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Can Manned Spaceflight Save the Economy?
Barry asks: "Driving home last night I was listening to a particularly goofy AM talk station. Just before the syndicated UFO talk show 'Strange Days... Indeed' came on, the discussion turned to the Mars Rovers and George Bush's newfound love of space exploration. The interesting thought was that a large number of American political leaders were about to join Bush in endorsing a new manned space program because it would generate 'millions of jobs'. Given that manufacturing jobs are being shipped offshore, and high tech jobs are following, this almost made sense. A primarily unemployed population could mean big trouble. So I am wondering how many people were employed during the height of NASA's glory days, and what kind of economic impact would we expect if a similar program - a Mars mission for example - were launched today?"
Is it just me or is that the most crazy financial logic heard in a long time. You're going to have a government agency employing people so they have jobs? Their money coming from tax dollars... which would be coming from the population at large. You're not going to save an economy by employing MORE people from the tax dollars. It just won't work. Basically you're just recycling money, quickly the funding would dry up. Build up the deficit even quicker than it is now.
CharlesP
CharlesP
wordtrip.com
Perhaps Bush has just figured out that the moon is an even better place to house those he doesn't like than Guantanamo -- after all, NONE of Terran laws apply there! Plus, there are endless hours of entertainment watching them try to figure out how to face Mecca when they pray!
Someone tell Mr. George W. that the moon is not made of cheese.
Well, sounds like they're getting ready for it, whether it'll fix the economy or not.
On the other hand, if it fails to do anything, they could just use the newly developed technology to shoot the unemployed into space!
--- Egads, I glow in the dark!
I mean look at all those unemployed people with high school diplomas or less! There will be thousands of jobs for them as LISP programmers!
I am not a chronic bush-hater, but this is fucking rediculous. The man's legacy will be stupid quotes and mediocre examples of the 3 easiest popularity boosting projects possible: a tax cut, a war and astronauts. For however many 100s of billion of $ all this will cost in the end, he could have done a whole lot more.
I don't have any concrete information on this at all, but would comparing NASA funding with defence spending be useful as a first estimate?
Both seem to have similar requirements as regards research and specialised engineering. Both historically have a reputation for a lot of bureaucractic overhead and paying inflated prices for equipment. Indeed, I believe they use many of the same subcontractors.
So, making the possibly unjustified assumption that the relation of spending to jobs created is linear, and using the above justifiation for assuming that this ratio is about the same for NASA as for defense spending on the whole, one could guesstimate the jobs created per new budget assigned to achieve these Big Space Projects.
One year later after Moonbase X-Ray starts to fill with prisoners:
Tom Ridge: "You know, we forgot to supply oxygen to that prison camp on the moon."
Bush: "Oxygen? Why would they want to watch Oprah Winfrey?"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"a tax cut, a war and astronauts"
Well, we get to keep more of our own money, the world is rid of a big badass, and we're going back to space. What more could we ask for?
I am sick of the latest of Bush's diversionary tactics.
To him I say,
Can manned spaceflight -- save the economy!
It should be
Can Manned Spaceflight Save George Bush?
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you
He's had a great economic plan all along. Too bad the Democrats in Congress keep balking him with the idea that a bad economy will help Democrats in November.
There is nothing diversionary at all.
Large amounts of government spending can do wonders for the economy, if citizens are willing to make the sacrifices (i. e. pay the taxes). And manned space travel, useless as it is, is at least less destructive to foreign relations and industry than wars, Bush's other favorite economic activity.
However, tax cuts and massive spending don't work. And private industry is unlikely to go into space anytime soon--it's not profitable.
Just more pigs at the trough. Someone has to pay the bill and that will be the rest of us. Better to provide a useful product or service than suck down government money.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
This is the good old broken window fallacy resurfacing (again). Read all about or from many other sites.
This could be a gigantic boon for the economy, in theory. Anybody who's interested in space has read about the resources and the possibilities in space, and if we could tap that such that space exploration could become self-sustaining, there's no practical upper limit to the wealth this could generate.
If the US intends to maintain its lead, rather then "sink" into a parity position with many countries (by staying relatively stagnant while other countries catch up), this is probably the biggest win that is feasible. (Note that everybody really ought to be rooting for this, even non-Americans, because if the US is rising, so is everybody else in absolute terms; without somebody leading the way I'm fearful we could all end up stagnating together. Yes, some other country could take over but the US could take over more quickly; for a real-life tech example of this, note how quickly IBM because the largest Linux company.) It's worth a try.
In this sense, its utility as an economy saver will be directly related to how deliberately it is run with this idea in mind, to be bold, to deliberately ask private companies to produce technologies and benefit from them, etc.
To the extent that this is run like NASA, it may not be a waste but it will not be an "economy saving" gain.
So, it depends on how its run. As is too often the case, if it is run too "selfishly" (too much focus on the short-term gain), it will be useless. But if it is run well, it could be an amazing boon for the entire human race.
I know which one I'd bet on if I had too... but I can still hope...
will President Flightsuit finally find his WMD on Mars?
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
That aside, socialistic space programs like NASA (sorry, but that's pretty much what a government funded program like NASA amounts to) are unable to grow, and being a monopoly, NASA has very little incentive to become more cost-effective. The historical record shows that the inflation adjusted NASA budget is roughly fixed (within a factor of 2). That's a political reality-no huge growth is likely; business atleast has the chance to grow; and often has a much bigger incentive to reduce costs, which allows growth also; via lower prices.
This analysis suggest that the US government should ramp down NASA, and encourage private industry to take up the slack. It's the only thing that makes any sense in the long run; it's the only way to get to Space in any big way.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!""See, when the government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs."
It's nuts to assume that throwing money at some new boondoggle will help the economy. Yeah, throwing money into space might employ people. Or alternately, you could employ a lot of people in the hole-digging industry if the government simply funded a giant industry to dig holes and fill them up again. Why not do that? See the parent poster's link.
I play Nerd-Folk!
The same contractors also benefited from the other major endeavour of President Bush: The wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, with the staggering replacement costs of cruise missiles, bombs and aircrafts/parts used.
If it takes off, yes, there will be jobs, and there will be benefits to the economy. But I don't find that the sudden enthusiasm shown by the President suprising in any way. But if increased exploration and discoveries is what will results - thank you, we will like that very much.
The economy goes up and down in regular cycle and will eventually be forgotten, but a lasting and successful effort on the final frontier will prove an enduring legacy.
we all know Dubya is trying to save his ass by giving us huge dreams and all. But if he didn't cut taxes like he did he could use money to make money. Right now all he did was save him and friends some cash.
From Joe Conason in Salon: (Jan. 12, 2004)
... Deeper drilling, into the multi-kilometer range, might occur as part of a 2014 Mars mission which would put astronauts on the planet to assist."
Halliburton on Mars: Take me to your CEO When President Bush inspires us onward and upward to Mars this week, his political calculations may be more earthly. Expanding space exploration is a wonderful aspiration for America and humanity -- and also quite promising for the Houston economy, the national aerospace industry, and one company in particular that has long pondered exploration of the red planet: Halliburton. Yes, the firm once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney -- fabled beneficiary of no-bid multibillion-dollar military contracts and high-priced provider of Kuwaiti oil -- is determined to drill on Mars and the moon. Surely this scheme has nothing to do with the Bush space initiative. But somehow, no matter what worthy motivations lie behind the president's policies, he and Cheney always appear to be shilling for their corporate clientele. [Click Here] (Consider former Treasury Secretary Paul O' Neill's revelations about early Iraq war planning, which included a March 2001 memo -- titled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts" -- that mapped out potential post-Saddam petroleum exploration.) Dreams about drilling on Mars date back several years at least. In 1998, a handful of top firms, including Halliburton, Shell and Schlumberger, showed up for a NASA "workshop" at Los Alamos, N.M., to discuss the prospects. Research seems to have intensified since 2001, with Halliburton and other firms engaged in proprietary research on such advanced technologies as laser-powered drills. They appear to have been awaiting this week's announcement, according to this old clip from Petroleum News, which reported: "The earliest drilling opportunity would be 2007
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Space exploration is not a revenue-generator, and there is little hope for revenue generation in the foreseeable future.
This means it must be entirely bankrolled by the government.
Which, in turn, means it must be entirely bankrolled by the public taxpayer.
Government efficiency being what it is, I hardly imagine my dollar of tax is going to pay a dollar worth of economic improvement. Most of that dollar -- like 99 cents of it -- will go to administration overhead, corporate looting, and general waste.
Which means, basically, that I'll lose a dollar, some rich corporate bastard at McDonnel Douglas will gain 99 cents, and Joe Frontline Worker might make a penny.
Thanks, George, but I'd prefer to give my dollar to Joe directly.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
The question is: Are those the jobs the best way to go about goosing the economy, and is this the way we want to develop them?
Unless President Bush plans to privatize the whole effort, we're talking about jobs paid for with federal contracting funds, and those are some of the most inefficient jobs you can release into the economy.
There's nothing inherently wrong with jobs generated by federal spending -- after all, the government needs to buy stuff just like any company. However (and this is the important part) jobs that grow out of federal spending programs aren't the most efficient way to translate capital into work.. First, the money has to come from somewhere (i.e., taxes). Then, it goes through an inefficient bureaucracy that needs some off the top to perpetuate and grow itself. Then, it goes back into the economy in the form of federal spending, but the spending is often uncompetitive because of pork set-asides or
Bottom line: If you put a few billion dollars into federal spending in the private sector and compared the economic impact with simply leaving the capital in individual and business hands to figure out what their highest and best uses were, you'd see more efficient use of the capital (read: more net benefit) from the latter.
Oh, and although everyone likes the high-tech aspects of the space program, the fact is that there would be many, many old-economy manufacturing jobs created or sustained for every engineer or scientist.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
You commented:
However, tax cuts and massive spending don't work.
Truer words were never spoken! Jeez, look what it did for us in California! Thank You Very Much, Gray Davis!
Well duh, of course government spending on anything to create government jobs isn't going to improve the economy. Only democrats believe that.
But since similar space programs have been done before, perhaps one should (gasp!) look at past performance and ROI before setting up straw men to knock down.
Ever wonder why the US leads the world in many areas of computers, electronics, manufacturing, matereials, etc.? The space program isn't the only reason, but it's a big one.
Ever wonder what the real ROI is, or how many technologies and materials in your own home are spin-offs from space-related research?
http://www.floridatoday.com/space/explore/storieshttp://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html
But I guess the Bush-hating pastime is much more fun and emotionally satisfying than actually dealing with the facts. I just wouldn't expect it from a group of nerds. Oh wait. This is slashdot. Nevermind.
A primarily unemployed population could mean big trouble
;-)
That's a pretty bold claim there, professor
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
The better thing to do would be to give all those people who wanted these sorts of jobs to go on a free (1 way) vacation to Venus instead.
Why not just print more money? A politician here in Australia suggested this so it must be possible.
Of course, she did jail time not long afterwards so maybe her comments should be taken with a bucket of salt.
lol, printing more money means inflation
"Something about the multiplayer effect always smelled like bullshit to me..."
Any lie to get re-elected.
Borrowing money from our children may be a good strategy in times of extreme emergency. Borrowing money to explore dirt and rocks in space is not an extreme emergency.
We're a bunch of geeks for crying out loud. We should be rejoicing at the thought of space exploration. A rejuvination of the space program could push forward technology faster than anything else we can think of. The race for the moon back in the 60's resulted in countless benefits to our society. Education, technology, synthetics, manufacturing, and many more all benefited from the Apollo program. This is another chance to reap those same benefits again.
I wonder if the Egyptians had these problems building the pyramids?
1. Go to Mars.
2. ???
3. Profit!
"Borrowing money from our children may be a good strategy in times of extreme emergency."
Humm...
My children are to young to work, thus they have no money. That being the case then there is no way for me, or anybody else to borrow money from them.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
Now, I love space development as much as anybody (check my journal if you doubt it) but this utter bullshit of claiming that NASA still creates a tidal wave of spinoffs is a grotesque exaggeration that decreases the credibility of a once-true claim.
Let's take the first dozen or so alleged spinoffs from the first article linked above.
GROUND PROCESSING SCHEDULING SYSTEM - Computer-based scheduling system that uses artificial intelligence to manage thousands of overlapping activities involved in launch preparations of NASA's Space Shuttles. The NASA technology was licensed to a new company which developed commercial applications that provide real-time planning and optimization of manufacturing operations, integrated supply chains, and customer orders.
Oh, please. After everything from the Challenger disaster to the constant ISS cost overruns, do you really expect us to want to use project management software from NASA?
As with most of these, the best they can do is to say, "NASA made a product that did this". They certainly can't say "X percent of the market uses this product". Now, speaking as a onetime economics major and a former workflow consultant, I've actually looked at NASA and DOD-created workflow and project managment solutions and I have found them to have absolutely foul interfaces, enterprise-level admin and platform costs, require dedicated boxen, and then provide third-rate functionality.
You know, about what you'ld expect from a government contractor.
SEMICONDUCTOR CUBING - NASA initiative led to the Memory Short Stack, a three-dimensional semiconductor package in which dozens of integrated circuits are stacked one atop another to form a cube, offering faster computer processing speeds, higher levels of integration, lower power requirements than conventional chip sets, and dramatic reduction in the size and weight of memory-intensive systems, such as medical imaging devices.
Yep, this one is all over the place, in use from PS/2s to digital watches. NOT!
Like IBM's early gallium-arsenide opto-electronics or the late Alpha chips, this is a pretty toy that is not only is too expensive for most real-world applications, but is also being done better by more, shall we say, frugal organizations. And, just in case you folks are forgetting, the supercomputer companies have been doing variations on this for years now.
STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS - This NASA program, originally created for spacecraft design, has been employed in a broad array of non-aerospace applications, such as the automobile industry, manufacture of machine tools, and hardware designs.
Okay, so I'll agree that this is important. But not only are most of the important concepts like NURBS things developed at places like Autodesk, but NASA's funding and development for this was, AFAIK, mostly in their aircraft research division, which is almost entirely separate from spaceflight development.
WINDOWS VISUAL NEWS READER (Win Vn) - Software program developed to support payload technical documentation at Kennedy Space Center, allowing the exchange of technical information among a large group of users. WinVn is an enabling technology product that provides countless people with Internet access otherwise beyond their grasp, and it was optimized for organizations that have direct Internet access.
Well, shucky-darn! A news client. Gawd knows there's a shortage of those! Why surely the two hundred or so other variants out there already would have been useless without NASA getting into the act.
Uh-huh. Right.
AIR QUALITY MONITOR - Utilizing a NASA-developed, advanced analytical technique software package, an air quality monitor system was created, capable of separating the various gases in bulk smokestack exhaust streams and determining the amount of individual gases present within the stream for compliance with smo
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
It's pretty ironic for republicans to portray democrats as fiscally irresponsible: republicans have been far, far worse over the last few decades, starting with Reagan. Republicans love towaste huge amounts of money unproductively, foremost on the military and propping up unproductive industries.
No. But, it could save humankind. Humans are a funny thing we need to explore, expand, and have something to struggle against. New technology follows in the footsteps of exploration, and saddly enough, war. Spring powered clocks came about due to the need of sailing ships needing acurate time to know where they were. The grand master of science fiction, Issac Asimov, said that humans only had one chance to surive, to expand into space. And I think he was correct. We need new vistas to dream about, just like your dog, we need the wind in our face, with new and unknow smells.
Another big idea was using telepresence to control things like a robot arm or a mars rover in hostile environments.
NASA had real prospective uses for this sort of technology and a big budget, so they were a real player in the early days of VR. Which isn't to say that everything VResque wouldn't have happened anyway without them, but it's something. It's not nothing.
Here's a relevant link.
I play Nerd-Folk!
My children are to young to work, thus they have no money. That being the case then there is no way for me, or anybody else to borrow money from them.
Not quite literally true, but truer than you assume..
To raise money, governments can sell bonds to investors for a given price, which are redeemable for a certain greater price at some given future date. When they come due, the difference has to be paid back - if your generation is retired by then, the next generation will be paying for that through taxes.
Cool link and good point. But as a bunch of us discussed in a JE this past summer much of the hot and heavy VR work was done in random places all over the world and, incidently was done by '94, while his team were still denying the very term "VR".
He makes a good point about near-space interaction, but again, much of this was also being worked on in other places.
Even he refers back to Ivan Sutherland's work back in 1968!
VIEW was seminal. Just as VPL was. Just as Warnock's work was. Just as was the work by enough groups that their leaders wouldn't fit in my living room.
I remember SIGGRAPH back in, IIRC, '85 and seeing some mighty VR-looking work being presented by some mighty threadbare and independent bunches of guys.
Did the space program contribute "something"? Certainly.
Is VR something that "came from the space program"? I think not.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Government spending can contribute to growth but it's a degenerative feedback loop - government "expenses" like taxes tend to eat up a portion of the economic kick each time money flows back through the goverment since most income is taxed. Thus government spending creates a blip which dissipates - if other growth sources aren't on the edge of recovery, the economy won't catch "fire" and start growing.
A space mission would eventually create technological innovation to fuel growth but it takes time to develop new technologies in the first place, more time for a critical mass of technology portfolios that are cross-purposeable outside of government/military to accumulate, and even more time for those technologies to finally take root. The rule of thumb is 15-25 years from the first scientific discovery/creation to the point when noticeable economic benefit results. Consider the Internet. Consider transistors. Consider integrated circuits. Of course you may not pick the correct newly discovered technology to bet on today.
It's not entirely clear how cost effective a Space Program would be. Sure there have been "homeruns" like semiconductors, computers and integrated circuits which never would of existed with the Cold War and the Space Race, but what's in the pipeline that would apply to a space mission, and then be applicable to a broader. The next "Velcro" won't power a major economic burst. Another internet or transistor might. Unfortunately computers and semiconductors themselves are mostly in evolution mode, rather than revolution mode. The "next big things" like nanotechnology and biotechnology are either just entering their 20-year obligatory incubation period or have industrio-technological structural impediments that will prevent revolutionary advances, and neither would seem to have a major role in a space program anyway.
My net-net is: don't assume a new space program will fix anything economically. If Bush thinks it will, he's, again, deluded. The time-constants are all wrong. If you use economics as a justification for a space program you are perpetrating an improbability. There are other good reasons to have a program. Jobs mean stability even if you don't have net growth. A space program, done right, can inspire a nation which is not a trivial thing. If you allow a economic window of 10-30 years, by then a space program will almost certain contribute to technology - the Net Present Value is still debateable. We certainly don't think that far ahead often enough though.
For instance, medicine was another big application area at the time. People liked the idea of using virtual cadavers for some instructional purposes as an alternative to real ones. Real cadavers are expensive, bulky, unique, difficult to obtain (in the US), and you can't make parts of them selectively transparent at will to look through or past the layers you're not interested in to point out the good parts. Stanford University was one place that was working on that sort of thing.
But I wouldn't say VR "came from research medicine" either. It came from a lot of people all over the place who read _Neuromancer_ and _Ender's Game_ and liked pushing the limits of technology and had wacky ideas about what it might be made to do.
I play Nerd-Folk!
Hey, I don't like Dubya as much as the next guy, but big projects finansed from public budget fuel all the economy. Just look at what Iraq war did to American economy.
.02pln
It's all the same, no matter if government spends it on bombs or space rockets. When they spend money big time, the main agency gets money and spends it. Its contractors get money and spend it.
And finally: their empoyees get money and spend it. On food, homes, cars, hi-tech gizmos (in any order). But suddenly all the people that produce those goods have money to spend it, and...
This is called macroeconomy, as someone down the page said it. It's better when it's fueled by space program than by another war.
Just my
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
uh, that's what happened in Germany before the rise of the Nazi's. Inflation was sky high, money had no value and was worth les sthan wallpaper.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
That was my immediate thought. But then the money paid to the new employees gets spent on all kinds of goods and services - houses, cars, food, whatever. The money paid to the people selling that stuff gets spent on other stuff, offered by other people who go on to do the same. And so on. And everyone pays taxes, so that money eventually comes back to the goverment, who pay and employ more people. It's a loop. It only fails when people stop spending the money and hang on to it. So how "good" the economy is must be a measurement of how quickly the money is flowing through the system, not just the amount of money in the system?
Of course, what I know of economics could be written on the back of a postage stamp...
You mean like Clinton with the airlines and AMTRAK? Same idea, different focus.
The short answer is no. It may create millions of jobs temporarily, but there is no profit to be made from space exploration, so it is therefore unrealistic to expect that those jobs would be permanent. It is not like we going to pan for gold on Mars and our Moon, we are going there to poke around. The only profits will be made by Aerospace companies, and the taxpayers will foot the bill for all the jobs and working capital to get this thing off the ground. (Pun intended!)
I hate sigs.
Save the economy?
Who cares! Not I!
From what? Boredom?
There are FAR more important things to worry about than whether or not all the fat Americans can only afford 4 McDonalds a day as opposed to 3.
It was common practise in the Roman Empire for weak emperors to invest large amounts of money in far-off projects in an effort to sedate the masses as to their local problems.
It seems like George Dubya is trying to do the same now. And those who do not learn from history are dooomed to repeat it.
Manned space flight (ie, the government spending MAD DOLLARS) is not going to save the economy if the government doesn't do something about outsourcing the jobs. Not just the fancy new space jobs, ALL JOBS.
6 S0 003
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK2003031
In New Mexico, the unemployment insurance department recently paid (some offshore (India) outsourcing company) $6 million for an online unemployment-claims system. How ironic is that, spending taxpayer money on a system to handle the growing number of unemployed people, but sending all that money overseas and not using it to employ Americans. That's just ignorant.
There is one way to "save the economy" : bring back the jobs. Simple as that. Make off-shoring and outsourcing economically unviable (tax the living hell out of it, for example) or simply make it illegal - or quite simply America is going to be totally and utterly fscked.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I wish I could run my business by taking 40% of people's incomes, wasting 75% of that, and "giving" the rest back to them in crap they don't really need.
It's about developing new technologies. Don't ask how many people NASA and their contractors (and subcontractors, etc. etc) employed. Ask how our society has benefitted from advances in science that come as a direct result of funding NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. How many jobs today aren't affected by advances in materials science or other technologies that can be traced back to NASA?
include $sig;
1;
You seem to have a much better understanding of econ than most people. I am not an expert per se, but I took a hell of a lot of econ for an engineering major (easiest social science for me to fill requirements with).
An issue which compounds the effect you speak of is that the government spends all of it's tax revenue, where almost all consumers have a marginal propensity to save, meaning that most consumers save roughly the same percentage of their income (not meaning from person to person variations are not huge, meaning that a person who can't save money when making 30K will not be able to when making 100K).
High taxes and high spending coupled together force the money through the economy at a higher rate. Tax and spend is an excellent way to jump start a lagging economy (but deficit spending works well too, but I don't feel it is a responsible policy). Did wonders for FDR...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
What jobs are lost because taxpayers have less to spend in the private economy?
What government spending can do is redirect jobs from one part of the economy to another part. Of course, it's hard to know what jobs exactly are lost in other parts of the economy because of this.
What ends up being really important is this: are those jobs being used to produce things that people want? If the money stays in the taxpayers pocket, they are very likely to make their wishes known in the market place and they are very likely to get what they want.
If it is taxed away for a space program, it's less obvious that they'll be getting what they want. I have to admit, though, I love looking at hubble pictures all day. I think the government has given me my monies worth, at least.
The other important thing to ask is whether or not the jobs being moved from one sector of the economy to another are going to improve efficiency. If people are creating as part of their job technology that makes the production of goods and services more efficient, then it might be a win overall because people get more for their money. A lot of military spending has this effect. How much technology was developed that later made production more efficent? Certainly the investment in computer technology has paid off in all sorts of ways.
There are also situations where spending tax money acts a simple transfer of goods and services and this can actually be a real burden on the economy if the recipients don't help improve production or don't recipricate.
Imagine a hamburger-flipper that is taxed at a 15% rate (payroll taxes for example). Now if that money is simply given to another group of people (retirees for example), when this group shows up at the hamburger joint with that tax money, they are in effect collecting free hamburgers and the taxpayer is unknowling giving them away because all the money he sees looks the same.
Now after getting back this money, it will of course be taxed again and some of it will go right back to that group to collect more hamburgers and the cycle will repeat, with 15% of the hamburgers being made for free for some group.
So the question becomes, how much are people willing to put up with this burden before it starts impacting their own production? No hamburger stand ever stayed in business by giving all it's hamburgers away for free.
The government borrows money. In the future, it will have to turn to taxpayers to pay it back. But taxpayers of the future are the kids of today. So, yes, the government does borrow from your children, against their future status as taxpayers.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Seriously - didn't Lyndon Larouche promise a platform almost completely built around sending people to Mars and building the US economy up with spinoff industries, etc?
Its stupid to invest in space, that 100 billion dollars could be spent developing drug treatments, cures, and investment for biotech and nanotech. These industries would easily get the money back. Our Government is stupid.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
The fact that educated native speakers of American English in 2004 use lanuage differently than educated native speakers of American English in 1804 is hardly reason to dispair.
It is a reason to despair when allegedly educated native speakers of American English in 2004 use language differently than the standards I learned in 1974. That's a big difference. I get a little tired of the "language is defined as solely how we use it crowd"... why then do we teach grammar? If there is no standard then we can't communicate well. That kind of sloppiness may pass muster in Time Magazine, but try it in a legal contract. The fact that editors are unable or unwilling to exercise middle-school-level grammar rules (as they exist today!) when they write is, in fact, very disturbing to me. If you can't be bothered to use the language correctly, what kind of attitude do you have when it comes to verifying your facts?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
NASA "spinoffs" are mostly vaporware. NASA has, over the years, tried to claim credit for everything from Teflon to computers. The only real NASA innovation that's had significant market penetration is NASTRAN, the structural analysis program.
Cutting NASA's PR and "education" budget by 80% would be a good start. They try to do the NSF's job, badly. And they do it strictly as a PR exercise.
I think, for the most part, the responses here have been determined by the writer's political bent, not actual, objective thought about the benefits of space exploration.
A major poll yesterday said that roughly half of all Democrats thought Bush's proposal was a good thing when asked if they were told it was a "U.S. Goverment" proposal. When the question was changed to say it was Bush's proposal, then the results changed to 2 to 1 against.
Clearly, the country's future and the benefits of the program were not what the responders were thinking about.
So why do we care what they think? Why should their opinions matter when they are being purely emotional?
This is just a rah-rah re-election ploy, with such short notice they can maybe award a few billion in contracts to friends, but no spending on the scale required to accomplish the goals.
I think this will last about 13 months.
Now on my economic rant.
Government contracts don't make money, they redistribute your tax money.
They can create jobs, but these aren't real free market jobs, it's just taxpayer funded job subsidization, when the gov spending stops, so do the jobs.
The real benefit is when they can stimulate real jobs, ones that don't rely on continuous gov money to exist. Nobody has an easy answer how to accomplish this, but the trick is to make people and companies want to "do stuff" on their own.
The current idea is to make an environment that stimulates this. Simple and well enforced laws, good infrastructure lead to this.
you have a 100 $ budget
... woohoooo
10 people who need a job
you create 10 jobs, say 100 bucks a year salary
end of year 00
you're 900 bucks in debt
but
you collect 100 bucks in taxes !!!
go figure , now you're only 800 bucks in debt !!
end of year 01
1700 in debt
no. wait a minute, another 2 kids finished college in year 00
got to give those a job too
1880 in debt
-3140
-4580
-6200
-8000
i knew fuzzylogic was weird science
but bushlogic sure as hell makes a whole lot more sense
Those of you who worry that the space programme would be funded through tax are ignoring GWB's almost Soviet disregard for capital worth.
Instead of taxing people to fund the Space programme (or to expand the economy), all George has to do is more of what he is already doing: print money; or rather, mortgage the future (with debt) to pay for today. Of course, if there is an infinite source of credit, you can always pay back today's dues with tomorrow's. How? Issue nearly valueless bonds (print money) and wait while China and Japan lap them up to keep their currencies competitive with the dollar.
Of course savvy investors (Europe) know whats going on, don't play the game and watch their currency soar but thats beside the point.
Back to the space programme - all George has to do to pump enormous amounts of money into the system is borrow it (and find suckers to carry it). Now providing this 'stimulation' multiplies as you'd hoped, then you get a net economic win, and hopefully (in addition to more men on the moon) you also have a resurgent economy.
Either way, you will have crippling debts, coupled with a reduced ability-to-pay. But then, those canny investors who got into GWB's military, oil, or space industry programmes will be sitting pretty in their walled enclosures with 24 hour security; and the rest of America can go to hell (and they will) whoever they vote for in future.
Yeah, everything is a net win if you don't have to account for opportunity costs. So you shouldn't just look at what benefits came from the space program, you also need to look at what opportunities were passed up because people (taxpayers/investors/entrepreneurs/inventors/etc.) couldn't spend their money in the way they wanted to.
...as long as we beat the terrorists to the Moon/Mars. What color are we associating with them these days, anyway?
Lets face it: Mars would be hard but given that already had people in space repeatedly (both US and USSR) and done this for many months (USSR/Russian have best experience here) and have had people land on another surface (US) then doing these all at once is simply a matter of project management and funding. Both of which NASA is good at handling.
Now if Bush had said clean water for all on the planet then this has not been done in recent history but it would create untold wealth for the US in increased demand for US products. Currently much of the world is fighting basic health issues due to water and just doesn't have the capability to be part of the worlds capital flows and trading systems. It has been done before on a smaller scale - the wealth of the Roman empire was sustained by water feed using aquaducts and roads - some of which are still in use 2000 years later.
Now why exactly was the space program stopped last time if it was of such a benefit to the economy ?. Answer is simple - when times are good (and the 50's and 60's were good for Federal deficits) - then programs like that are a great way of helping focus Federal spending and also absorbing excess tax dollars. When times are bad (70's with the oil shocks) or wars then space programs are a luxury a country can ill afford while it is burning cash on imported oil or bombing others in the middle of no-where.
Bush has burnt all his cash from the Clinton era Graph by party on his two most recent big projects and those projects are two wars. Nothing left for Mars or the Moon and he still hasn't finished those wars.
China has declared that they want to put a Chinese man on the moon in 10 years.
Bush is going to beat them there.
Ever since the industrial revolution, the cost of raw materials has tended to fall, and the cost of turning raw materials into food and goods has also tended to decrease.
In a world in which more and more of the real work is done by machines, the challenge becomes how to divide the spoils.
One effect we're already seeing is a growing service sector. As a society we can afford to feed more hair dressers because food is becoming cheaper.
It will also become possible to make previously untenable economic models work, because an efficient wealth distribution model is unnecessary if you have efficient production and distribution.
Machines multiply human effort. If it gets to the point where the effort of a few can feed, house and clothe everyone else, everyone else no longer needs to behave rationally. They can lie in hammocks, organize themselves into previously untenable communal social structures, or go to the moon because it's fun.
// DevsVult: The Machines Will It
It's pretty ironic for republicans to portray democrats as fiscally irresponsible: republicans have been far, far worse over the last few decades, starting with Reagan. Republicans love towaste huge amounts of money unproductively, foremost on the military and propping up unproductive industries.
What happened is this:
The Republicans got tired of losing elections because they would not play the give-away game.
They almost went back to their old ways when they won the senate for 2 years (out of 40) under Reagan. Once they started talking about reforming social security, the Democrats used it as a bludgeon and won back the senate. The lesson wasn't lost on the Republicans: buy votes with taxpayer money.
C'mon! everyone knows T'Pol brought Velcro to Earth...jeeez
If they really want to foster competition, how about sponsoring a $100 million X-Prize type competition. Tons of companies all working their ass off to get the prize, and no one gets paid until it's done. No contracts or pork and tons cheaper then the billions spent on doing it alone. Have 2nd and 3rd place prizes to keep some competition and then pay the private sector to get our base in space.
The lesson wasn't lost on the Republicans: buy votes with taxpayer money.
That argument is bogus because the Republicans are cutting like crazy in programs whose benefits voters actually experience.
What Republicans are buying isn't "votes", which would be the right thing to buy in a democracy, what they are buying is campaign contributions which they then use to influence the media. And that is not a good thing.
No, very different idea. Airlines and AMTRAK are institutions that benefit voters directly. Propping up unproductive industries and sending the military on expensive and unnecessary escapades, however, results in no benefits to voters.
Both Republicans and Democrats spend like crazy. But while both parties commit grave fiscal sins and while both parties cater to special interests, Republicans do so even more than Democrats by funneling even more money into the military and to the wealthy.
Maintaining a large scale space program is perhaps the best way to guarantee a populace of intelligent workers. The space race of the sixties put the US on the pinnacle of ICBM technology. A new space exploration project would cause, presumably, many children to enter the sciences. It is this development that is important.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/