Romney-Ryan Release Space Policy Paper 378
RocketAcademy writes "The Romney-Ryan campaign has released a white paper on space policy, which observers find to be long on criticisms of the Obama Administration but short on specific recommendations. The policy promises 'a robust role for commercial space,' but it's clearly a supporting role: 'NASA will set the goals and lead the way in human space exploration.' When it comes to space, both parties put government ahead of private enterprise. Some see a parallel with the policies which are driving space companies out of California. Newt Gingrich, one of the few politicians who thinks seriously about space, says the policy is a step in the right direction but not enough."
Re:Romney-Ryan no Insurance your doctor is ER and (Score:5, Insightful)
Bottom line is, if you can't afford insurance, you have no business getting free health care financed by the rest of us. Find a free clinic.
And who pays for this "free" clinic?
Same thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Short Version (Score:2, Insightful)
47% of space doesn't pay any taxes
Re:Romney-Ryan no Insurance your doctor is ER and (Score:5, Insightful)
Bottom line is, if you can't afford insurance, you have no business getting free health care financed by the rest of us. Find a free clinic.
And who pays for this "free" clinic?
Magic. Magic pays for everything. It's the new fiscal accounting model.
Re:Romney-Ryan no Insurance your doctor is ER and (Score:0, Insightful)
Ha ha! Take that eldery, homeless, children, and handicapped! Anonymous Coward has, in two of the most devastatingly effective sentences ever written, has demonstrated both his/her boundless understanding of economics and the nearly infinite well of compassion he/she holds for his/her fellow man! Your apparent lack of immediate value to our economy is your death sentence. Best you die now and decrease the surplus population!
Anywhoodlidoodle, don't worry sir(or ma'am), you need not fear paying for check-ups, immunizations, and whatnot. You can simply wait and pay tons more for what could have been easily preventable emergency care. Just like Rand would have wanted.
Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
1:Science and innovation important, some how having nasa means our workforce is some how more scientifically educated and skilled. Which makes no sense because I thought education did that, not Nasa.
2: Space is important some how to a bunch of industries, despite the only real importance being research and satellite launching.
3:Military in space good, need to secure space against space terrorists. More money to defense contractors. Could be hostile aliens?
4:Nasa and our space program is like fancy armor in WoW, it is the international penis we can wave in the face of non-space faring countries. People respect space penis. Also private space penis is good too.
Restate all the above and say that the country needs clear and concise leadership etc.
pretentious quote by me. Who quotes themselves in their own policies? I do. I'm that awesome
Huge diatribe on how Obama is bad and stuff. Also commercial space stuff is good
Re:The real question... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh wow, that's pretty stupid; but he was speaking from emotions. If your spouse was in peril, would you think about the technicalities first? He's done and said some really stupid things, but I have to give him a pass on this one.
You might feel the need to give him a pass, but I do not. He had time between the incident and when he gave that remark (at a $50k/plate dinner no less). Furthermore he is college educated and should realize the stupidity in that statement (actually there are layers of stupidity in it if you read it carefully).
His fratboy antics
You must be new here. On slashdot you are only allowed to call Obama (or BHO as is preferred) to be a frat boy or party animal. All republicans are serious, Obama is a party animal. Get the mantra straight before you talk politics here...
Re:Romney-Ryan no Insurance your doctor is ER and (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple, Ryan has this one covered...
You just have to rob a bank to steal the money to pay for your health care. If you get away, you can now afford it. And if you get caught, no worries, the government will now pay for all of your health care, food, and lodgings anyway.
Re:How About Tax Returns First? (Score:4, Insightful)
If he's going to be President of a country who's attitude on individual privacy can now be summed up as "if you didn't do anything wrong, what are you hiding?" then yes, I think it's very relevant.
Re:What NASA needs. (Score:5, Insightful)
yeah... because since the 60s, all NASA has done is launch probes to all of the planets, orbiters to a bunch of them, rovers on Mars, interstellar probes at the boundary of the solar system, ion drives, missions to asteroids... gee I sure wish we were still trying to put a couple of guys into low earth orbit.
Re:The Short Version (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you care to discuss this point using reason and logic, or it this just flamebait?
Honest question, it is worth discussing.
Intellectual honesty, or coward? Just asking,
I'd point out something about anonymous coward and finger pointing, but don't expect you have the grace to say, "Touché"
Sometimes it's just about having a little light hearted fun, after all this is a political thread. I don't expect anything in here to influence a vote, one way or the other.
Re:Romney-Ryan no Insurance your doctor is ER and (Score:5, Insightful)
Well yeah, they'll have insurance. These people aren't hopeless morons, and they love their children and what whats best for them. Indigent homeless are trickier, but you see a lot of working homeless families lining up around the block to get their non-emergent medical needs addressed. Under a
You forgot to call the President "hopey changey," or make a reference to the "democrat party." Minus two points.
Tort reform is a bit of a red herring. Orrin Hatch's Tort Reform proposals in '09 would have saved about $54 billion [washingtonpost.com], which isn't chump change, but it would only reduce total national health spending by 0.5%. So we could claim that money on the table, but the limitations in Hatch's proposal specifically were extremely low, to the extent that they reduced pain and suffering awards to a slap on the wrist and would probably cause incidents of malpractice to increase.
State-by-state solutions are doomed in the US because of regulatory arbitrage. Employers and tax units in states with expensive programs can simply move their paper addresses to states with lower tax liability. Insurance companies can shop around for states that offer them the most favorable regulation (the ones with the least customer protections), and employers can play states off each other to obtain favorable tax treatment. States simply can't design their own programs when the employers within it can simply evade the costs of the system by filing paperwork, while enjoying all the benefits of the system by dumping their employees into the state public program. A state-by-state healthcare system in the US would end up looking a lot like the consumer credit card system in the US, which is to say, we'd all have whatever rights the North Dakota and Delaware legislature had agreed to, because they were the highest bidder for the health insurance company's business.
"States' Rights" has been keeping 60's-style state capitalism alive for decades, by giving employers a huge stick with which they can extract free services from a state government, guised under the threat of "killing jobs." An employer simply threatens to move unless they can stay tax-free, dumping the costs of roads, schools, police, and health care on everyone else.
Re:Romney-Ryan no Insurance your doctor is ER and (Score:4, Insightful)
At least they are still alive, and not lying face down in a gutter. And of course those inadequate facilities are probably still costing taxpayers about 10x what providing basic insurance would...
Always amazing the stupid decisions people (politicians and voters) will make with emotion or spite over reason. Reminds me of the CA death penalty. 13 people have been executed since it was reinstated in 1978, at a cost of about $4B. And the process takes so long that over *80* death row inmates have died of other causes. So $200M a year has been wasted just to wait around for 90% of the inmates to die on their own, same as in life without parole.
Re:But he said space was stupid before.... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's correct. They skipped the "flip" part and just flopped.
Re:I hear that... (Score:5, Insightful)
If I'm running for the most powerful office in the world, and giving a prepared speech the day after an event like that happened then yes, I would fully expect to give a coherent and cogent response. It's not like they interviewed him on the runway, standing next to a still smoking plane while his wife was gasping for fresh air.
Re:I hear that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Romney-Ryan no Insurance your doctor is ER and (Score:5, Insightful)
Bottom line is, if you can't afford insurance, you have no business getting free health care financed by the rest of us. Find a free clinic.
And who pays for this "free" clinic?
WTF does this have to do with TFA about Romney and space? This is why I dont like reading /. anymore
Re:Romney-Ryan no Insurance your doctor is ER and (Score:5, Insightful)
Thread drift is a hallowed part of /. history. From the time I joined after lurking for a while, thread drift has become a major feature of this atmosphere. To ensure you like it, next time you get mod points, use the Offtopic mod.
Most geeks have at least a touch of ADD. The original topic, which talked about a Space Program by the opposition candidates, was made after one of them wondered, in all seriousness, why you couldn't open windows on airliners. Any semblance of subsequent sanity is purely accidental.
Re:The Short Version (Score:2, Insightful)
I have had a drink and Retract everything I said above.
I realized, as I stared into my empty Bud Light, that I need to get a life, get out of the house, and talk to real people.
Re:Romney just showed he is still a hypocrite (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite aside from how it reflects on his opinions about colonizing space, that quote says some pretty bad things about Romney's management style if he's in earnest. Most of us have seen that sort of autocrat manager that can't even tolerate discussion of anything outside the box. They're pretty much universally idiots.
Re:What NASA needs. (Score:5, Insightful)
What NASA needs is to be scrapped and started over.
I think you could say the same thing about the whole of the U.S. federal government. It was less than a hundred years ago (in the beginning of the 20th Century) that the Post Office Department was the largest federal agency.... not because the post office was necessarily all that huge but because the rest of the federal government was practically non-existent. That even including the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, which combined was still smaller than the Post Office.
America wasn't exactly a wimpy nation a hundred years ago either and had 48 states plus a dozen territories, including the Philippines and Cuba. That the whole "empire" could be managed with under a couple hundred thousand bureaucrats speaks volumes about what the federal government could be doing today.
Then again I blame Herbert Hoover for the mess that the federal government became, and FDR only made it worse.
Re:Romney-Ryan no Insurance your doctor is ER and (Score:3, Insightful)
Mitt's plan is to distract us while he robs the bank. He's a crook.
Article's editorializing isn't fair, but mine is. (Score:5, Insightful)
The article's editorializing isn't really fair. No, Romney doesn't have a plan, but the goal of the article isn't to propose a space policy, but to bash Obama's. And it's true that space exploration has taken a hit during the Obama administration, but all the key events took place before his administration.
Bush, 2004: "Screw that space shuttle, boys, we're going back to the moon!"
NASA, 2004: "Cool! Just so you know, that's kind of expensive."
Bush, 2006: "Is a buck fifty enough?"
NASA, 2006: "No. And BTW, we're cancelling the shuttles like you asked."
Obama, 2009: "Umm, guys? Let's be honest here, going to the moon on a buck fifty isn't going to happen. We need a new plan for what to do with your buck fifty."
Congress, 2009: "What buck fifty?"
Obama, 2011: "Oh for fuck's sake."
I've talked to lots of NASA employees over the year. Lots of them are really pissed off at Washington politics. But the names that inspire curses are George Bush and Congress. Obama is rarely mentioned.
NASA's woes are a classic case of the Republican game plan:
1) When in power, make grand plans without sweating the details or the cost.
2) When out of power, block all solutions to the problems that arise from your grand plans.
3) When seeking power, blame the opposition for failing to solve the problems you caused.
Re:Romney-Ryan no Insurance your doctor is ER and (Score:2, Insightful)
No, you are. And me, and that guy over there, and a whole shitload of people--every single American, plus millions of other people worldwide. We, collectively through the markets, decide the value of the dollar. We've collectively decided that the value of the dollar is pretty damn good and that it's long-term prognosis is absofuckinglutely marvelous. Sound as a pound is so 1800's. Big Daddy Dollar's large and in charge, the reserve currency of the motherfucking planet. Fucking hell people are lining up for the opportunity to buy our debt, and are willing to pay for the privilege. That's right, a 20 year T-bill doesn't even beat inflation. The US government can spend money, for fucking free, for 20 years! God damn all hail the power of the markets, baby!
Re:Romney-Ryan no Insurance your doctor is ER and (Score:5, Insightful)
The banking side of TARP is going to turn a profit.
Universal health care will decrease the cost of health care to the entire population, while increasing overall health. Arguing against it is short sighted and stupid.
Re:What NASA needs. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. $2.2 billion after you cut out the part Germany paid for. That's to send a giant robotic laboratory 350 million miles and land it on another planet.
We spend that much on one submarine. We have 71 of those. Last figure I saw for the f-22 program alone was $65 billion. That's just one plane we have zero use for and has spent a fair percentage of its operation life grounded. And still we spend between 1 and $1.4 trillion, per year, on defense related stuff.
That's (conservatively) more than one Curiosity rover launching, and one landing on another planet, every single day, all year long. Oh, and cash left over to launch a new space telescope maybe every other month? Plus the manpower to run it all. Now do that every year. Rough math, I admit.
So yes, $2.2 billion is roughly "$14 and a pack of chewing gum", with regard to the US Budget.