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.
Total BS (Score:3, Insightful)
Your payroll tax increased 2% on Jan 1, if you work. That is a 2% paycut to you, period.
The sequestor is effectively a 1% reduction in spending this year for the Federal government.
Translation: You need to do with less and not complain, if you force the government to reduce spending by a tiny amount doom will come for you.
And Yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait! You don't think.... No! Surely politicians wouldn't play games with government services for political gain? Say it isn't so!
A generation? (Score:5, Insightful)
A less than 3% cut in funding is going to set medical science back a generation? By that logic, if we were to increase funding by 3% (as we have more than done) we should have seen a generation's worth of progress. So where are my medical tricorders?
Methinks somebody is fearmongering. I'll be the first to say cutting research funding is a dumb idea, but is it too much to ask that the former head of the NIH assess the situation based on the facts and not Chicken Little "the sky is falling" theater?
Re:House Republicans (Score:2, Insightful)
Wrong, its the failure of leadership to get something done and the leadership is the President. If he cannot build a culture where people can agree to disagree but come out with a win-win then its his fault 100%.
Good old American bait and switch (Score:5, Insightful)
It was "the government shutdown" a few years ago. And all sorts of people got on their soap box and blamed everyone else for it. Now it's called something else, the "sequester". And again let's point fingers and blame. However none of that has to do with the real problem - the US is spending more money than it takes in, spending more money than it can print, even, and has been doing this for YEARS. They scream at the federal banks to keep interest rates near zero to "stimulate the economy" meaning that everyone must bear the cost of the devaluation including those smart enough to put their money to work, and then they wonder why all the wealth is leaving the US dollar.
The US will be buried under its Keynesian nightmare. I just hope it doesn't take the whole world with it.
Soulskill is an idiot. (Score:0, Insightful)
> because U.S. politicians are bad at agreeing on things.
If you think the budget problems (and resulting cuts) are only due to disagreement, you're an idiot.
Re:House Republicans (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:House Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but if a 2% cut to expenditure is crippling, then the system deserves to fail.
Know what a government with 2% less money looks like? Take a look at the budget from 2010. That's what it looks like.
I know, using the 2010 budget for 2013. Complete madness!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#Total_outlays_in_recent_budget_submissions [wikipedia.org]
If you are really brave, take a look at the budget from 2001 (Clinton). 1.9 trillion.
Re:House Republicans (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, the other part of your post that I have to challenge is the idea that cutting the amount that government spending increases will somehow "cripple" the government. Not only are the cuts in this sequestration not significant, they are merely reductions in how much federal spending will increase not reductions in actual amounts spent.
Re:House Republicans (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't trust the Republicans in government further than I can comfortably spit a rat, but take off your partisan blinders for a moment and look around. The world is both weirder and more wonderful than your blinkered view will allow in.
Re:Total BS (Score:5, Insightful)
And it's not even a real cut. It's merely a reduction to the increase.
Baseline Budgeting ensures that ALL budgets increase by a certain percentage every year automatically. This is the elephant in the room when it comes to discussing the budget. The dollar value of the increases will get bigger and bigger as each subsequent increase is a percentage of large budget.
So when you hear people whining about a 2% cut, the are actually whining that they won't get the usual X% increase.
Baseline Budgeting needs to be killed...with fire if possible.
Re:House Republicans (Score:2, Insightful)
Wait - So the whitehouse bluffed and the Republicans called them on it, and you blame the Republicans?
IANAR, but just no. Both sides may take the blame for failing to come up with real cuts, but the full burden of responsibility for the sequester rests solidly on Barry's broad shoulders.
Re:Total BS (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, that's easy. Because first he lowered it at the start of 2011, to rob Social Security of its only source of funding and buy votes in the 2012 election, and then he let the cut lapse.
The "sequester cuts" are so shallow that all they do is decrease the amount by which spending is increasing this year. This year's spending is still higher than last year's, even after the "cuts."
Obama's biggest fear is that we'll see that everything is just fine without that 1%, and then maybe we'll start demanding more decreases.
Re:House Republicans (Score:1, Insightful)
House Republicans passed two bills to address this last year and the Senate didn't even bother to look at them.
Obama has threatened to veto a couple or proposed solutions.
So, who get's' the majority of the blame?
Re:Total BS (Score:2, Insightful)
Which is why he has to make the cut hurt. Instead of minimizing waste (reducing travel budgets, etc.) he's going to cut positions with that 1%
Re:Total BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Key point there, if you work. Guess how those mysteriously unaffected by the payroll tax increase tend to vote?
Follow the money.
/ Not a Republican.
Re:Total BS (Score:5, Insightful)
GOOD!! If the program needs to maintain or increase then our representatives need to actively decide to increase funding. Funding should NOT be automatic.
Re:And Yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
"I think you're missing the fact that the sequester isn't x% off the total budget. It's x% off of almost every item in the budget.
How long is your landlord going to accept 95% of your rent bill?
How long are your pets going to eat 95% of their regular diet?
How long are you going to spend 95% of the maintanence required for your car?"
Wrong questions to ask. The correct questions to ask are:
Since you spend more than you make:
How long can you pay your rent using your credit cards?
How long can you buy pet food before your credit runs out?
How long can you maintain your before your credit runs out?
An even BETTER question to ask is:
"Why the hell are you spending so much more than you make????"
Re:Total BS (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice revisionist history there. The temporary payroll tax reduction act was allowed to expire by the dysfunctional house of representatives. They used it as a bargaining chip in their attempt to renew the temporary tax relief package that directly benefits the top 1% of income earners. Of course hypocrisy surfaced after the "fiscal conservatives" used the need to reduce the budget deficit as an excuse for letting this tax reduction expire even though these same individuals are still actively pushing to make their own temporary tax relief act permanent.
I single out one lobbyist in particular - Grover Norquist. True to form, he actually argued that the expiration of the payroll relief bill was NOT a tax increase, whereas the expiration of the Bush tax cut for the wealthy is undeniably a tax increase.
It takes some balls to place blame on solely Obama for increasing the payroll tax despite the fact that there are overwhelming amount of written and recorded documentation that shows it was the opposition at fault.
Re:Total BS (Score:4, Insightful)
Obama got his tax increase....we all saw it in our paychecks in January. Why can't they start cutting...but in an INTELLIGENT manner?
Because they want to make spending cuts as painful as possible so that they're the stalwart heroes fending them off. It's the Munchausen Sydrome by Proxy school of political thought.
Re:Total BS (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Total BS (Score:5, Insightful)
rebuttal: the tax cut would have expired regardless of whether he signed that bill.
Re:House Republicans (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:House Republicans (Score:4, Insightful)
the Republicans have failed to budge from their stance against taxing the wealthy.
I thought they already gave Obama the tax increase he wanted at the beginning of the year. Obama was claiming that if they gave him a tax increase during the "fiscal cliff" negotiations than the sequester negotiations would be all about budget cuts.
Misinformation on baseline budgeting (Score:5, Insightful)
It is, in fact, a real cut to the currently-appropriated spending and the current spending rate. While it is often the case that reductions in projected increases are sold as "cuts" in government budgets, this is not one of the cases.
The sequester has nothing to do with baseline budgeting, it has to do with cuts to funds that are already appropriated for the current period.
Also, nothing in the federal budget happens automatically. If an appropriation isn't passed for each year, there are no funds, period, full stop. Baseline budgeting has to do with how budget proposals are drafted and presented, it doesn't mean that if no legislative action is taken an appropriation automatically remains in effect indefinitely.
Re:Total BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the sequester mechanism, when it was passed by Congress and signed by the President as part of a short-term funding agreement was designed by both sides to be painful because both sides wanted it that way so that it would be a disincentive to the other side to refuse to compromise on an actual budget agreement that would deal with specifics of addressing budget priorities going forward.
In a sense, it was a version of mutually-assured destruction that went into effect if bilateral action wasn't taken to avert it.
The problem with this is MAD may work when you have to take an active step to trigger it, it doesn't work as well when you have to have to jointly avoid it, because its easy to convince yourself that the other side will back down if you wait a little longer, so you don't have to compromise.
Re:BULLSHIT (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Total BS (Score:2, Insightful)
So when a sale ends, that's a price increase?
Re:Total BS (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not 1% less. They are actually just not increasing as much as they'd like to. It is not a cut in spending. Damn I miss Bill Clinton. At least he was just fucking interns instead of the entire country.
unAffordable Care Act (Score:1, Insightful)
The Repubs ideologically oppose the ACA because it is ideological in its conception, and practically unaffordable. Dems were hiding the real costs by doing things like not counting the Doc fix, and the bill was full of new measures that would add real costs to employers, like the extra billion per year supermarkets would have to pay for new food labeling requirements (I know, Nancy told us we didn't need to read it, so I don't blame anyone for not knowing this was in there). And what about the new taxes on medical device manufacturers? That impacts everyone!
But you give yourself away with the phrase "for-profit medical industry". Don't like profits, huh? Neither does anyone in the administration. The people who wrote and pushed this law don't like this "for-profit medical industry" or any profitable industry, for that matter, and would like to turn the whole thing eventually into a government enterprise. Like good Marxists, they want to blame the increases in costs that the consumers are currently seeing and will continue to see on the "greed" of industry, while they re-distribute wealth and buy the votes of the dependent masses. Ultimately, the private insurance industry cannot compete with a government that can borrow infinitely and would collapse. Hello, single payer system.
It's not an interpretation; it's in their own words. They give speeches plainly stating that the ultimate goal is a single payer system. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=926bPZiQhgY [youtube.com]. Keep browsing; you'll find all their speeches. They're not exactly shy behind closed doors. Here; have some more. Donald Berwick, one of the architects of this law stated in a speech that "Excellent healthcare is, by definition, redistributional." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIK7duK9ACE [youtube.com].
By the way, to your last point, did you see the election results? It wasn't anywhere near a landslide and it shows that nearly half the country is against raising taxes. Maybe the same half that is not in the "protected class" and actually has to pay them?
Ultimately ACA is a spike in the heart of the economy and will only drive long term liabilities sky high. It was never meant to be paid for, because nothing is these days. That's why these "cuts", as trivial as they are, are a necessary first step.
Re:Total BS (Score:2, Insightful)
you know...we really need to just stop...sweep EVERYONE out of Washington, no one in office can come back to it, and start over. Maybe then we'd have a chance going forward for a bit without all the crap that is currently entrenched in DC.
Or, sweep everyone out of office and don't replace them. Seriously, what really, truly needs to be done that can't possibly be done at the state level? I mean, even for those people who want government to do a lot, why does it have to happen centrally?
Just start over with a whole new crowd with no one having seniority, no power clicks...etc. It is too bad that there was no periodic "clean the house" type provision in the Constitution where every few decades...whoosh, everyone there is out and must be replaced.
That's like clearing all the weeds out of your yard and then planting more so that you just have to do it again next year. The solution isn't to replace those holding political power, the solution is for there to be less political power in the first place.
Re:Total BS (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition, both sides can try to spin the situation as "We tried our best to avoid this but THE_OTHER_POLITICAL_PARTY wouldn't seriously negotiate with us. It's all the fault of THE_OTHER_POLITICAL_PARTY."
Re:Funding isn't automatic now (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Total BS (Score:4, Insightful)
He isn't saying it's okay for Obama to do stupid things, he's saying Obama didn't do the stupid things he's being accused of doing. Obama passed a temporary tax cut. That tax cut expired. Failing to permanently extend a temporary tax cut is not the same thing as raising taxes. That's the argument. And fuck the guy who tried to smear Obama with that brush.
GP is casting blame at the people he thinks truly deserve to be blamed, ie Grover Norquist.
And the blame should fall squarely on the GOP's shoulders. This is a crisis of their making, this is their sequester. Obama agreed to it because he's been willing to compromise, as he has endlessly showed us, it's the GOP that has refused to budge. They constantly refused to even write a bill or identify what they wanted to be cut. They didn't even put a bill up for a vote in the GOP-controlled House. This is entirely of the GOP's making, and they like it that way, because they have no interest in bipartisanship, only reducing taxes and forcing the Democrats to take the blame for the inevitably necessary spending cuts.
Re:And Yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Republicans. Seriously, are we this short-sighted? When Clinton was president the budget deficit was a big deal too. Then what did Clinton do? He fucking balanced the budget. We could have started paying down the debt then and there. Gore ran on a platform of doing just that. Bush ran on a platform of trillion-dollar tax cuts, increased spending, and wars in the middle east. Guess who people voted for, and guess who ran up the bill? And why was this never an issue when Bush was in office, running up the debt? Because as Cheney said, "Deficits don't matter." At least not when Republicans are running the place and they get to set their own agenda. But if a Democrat gets in office, they will do everything they can to derail their mandate by screaming about deficits, even though it's the least important issue and completely counterproductive.
Don't blame Democrats, this is 100% a Republican-created crisis. Republicans are as fiscally-irresponsible as they come.
Re:Funding isn't automatic now (Score:4, Insightful)
This is such a load of crap. The Democrats are using the excuse that unless they have a filibuster-proof majority, then they can't even think about passing a budget. They haven't even proposed a budget to see if it would be filibustered. How did all of the Senates before this Senate operate without filibuster-proof majorities? The Republicans would be glad for the Democrats to vote on a budget, as it would expose them (the Democrats). There is no reason to filibuster.
Re:Funding isn't automatic now (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:House Republicans (Score:2, Insightful)
It's crippling to the economy. Government spending is what is keeping the economy from taking an even worse nosedive. In case you haven't noticed, we've been a recession with high unemployment since the banks crashed the economy in 2008. In my state there are 5 people looking for work for every job that's available. Spending equals jobs. Government is one of the biggest spenders. Cut government spending, you kill jobs. These things have a multiplicative effect. You kill jobs, those people who lost their jobs can't spend as much, more people lose their jobs. 2% is a lot of jobs. An analysis put that at 2 million jobs lost.
Re:Total BS (Score:4, Insightful)
I know right. The grocery store had a sale on cheese last week, and then today the sale ended.
So that means the grocery store just hit me with a 30% price increase on cheese!
Nevermind that it was exactly the same price it's been all year, except for the sale last week.
Re:House Republicans (Score:4, Insightful)
I expect the real reason the GOP pushed to let Obama choose is so that they could turn around and blame him for any unpopular cuts. They tried to further abdicate responsibility, because it's Congress's job to choose funding levels.
Re:BULLSHIT (Score:2, Insightful)
So if you took a 5% pay cut you would pay 5% less of everything? Call up your bank and tell them you'll only pay 95% of your mortgage? Would you pay only 95% of your internet and phone bills? Would you go the gas pump and only fill up your tank 95% of the way? Would you only pay 95% of your health, home, and auto insurance?
The fact of the matter is that all departments have fixed and variable expenses. They can't touch the fixed expenses (including contracts already awarded) so brunt of the cuts occur on the variable expenses as big or as small as they are.
So if 80% of your budget is unalterable then the remaining 20% of the budget will bear the whole of the 5% cut (or a 25% cut to those expenses).
This is why training (as an example) would be cut 75% and govt employee hours would be cut 20% for a limited number of weeks in the year.
Rash changes and cuts cause all sorts of boneheaded decisions, like taking out hugely expensive bonds [npr.org] or selling off govt assets and services to private companies only to have the sold back to the govt' at a higher cost (all for a short term boost).