My personal take on this is that the US has to decide between policing the world and car
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The evidence at the moment is that it can't do either.
Re:Science loses again (Score:5, Informative)
You don't even need to look outside NASA to see ridiculous spending to compare to. The same House appropriations bill with the $431M JWST cut includes $2B for the Space Launch System (SLS) and $1B for the Orion/MPCV capsule. The SLS is basically Congress's mandate to NASA to build a heavy-lift rocket out of Shuttle-legacy components capable of competing with SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. The $2B is only for the first year of SLS funding, for a rocket which isn't expected to have its first launch until 2017 or later. Mind that this is for a rocket that NASA didn't even want in the first place.
Re:Science loses again (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the issue is that if one can not protect the sovereignty of a country then its science is a moot point. The country will soon be owned or destroyed by someone else.
War/Destruction and Knowledge/Progress are not mutually exclusive. Look at the advances in aircraft during WW2. We went from biplanes to jet planes in a scant ten years. More recently Kevlar and composites that are used in manufacturing were originally researched for military use.
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Considering we went from losing hundreds of thousands of jobs every month under Bush, to adding jobs every month under Obama, I'd say he's done a damn good job fixing the damage. If you were expecting those jobs to magically reappear over night, you're deluded.
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the jobs that are being made aren't really jobs, they give the bare minimum so the person can live in a trailer park with 20$ to spend a week. That's not a life its just slavery.
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Personally, my next position pays 8% more than the previous one that I left.
Just about the ONLY people who are taking a 'step down' like this are the real estate agents who were part of the building of the last bubble in the first place. Did you ever think they were being overpaid in the first place, and now the market has adjusted down to more correctly reflect their skill set?
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Re: real estate agents
Trust the opinion of no one who is earning a commission on what you wish to buy.
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Adults brain-damaged by kwashiorkor [wikipedia.org] in their youth ; mothers selling one child to get money to feed their other children ; annual cholera epidemics.
A real return to "Victorian values".
The Right are also attacking public health, sanitation, and the legality of contraception too. You need to get rid of those too, to keep the masses properly in their place.
It worked for Tsar Nicholas, didn't
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Nothing a single U.S. president does can "fix" economy or add/destroy jobs. Sorry. People who think so are so out of touch with reality it's scary. U.S. economy has been self-destructed from inside by greedy and unscrupulous businesspeople at all levels (both in small businesses and on tops of corporations), and by equally greedy and uneducated/ignorant consumers. The only way to "fix" it is to let a generation or two die off and be replaced by better people. Where the heck we'll get those, though, is a har
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Your belly-feel doesn't align with the facts, or for that matter, logic. The stimulus employed millions of people. Those people now had money to spend. How is it possible for that to not impact the economy? Just because you "guesstimate" that nothing matters doesn't make it so.
The mindset you are displaying is part of the problem. People see how complicated the system is, throw their hands up, and say "it's random, no one can control it". That sort of defeatism is self-fulfilling.
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So educate me. A U.S. President has nothing much to do with economics of U.S.A., or the world at large, for that matter. Their net worth is usually very low, and the influence they have in the matters of economical "ecosystem" is I'd say apocryphal at best. It's demonstrated over and over when they can't get shit done.
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Work on your reading comprehension. I said "adding jobs every month". Not "adding hundreds of thousands of jobs every month". Go check out a graph of jobs lost/gained per month. The inflection point occurs pretty much immediately after the passage of the stimulus bill. Considering how much the Dems have done to repair the damage, it really is disgusting how the media is going along with the "stimulus failed" meme. But hey, good news doesn't get ratings.
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It's a coincidence. The stimulus was not even a drop in the bucket, in the grand scheme of things.
Re:Science loses again (Score:4, Insightful)
They're basically clones of each other... a false prosperity, supported by a bubble of circle-jerking investors, in which none of the "wealth" goes to the workers [during the 20s, income for the average American rose one percent and for the rich rose something like 50%], and in the end the bubble finally reaches a maximum inflation, jitters a bit, and implodes. Sound familiar?
If there is any causal connection, it's that the change in House control was the pin that pricked the bubble - the first investor to panic then brings the whole lie crashing down. Do you blame those who exposed the lie, or those who inflated it, created it, and enabled it?
Re:Science loses again (Score:4, Insightful)
Liar. Stop regurgitating talking points and think. What caused all the job losses? The recession, obviously. What caused the recession? Rampant greed and absentee regulators. It was a long time brewing. Beyond that, the causes are irrelevant. What is relevant is that once the Democrats were in charge, which happened on Jan 2009, things quickly improved.
And the Democrats were not in control of the government in 2007. They had Congress, but Bush had the veto pen. They could not begin undoing his damage until 2009. Stop regurgitating the lies that Fox has poisoned you with, and think for your self.
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Re:Science loses again (Score:5, Interesting)
...No shit they paid it back. They bought treasury bonds with the money loaned to them at discount interest rates and sat on them until the treasury yields balanced their books. It was just a hand out by any other name. They repaid the loans with devalued capital, after using that money during a liquidity crunch to hostile takeover their competitors who didn't qualify for a government handout.
If you convert the loan to gold at the time it was made and then make the same conversion when it was repaid you'll see that the tax payer was robbed of nearly 200 billion dollars, the majority of which sailed off in to the sunset as golden parachutes and bonuses for the people who crashed the american economy.
The insult to injury here is that the Treasury department begged congress for unconditional trust and then turned right around and engaged in the largest example of graft in recorded human history - Carting wheelbarrows full of money out the back door in the form of secret purchases of toxic mortgages at 500% of their market value. The beneficiary? The treasury secretary's former employer Goldman Sachs and the new banking cartels: JP Morgan and Bank of America.
These assholes caused the crisis and in return were handed majority ownership of the entire american real estate market on the backs of the people who they cheated out of house and home.
Treason fails to communicate the gravity/magnitude of the events which you are so eager to forget. Why so forgiving? I suspect because holding a grudge would cause your illusion of democracy to dissolve if it meant that your favorite sock puppet was no less corrupt than his predecessor? Cognitive dissonance is a bitch ain't she?
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whack! (Score:2, Insightful)
This was a way cool project that could have led us towards life in the distant cosmos! Maybe its because were in for a much bigger revelation... (FINGERS CROSSED, and by revelation I don't mean that in a religious sense)... More than likely though their probably just rerouting the funding to war crime projects....
Budget problems (Score:5, Informative)
From Wikipedia:
"In June 2011, it was reported that the Webb telescope will cost at least four times more than originally proposed, and launch at least seven years late. Initial budget estimates were that the observatory would cost $1.6 billion and launch in 2011. NASA has now scheduled the telescope for a 2018 launch, though outside analysts suggest the flight could slip past 2020. The latest estimated price tag for the telescope is now $6.8 billion."
Although a loss for science, this would seem to be more accurately blamed on poor management and budgeting. Perhaps a smaller, better managed project will rise from the ashes.
Re:Budget problems (Score:5, Insightful)
The panel noted that the project was in good shape technically, but that NASA had not budgeted enough for the project initially. In other words, it would have cost less if they'd put more in up front and completed it on schedule. This is why you shouldn't let penny-pinchers be in charge of cost estimates (or anything, for that matter). If they weren't willing to commit sufficient funds to the project, they shouldn't have done it at all.
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The panel noted that the project was in good shape technically, but that NASA had not budgeted enough for the project initially. In other words, it would have cost less if they'd put more in up front and completed it on schedule. This is why you shouldn't let penny-pinchers be in charge of cost estimates (or anything, for that matter). If they weren't willing to commit sufficient funds to the project, they shouldn't have done it at all.
I concur completely. The rule in aerospace projects, whether civilian or military, is lowball up-front estimates (helps the project get funded) inevitably followed by cost and schedule overruns. Check the F35 as one example. C&S inflation comes from a variety of sources, but the initial lowballing is a major contributor. Good work costs real money. (And yeah, I know real money doesn't guarantee good work.)
Re:Budget problems (Score:4, Informative)
Without Shuttle, Hubble as it was launched would be known as an expensive boondoggle and no longer be operational.
Without the shuttle we could have launched a new Hubble every few years, because that would have cost less than the maintenance missions.
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Did you read what he wrote? We could build and launch another Hubble from scratch, for less than the cost of one or two Shuttle launches alone.
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The same was true of the Constellation project. It was only behind schedule and over budget because the pointy-heads didn't listen to the engineers when setting up the project. From what I understand from some people involved in the planning meetings, it was basically on the schedule they said they needed and possibly even a little under the budget at that point that they said the needed.
Re:Budget problems (Score:4, Interesting)
Boy, been there, done that, burned the t-shirt. As a VP R&D in a startup a long time ago (early 1990s) I once spent two months with my software manager doing a complete system plan for a complete rewrite, rearchitecture and platform change (including converting from several languages to C), down to the function level, with good estimates of the time it would take to do every piece of it. This was a product with several hundred thousand lines of code in FORTRAN, Pascal, Assembler of various sorts, maybe some C, and microcode for a custom image processor. It came down to six engineers and about two years. We got approval for that project plan at the board meeting.
Then one of the engineers mentioned to the head of sales that he thought we would 'have an image on the screen' (meaning we would have figured out how to write a toy/test program to paint a window) in about two months.
Within a few days, the sales guy had promised delivery of two systems in ... you guessed it ... two months, to GE. Oh, and by the way - the company didn't have the cash flow to hire more engineers, so we only had two guys available to the project. As it happened, I quit a week or so later for other reasons. According to what I was told later, by conspiring with the users at GE who agreed to receive the boxes, they managed to ship two completely non-functioning systems to GE, and spent the next two years 'fixing' it while the folks at GE got more and more pissed. I think GE finally sued them. After numerous equally dicey escapades, the company got forced into bankruptcy.
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This is why you shouldn't let penny-pinchers be in charge of cost estimates (or anything, for that matter). If they weren't willing to commit sufficient funds to the project, they shouldn't have done it at all.
It is just as likely that the scientists and engineers involved did not provide accurate cost estimates to the "penny-pinchers" so that the project would get approved. Management can only act on the information they are given. I can see the conversation now:
Management: How much do you think it will cost?
Engineers: $4B
Management: I am not sure we could get that approved. Are there ways to trim things and decrease the costs? How about you try and decrease the costs.
Later;
Management: New budget complete? How m
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To steal a line from "From the Earth to the Moon". Budgets and schedules are based on what has been done before. That works great for paving a highway or building a building. Not as good when you are building a new aircraft or satellite. It is almost entirely useless when building something that has never been tried before like a 6.5 m diameter 7 segment folding infrared space telescope.
Re:Budget problems (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Budget problems (Score:5, Informative)
Although a loss for science, this would seem to be more accurately blamed on poor management and budgeting. Perhaps a smaller, better managed project will rise from the ashes.
This isn't exactly a surprise. The only way NASA can get funding is to promise the moon (usually figuratively, though occasionally literally) on an implausible shoestring budget, and then hope that the real costs later on don't cause management to scupper an already-in-progress high-profile project. This is a pretty common strategy in government funded technology and research projects, and it's something that's as old as NASA.
The Mercury program came in at roughly double its original estimated price.
The Air Force anticipated in 1958 that a lunar program would cost $1.5 billion and be complete by the end of 1965. In 1961, NASA's experts said they could do the job by 1967, at a cost of $7 billion. By the time Neil Armstrong took his one small step, it was 1969, and the program had rung up a price tag of about $25 billion (in 1960s dollars).
Looking at the last space telescope project, the Hubble was originally budgeted at $400 million. It cost $2.5 billion by launch time, and total program costs to date run to between $4.5 and $6 billion.
This problem isn't unique to NASA. Technology development programs in the military offer some particularly good examples. Lockheed completed their contract for the F-22 Raptor more than two years and ten billion dollars behind schedule--but they still received more than $800 million in performance awards for their work.
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Lets compare that to the F-22 "Raptor".... supposed to cost about $80 million per plane, the "fly away cost" per plane on last delivery was about $165 million. Years late for initial delivery, the total program cost was over $65 billion......
Oh, and as of this writing, ALL OF THEM ARE GROUNDED due to problems with their oxygen generators..... not a single plane is flying right now.
That is a load of crap, foisted on the American taxpayer by the defense-industrial complex.
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This is crazy thinking. If the project has merit, fund it.
The reason projects are over budget is that the people making the decisions always go for cheap. Not good or useful or necessary, but cheap. So if you believe in your project, you will lie about it. Because otherwise, it will never get a chance, never mind its actual merits.
To change this, you need to punish not the guys making the proposition, but the morons who accept clearly impossible projects. The guilty party here is not NASA: they are playing
Can we start a kickstarter? (Score:3)
Seriously, I wonder how much money we can get donated to keep this going. in retrospect, I'd gladly have paid what i could for the Hubble, and the repair/upgrade missions, out of my own pocket.
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Well, they're currently $5 billion over budget and 10 years behind schedule. Still think all they need is a bit more money? :)
It's a good idea, but it's clearly being mismanaged.
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Only a very small percentage of your taxes goes to NASA. Suppose I want to fund NASA without funding the 3 wars at the same time, I would have to jump through a lot of hoops. There is currently no legal way of donating to NASA besides signing up for a tour and then giving the security guard a suitcase of cash claiming that you found it unattended.
Nearly $3 million dollars was donated to the US treasury [treasurydirect.gov] last year, out of which NASA received roughly $15,000. I suspect
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Re:Can we start a kickstarter? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hear that if you vote for Obama in 2008, we will no longer have to deal with Bush's wars. Try it, maybe it'll work. He is promising change, after all.
Absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Absurd (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think the Repubs are going to do any of that, you're dreaming. They're busy pandering.
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If you think the Repubs are going to do any of that, you're dreaming. They're busy pandering.
If you think Dems are going to let anyone so much as touch Medicare or Social Security, you are also dreaming.
Money spent today buys votes whether it's a tax cut or an entitlement payment.
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Oh noes...utopia...how terrible.
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it is the And Raising taxes part that they always seem to forget. Or if they do do it all, they seem to forget the next step entirely. the paying down debt before cutting taxes back.
Re:Absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't "forget" to raise taxes. The Republicans have instituted a very well-crafted and carefully executed plan for the past decade or so. They pass a massive tax cut to wipe out the surplus. They then drive us deep into debt with wars and the unfunded Medicare expansion. Next, they use that debt as an excuse to eliminate Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. Then they take the savings, and insist the way to grow the economy is with more tax cuts. See where this is going?
The end result is a society with no safety net to support the ~250 million serfs, who must therefore work for whatever wages their lords are willing to pay, and die in the streets when they are no longer of use. Meanwhile, those lords pay no taxes. The government, with no revenue, cannot regulate the lords to keep them from further abusing their serfs. We're on a fast track to return to the Gilded Age. This is not an accident.
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See, if the rate is 100%, you will get no taxes. At 0%, you get no taxes. Thus, there must be some optimal amounts of taxes which maximises revenue.
Now clearly, the US is closer to the 0 bound, so increases taxes increases revenue: proof comes from Bush, lowering taxes lowered revenue. During a bubble. Thus, the right course of action is to increase taxes.
Why would you want to maximise revenue? Because it is a proxy for economic output: good tax structure leads to healthy economy.
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Last time I checked taxes were raised in the 90s and the economy boomed and then taxes were cut under Bush and the economy went into the great depression 2.
Hint: correlation is not causation.
If you really think that raising taxes improves the economy, you should just increase tax rates to 100% because then the economy would really be booming.
Partially correct. (Score:2)
It is true that within budget cutting they are being stupid (political) about it and probably more interesting in the number of programs they can claim they killed because that makes a nice talking point.
The REALITY is that all this spending could continue at this level if we funded it. We have less economy to produce the revenue and that is a HUGE reason for the recent shortfalls -- its not merely wasteful spending (which is a big factor) but the other HUGE issue is going largely ignored. The banksters cau
Where has the wonder gone? (Score:2, Insightful)
In the future, when people look back at our age, they will see things as Hubble, and (hopefully) the James Webb telescope as some of the true wonders of our time. INNA (I am not American), but where has the USA's sense of wonder gone?. Truely, the USA needs to invest in things like this great telescope. They can afford not to build another (half a?) stealth fighter, surely.
Re:Where has the wonder gone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Our sense of wonder was spent in Iraq, Afghanistan, Goldman-Sachs, and AIG.
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Mixed Feelings (Score:5, Informative)
Why the budget overruns? (Score:3)
Look, I really REALLY love NASA's unmanned science programs and would think it would be a crying shame if they cut the JWST at this point but what is wrong with the budgeting process if they get it off by a factor of four? (so I've heard). Should they first launch a small prototype test mission to evaluate the technologies or something? Or were they putting the wrong people in charge of budgeting? Are they scientists who may be brilliant in their fields but not skilled at project forecasting or bureaucra
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It should also be noted that funding agencies essentially insist that cost estimates be understated so they can more easily be sold to the purse holders. This is a great detriment to science in the long run but the situation as it stands. Finally expecting a space t
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Hah (Score:5, Insightful)
What do we need with a space telescope or space exploration program anyway? Our children are being groomed to be the poorly fed, poorly housed, poorly educated drones of the likes of of the Koch Brothers--or worse, cannon fodder in the next forever war undertaken to line the pockets of the defense contractors. Other countries will gladly assume the exploration of frontiers and the advancement of knowledge while our kids get to learn about creation science.
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How is this modded insightful? The cost of the entire telescope project, even with the massive cost overruns and across eight years, couldn't pay for even a significant fraction of California's education budget for one year.
It's amazing how ignorant drivel (we have no food? Really?) gets modded up by taking a jab at the Koch brothers, as if they were the Illuminati or something, sitting on the board of every school district around the country.
If you don't think $10,000 per student is enough money, you're de
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How is this modded insightful?.
Because there's no (+1 True Statement)
SCSC (Score:2)
Podcast about Infrared Astronomy & JWST (Score:3, Informative)
This This Astronomy Cast [astronomycast.com] podcast episode does a great job of explaining why infrared astronomy is important, and the role that the JWST will (would have?) played in discovery.
Shaking my head... (Score:3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Gerald_R._Ford_(CVN-78) [wikipedia.org]
Military Industrial Complex FTW!
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Gerald R. Ford is slated to replace the current USS Enterprise, ending her then 50-plus years of active service
Is it just me or are there some eerie symbolic coincidences with that sentence?
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Then just change the name (Score:2)
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lol (Score:2)
Hey congress... (Score:3)
How about cutting things from the budget that will ACTUALLY HELP SOLVE THE PROBLEM.
Cutting the space telescope (with its tiny budget) wont make any difference.
If you want to fix the US economy and the US debt problem, cut where it will help. Cut the billions and billions of dollars spent on subsidies to the airlines, the big agribusiness companies, the coal industry, the oil industry, the media companies, the defence industry etc.
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If I was an American, I would be out there writing letters to my Representatives (and getting as many people as I could to do the same) DEMANDING that they do something meaningful about the national debt and threatening to vote for the other guy if they dont do it.
If enough people started asking for something to be done to solve the problem, Congress would have to listen (especially with an election in the near future)
Re:One thing I've noticed about large organization (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean the long-timers that developed Hubble, the Shuttle program, ISS, and (mostly) successful Mars rovers?
If anything, NASA gets worse with each new generation. As I saw on reddit once, "If you watch NASA backwards, it's about a space agency that has no spaceflight capability, then does low-orbit flights, then lands on moon"
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People fixate on the human space program too much. NASA has had an almost constant string of fantastic science missions since Apollo.
No one wants to pay to put people into LEO, hell people were bored of the Moon landings after a couple of missions.
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What NASA is missing is a goal and the political will to stock with it for more than one election cycle.
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I wish I had mod points.
See Mammon a Jesus coined term for this problem. I only invoke him out of an interest in truly sad irony.
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Right. When people say "money is the root of all evil" they tend to leave out the first few words of the phrase. Originally, it was "the love of money is the root of all evil". Without those first three words, it really doesn't make much sense.
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Defense? That's one of the very few legitimate functions of government.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Unfortunately very little of the $700 billion military budget last year went towards defending this country from foreign enemies.
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Nah. Just return the tax rates to what they werewhen the so-called "Reagan Boom" started. Budget crisis averted without raising taxes beyond what everyone agrees is consistent withdrawal robust economic growth. Bill Gates chips in his share without having to give up the benefactor to humanity gig. Everyone chips in some and the rising tides lift the yachts along with the dinghies.