How the U.S. Sequester Will Hurt Science and Tech 522
Later today, the U.S. government will enter the sequestration process, a series of across-the-board budget cuts put into place automatically because U.S. politicians are bad at agreeing on things. "At that moment, somewhere in the bowels of the Treasury Department, officials will take offline the computers that process payments for school construction and clean energy bonds to reprogram them for reduced rates. Payments will be delayed while they are made manually for the next six weeks." The cuts will directly affect science- and tech-related spending throughout the country. Tom Levenson writes, '[s]equester cuts will strike bluntly across the scientific community. The illustrious can move a bit of money around, but even in large labs, a predictable result will be a reduction in the number of graduate student and post – doc slots available — and as those junior and early-stage researchers do a whole lot of the at-the-bench level research, such cuts will have an immediate effect on research productivity. The longer term risk is obvious too: fewer students and post-docs mean on an ongoing drop from baseline in the amount of work to be done year over year.' The former director of the National Institute of Health says it will set back medical science for a generation. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has laid out how the cuts will affect the U.S. space program. He said, "The Congress wasn’t able to do what they were supposed to do, so we’re going to suffer." The sequester will also prevent billions of dollars from flowing into the tech industry. This comes at a time when there's a pressing need in the tech sector for professionals versed in the use of Linux, and salaries for those workers are on the rise.
And still... (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Colin Macilwain. Science should be ready to jump off ‘the cliff’ [nature.com]. Nature 491, 639 (29 November 2012) doi:10.1038/491639a
These aren't real scientists asking that government money stick around, but lobbyists for companies that feed upon science funding. Scientists love more government money of course, but many scientists understand that far must be cut, especially in military spending.
Sequestration merely provides an opportunity to re-evaluate what is important. Our question should be : Do we decide "important" by consulting lobbyists or by looking at the work that gets done.
Re:And Yet... (Score:3, Informative)
This Jan saw the government increase spending over $300 billion dollars alone. Didn't see jobs dramatically increase. Yet, Maxine Waters scare-mongers that we'll lose 170 thousand (she stupidly said MILLION, but give her the benefit of the doubt) by cutting ~$80B.
What I want to know is why we didn't see jobs increase by 600k plus since January?
Re:A bunch of FUD .... seriously ..... (Score:5, Informative)
$13 TRILLION dollars a year in deficit spending
Not even remotely close to accurate. It spends approximately $3.8 trillion in total this year, and of that about $900 billion was originally going to be borrowed.
It's great to try to ensure all Americans have healthcare options available to them. But nobody has really tried, yet, to do anything about the massive (and constantly rising) COSTS of healthcare, which SOMEBODY gets the bill for, whether it's an uninsured individual or the insurance company covering that individual by govt. mandate.
Actually, RomneyObamaCare (I call it that because Obama basically took Mitt Romney's plan in Massachusetts and made it national) has various attempts to do just that, to curb the growth in medical costs, most notably in reducing spending on unnecessary procedures. It's unclear if they'll work, but we haven't even had a chance to find out yet.
The approach that was dismissed as unrealistically liberal, Medicare for All, did in fact mean that everyone would have had the benefit of Medicare's tough negotiating. It was a non-starter because the insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and hospitals all opposed that.
Show me the cuts (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the sequester doesn't cut federal spending at all, or rather it cuts it only in the Washington sense of any reduction from projected baseline increases is a cut. In reality, even if the sequester goes through, the federal government will spend more every single year.
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/fairy-tale-spending-cuts [cato.org]
Spending will still go up, just not as much.
Re:House Republicans (Score:5, Informative)
You mean the House Republicans who passed not one but two bills as alternatives to replace sequestration
Republicans passed those bills in the 112th Congressional session.
Which means those bills are dead right now, since we're in the 113th session.
They'd need to be resubmitted and brought back for a vote if Republicans were serious about putting them into play.
*Here's a summary of the Democratic proposal from Feb 14th [house.gov] which the Republican House leadership has refused to allow a vote on.
And the full text of the bill HR 699: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr699/text [govtrack.us]
The real problem is that Republicans think that cutting spending is the only way to fix the budget,
despite the fact that taxes are at historic lows and austerity is actually a really shitty idea (see: europe).
*skip down to the last section if you don't want to read a bunch of political posturing
Re:Total BS (Score:3, Informative)
Your payroll tax increased 2% on Jan 1, if you work. That is a 2% paycut to you, period.
This simply rolls back the temporary 2% payroll tax decrease from 2 years ago.
Re:House Republicans (Score:2, Informative)
Holy fuck that's some spin.
The Republican bills were complete pie-in-the-sky conservative fantasy that would NEVER have passed, and would have been disastrous if they did. The blame is on their shoulders for not putting forward anything that would have had a chance of making it. Those pieces of legislation were nothing more than symbolic gestures to pander to their base.
And you're pretty stupid for buying their BS.
Re:House Republicans (Score:5, Informative)
But I do have to note that the Republican-controlled House has been passing budgets while the Dem-controlled Senate has not, which is why we've been running on continuing resolutions (and thus running up $1T per year in new debt).
Those "budgets" gutted various provisions of the ACA, which Republicans are ideologically opposed to. That, and the for-profit medical industry has their collective dicks in various congressional asses.
Basically, those budgets aren't really in good faith, cutting services (you know, services for the citizens that the taxes are ultimately drawn from) instead of drawing more revenue from places like the wealthy and wall-street (the biggest fraud perpetrators in the history of the world).
I have to note that the President has threatened to veto all of the ways the Republicans have proposed to avoid the sequester
Yes, because they are all total BS. I could also counter-note your note and observe the Republicans have failed to budge from their stance against taxing the wealthy. We're at loggerheads and while both sides are responsible, raising taxes on the wealthy was a specific platform of Obama's re-election and thus I would argue the Republicans are thwarting the will of the electorate in this matter.
Re:Total BS (Score:4, Informative)
According to the CBO, the cuts will have no signifigant effect on the economy. But the Rise is Social security taxes deffinately will. They also say that:
"We project that debt held by the public will reach 76 percent of GDP this year, the largest percentage since 1950. And, under current laws, we project that debt in 2023 will be 77 percent of GDP—far higher than the 39 percent average seen over the past 40 years—and will be on an upward path.
First, high debt means that the crowding out of capital investment will be greater, that lawmakers will have less flexibility to use tax and spending policies to respond to unexpected challenges (like a recession or war), and that there will be a heightened risk of a fiscal crisis in which the government would be unable to borrow at affordable interest rates. "
http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43943 [cbo.gov]
etc... etc...
We HAVE to cut spending. Period. If the only way to do it is to let this sequestration process proceed, then fine.
Re:House Republicans (Score:4, Informative)
Those passed budgets were a sham, gutting services and preserving tax rates on the wealthy.
It all comes down to where the axe should fall, and given Obama was re-elected campaigning to raise taxes on the wealthy and preserve services for the middle and lower classes, the majority of the blame goes to the Republicans for ignoring what the MAJORITY of voters want to do.
Re:BULLSHIT (Score:5, Informative)
It isn't a 5% budget cut. 85 billion is more like 9%.
Add in the fact that some 66% of the budget is untouched SS, Medicare and debt payments it is in fact about a 25% cut on the rest of the budget.
That's a pretty decent whack.
Re:And Yet... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Funding isn't automatic now (Score:3, Informative)
This is one of those "Lying with facts" things that needs more context to correctly understand.
The House of Representatives is currently controlled by a Republican majority, 232 (R) vs 200 (D). A simple majority is all that is required to pass any Bill in the House of Representatives, therefore, so long as the Republican caucus can keep its members in line, they can pass anything, no matter how much Democrats hate it, with no thought at all about compromise.
The Senate, on the other hand, has a Democrat majority of 53 Democrats, plus 2 independents that caucus with the Democrats. That's 55 Democrati-caucussed Senators. That's a "Democratic-controlled Senate", true. However.... Functionally, the Senate can't pass much of anything, especially a budget bill, without a 60-vote majority. Therefore, they require at least 5 Republican Senators to agree to a mutually-acceptable Bill. Quoting myself above... "so long as the Republican caucus can keep its members in line"...
For the Democratic-controlled Senate to pass a budget bill, the Republicans and Democrats have to find an acceptable compromise.
For the Republican-controlled House to pass a budget bill, the Republicans don't have to care about an acceptable compromise at all.
The House passes a Budget Bill. The Senate doesn't. Pretending those are equivalent situations is lying with facts.
The larger issue is that neither side seems willing to compromise much at all, so finding an acceptable compromise is much harder that you'd normally think it would be.
Re:Funding isn't automatic now (Score:3, Informative)
Load of crap? What planet do you live on?
The republicans have been filibustering everything. And I don't mean a little more. An unprecedented, never before seen high by orders of magnitude more seen in modern history. They've taken what was a gentleman's agreement not to grind congress to a halt and have done exactly that.
This narrative that the Dems are being uncooperative is the sort mind-bending detachment from reality that proves that Republicans really are the fucking retards that mindlessly repeat whatever they see on fox news.
The republicans have not put forward a budget that is passable. End of story.
Re:And Yet... (Score:3, Informative)
A couple of things:
1) Contrary to rumour, Clinton did not create a surplus (much less a trillion dollar surplus) in the budget. If you bother to check, National Debt went UP every single year he was President.
2) Trillion dollar deficits didn't happen until Obama got to be president.
Re:Funding isn't automatic now (Score:5, Informative)
A recent judicial nomination, by two Republican senators, had been blocked and sat for 263 days [whitehouse.gov], only to pass 93-0. While not technically a "filibuster", neither was the Hagel delay (wink, wink). We just also confirmed a judge after 300 days, and another guy's been waiting over 330.
When it comes to Senate filibusters, we are no longer playing with rational actors.
Wrong by 93% (Score:3, Informative)
Come on idiots, (not the poster, who probably just made a typo, but the mods who sent it up to +5) -- the TOTAL cumulative government debt is about $14 trillion. The deficit for this year will be in the neighborhood (probably under) of $1 trillion, still a large number but we need to keep the facts straight in these discussions.