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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
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..."
At best he'll get a footnote.
I disagree. I think Kennedy got the credit he deserved for establishing his challenge to put a man on the Moon in the 1960's. I don't ever recall hearing Nixon being the Moonshot President because he happened to be in office when the event finally occurred.
There is no doubt that there could be a political motivation for doing this, but the potential for applied science and engineering is incredible... far more than anyone who doesn't follow the Space Program closely would ever realize.
However, to suggest that Bush is doing this to score points with the electorate is pretty naive. Hell, I would bet a majority of people believe that silly Fox TV show calling into question that the original Moon landings ever happened.
Remember, a large portion of the population still believes in things like horoscopes, the psychic hotline, and the daVinci code. We are not, as a whole, very good at critical thinking.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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.