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.
Re:Total BS (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Total BS (Score:5, Interesting)
Just fyi [slashdot.org], the scientist whose budgets are being cut agree with you [nature.com]. We cannot adequately fund science, education, and social services while gratuitously financing gratuitous military spending and asinine wars on drugs, brown people, etc.
We should first cut it all by 10% per year for a few years, make all those federal contractors show declining profits despite their lobbyists efforts. We should then evaluate which government financed industries tightened their belts but still did the work and which just pocketed the same amount while cutting real work. Any industries in the second category should continue getting cut.
A bunch of FUD .... seriously ..... (Score:2, Interesting)
If there's one thing politicians are EXPERTS at, it's convincing the general public that money must keep flowing in for any and all of the projects they voted for, or else dire consequences will result.
To step back and put these cuts into perspective.... Federal govt. is STILL spending something like $13 TRILLION dollars a year in deficit spending with the full effects of the sequester in place!
The primary reason Obama is motivated to scare up people to put a stop to this and "work out a deal" is because this prevents his healthcare reform plans from taking effect. (And before we get into that whole debate on whether or not his healthcare changes would be a good or a bad thing for the USA? Let me just say that IMO, the REAL problem with them is they attempt to fix only one side of the issue, while ignoring the other side. 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.
Time magazine (the online version) very recently published a great piece on all of this, breaking down line-by-line, all the costs on 6 or 7 people's hospital bills, and clearly illustrating how inflated and arbitrary those charges are. (By and large, the price Medicare/Medicaid actually compensates a hospital for a given procedure or good is pretty darn close to what a "fair" price would really be, where a small but reasonable profit is made - but no gouging takes place. But so far, Obama's healthcare reform doesn't really do anything to ensure ALL insurance companies are able to pay those bills using those same rate structures. So each of those $29 -rays becomes $300 charges, etc.)
But overall? As little effort has been made to spend our tax dollars more wisely? (Some recently approved study was going to give over $1 million to researchers for a project studying goldfish to see what they could learn about political choices people make based some some aspect of their habits!) I wouldn't mind seeing govt. grinding to a halt for a while .... even if it causes a little inconvenience and pain in the short-run.
Re:And Yet... (Score:4, Interesting)
NIH budget in 2011: $30.9 billion
NIH budget in 2012: $31.9 billion
NIH budget requested for 2013: $30.8 billion
NIH cuts from the sequester: $1.6 billion
NIH budget after sequester (assuming 2012 levels continued): $30.3 billion (which LESS THAN 2011)
Accounting for 2% inflation, the real NIH budget after sequestration in 2011 dollars: $29.1 billion
It's called math, and you are wrong.
BULLSHIT (Score:4, Interesting)
Really, how long are we going to swallow absolute FUD without question?
The sequester is $1.2 trillion....OVER TEN YEARS. So $120 bill a year (I've seen it reported as $85 bill for this year).
The idea - as promulgated by the spenders in Congress and White House - is that ANY cut in spending by the US gov't will radically and catastrophically affect (whatever service is important to the listener). This is a bald-faced lie.
This morning, a senior administration official claimed that sequestration would CANCEL all military service person training for the rest of the year (outside of actually-deployed servicepeople). Seriously? A 5% cut in budget cancels 75% of a training schedule?
One example: Obama/Tiger Golf Trip cost $989,207 to the Fed and $78,205 to local police...the average american household paid $1372 in income tax... So ~728 American households had to pay taxes for an entire year to fund the golf trip...
And yet we're crying that we can't cut anything from the US budget? Really?
My understanding - I'm not an economist - is that if we simply STOPPED programmed-increases in spending for 6 years, the US budget would be balanced. That doesn't seem that painful, given that most American businesses (except Wall Street, I suppose) have suffered far worse over the past 5 years already.
On NPR this morning, they discussed the previous sequestration of 2% that happened in 1991. The bureaucrat they talked to discussed "how hard it was to implement this 2% cut in everything", using as an example a call he got from a Parks person, asking how they implement a 2% cut in service that scrapes bird shit off of channel buoys. His response was to "...only scrape 98% of the crap off".
This, my friends, is what passes for both intelligent thought in government bureaucrats...either he (most likely) thought that was an ironic, humorous reply to what he felt was an unjust budget cutting (which it really wasn't) or he thought that was ACTUALLY a way to reduce his 'poop scraping' service costs by 2%.
As much as they try to make it so, it's pretty simple: expenditure cannot exceed income. Period, full stop. ANY OTHER SOLUTION IS GAME-PLAYING.
Oh, and for those with a party bias? I'll just remind everyone that this has been a problem for 50 years REGARDLESS of which party controlled Congress and the White House. It wouldn't be this bad, if both parties weren't generally colluding.
Re:House Republicans (Score:1, Interesting)
Like the previous person said, take off your blinders, I have yet to see the Obama and his administration respect any of the "separation of powers". Want some examples? well here are a few, Tell the supreme court they better not strike down his Obamacare. His administration has no transparency, yet that was his platform. He routinely tells his AG to ignore enforcing laws that "He" doesn't agree with. If he can't get something passed, he writes an executive order. He uses fear mongering and children as props when he doesn't get his way.
He really respects the separation of power....keep telling yourself that, if that lets you sleep at night.
FYI (I didn't approve of how the last president used his power, but the current administration has done things 100 times worse, in short, obama has to be one of the biggest hypocrites I've seen in a long time.)
Re:Total BS (Score:5, Interesting)
When I started looking a bit more closely at this, it isn't a cut at all. It is like you said...only a reduction in spending.
Even with sequestration, we're on schedule to spend more this year than last year, just what we need.
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?
*SIGH*, 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.
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.
Re:Total BS (Score:1, Interesting)
Won't hurt anything unless they want it to. (Score:4, Interesting)
Bureaucrats have one goal in life. To accumulate more power and increase the size of their budgets. The thoughts of cutting waste and removing inefficiency never occur to their twisted minds.
If these microscopic little slowdowns in their budget increases (these are not cuts) have any effect on government services whatsoever, it is only because the bureaucrats implemented them in a way that would be most painful and most noticeable to the people.
If your spouse was a bureaucrat and you had to decrease household spending by 2.2%, the cut would be made by turning off the heat and electricity. The restaurant and entertainment budget that a sane person would cut first would not be touched. That way, the cuts would be as painful as possible so that you didn't DARE suggest a cut ever again.
It would be possible to cut the federal government by 33% without anyone but the bureaucratic parasites noticing.
Re:Good old American bait and switch (Score:4, Interesting)
The US is fighting an economic war with the rest of the world, and it is winning. We are essentially pushing for a global economy, but doing it by crashing every other country's economy. We can do this because the US is the largest economy, the US Dollar was accepted very broadly, still is (for now) the reserve currency, and has moderately retained its value in comparison to other countries. Despite all the money the US has printed through the recession (2-3 Trillion, note this is not the same thing as the US deficit or debt), it is not really a huge percentage of the real total US money supply (the US stopped releasing their numbers a few decades ago, but everyone estimates them). The estimated real total US money supply is ~70 Trillion, so 3 Trillion is only a 4% increase over 4 years. Even with the US debt of 16 Trillion, it could print all that money and repay every last borrowed cent and only devalue the currency by ~20 percent. Of course it won't do this because all that debt keeps other countries very dependent upon the US and the US economy. That debt gives the US a big stick in negotiations, though nowhere near as big as the US Military's stick.
Make no mistake, the US is aiming for global economic domination.
Re:House Republicans (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, because [the Republican plans to avoid sequester] are all total BS.
I don't think that's true. There was one suggestion to allow the president to make the choice of what to cut [defensenews.com]. With such a small cut, it should be easy to find things that won't cause huge damage. Obama threatened to veto it, because of pork-spending, jobs, defense, and kids. Think of the kids.
It's not clear to me the real reason why he opposes that bill.
Re:And Yet... (Score:4, Interesting)
An even BETTER question to ask is:
"Why the hell are you spending so much more than you make????"
Metaphors comparing personal and government spending tend to fall apart once you reach that question, because personal and government spending do not fundamentally operate the same way.
So without getting into interests rates or international trade flows, the short version is that you spend more than you make as an investment in the future.
The only real crisised have been the ones manufactured by the Republican party.
The US Government isn't broke and this wasn't a problem that needed to be solved post-haste.
Re:Won't hurt anything unless they want it to. (Score:4, Interesting)
If your spouse was a bureaucrat and you had to decrease household spending by 2.2%, the cut would be made by turning off the heat and electricity. The restaurant and entertainment budget that a sane person would cut first would not be touched. That way, the cuts would be as painful as possible so that you didn't DARE suggest a cut ever again.
This is actually a perfect analogy, except you missed slightly.
In this hypothetical household, both sides are arguing about cutting utilities vs. cutting entertainment, when the REAL problem is the fact they bought a house that is killing them on monthly payments, but they can't move. So while the actual problem expense is 10X bigger than anything they are looking at cutting, they go after crap like the monthly newspaper subscription and number of toiler paper rolls they buy.