Slashdot Mirror
President Bush's Money For Space Cometh
citanon writes " The Washington Post reports that
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has delivered, via the omnibus spending bill passed
Nov. 20, the President's full budgetary request of $16.2 billion dollars for NASA as a part of his
Vision for Space Exploration. Despite earlier reports that NASA's
budget will be cut, DeLay, whose congressional district now includes the Johnson Space
Center, was able to deliver the full budgetary request without any debate. NASA now has "enough money to forge ahead on a plan that would reshape U.S. space policy for decades to come."
Despite this early victory, questions regarding the full cost of the program remain unresolved. It is also unclear whether the NASA
bureaucracy will be able to rise to the challenges posed in the initiative and which current projects will suffer as a consequence."
Personally I believe I'd be just as useful to put several billion dollars in a garbage can and set it on fire, then spending billions to send a man to mars so he can bounce around and make another "small step for man" speech.
I hate to be the one pointing this out, because I know spacetravel is a "fun concept", but IMHO it is just a waste of money.
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
Conspiracy theorists: there must be some neocon advantage! Figure out a way to spin this against the Bush administration, even though you were arguing mere days ago that Bush's space plan was bullshit and just talk because nothing would ever get funded!
Honestly, you Party lovers used to be funny, but now it's just depressing to the point where I wish the lot of you really would drink the Kool-Aid and drop the fuck dead so those of us with critical thinking skills and functioning sentience can begin to advance civilization once again.
"a stable middle east is foundational to the survival of the western world"
Really? How so?
The middle-east was more stable before we invaded. Maybe we should stop selling weapons to every other country in the area.
No really - shut up.
Go post your economic complaints elsewhere. This is not the site.
16 billion is nothing in the grand scheme of things and it's not going to break the bank.
We need to keep ahead.
You're a citizen of North Dakota. Your state is a bunch of upper midwestern welfare sucking shitbags that would collapse into dust bowl without federal subsidies. In 2001 NoDak paid 3.288 billion dollars in taxes to the federal government and received 6.169 billion in federal spending. The facts and figures are here. That's a 2.881 billion dollar deficit in your balance of payments with the federal government.
Now, I'd be perfectly happy to end some of the wasteful spending that we sent to states such as yours and use it for something else, as an example we could shitcan farm subsidies, which would save a lot of money, start charging market rates for water delivered from federal water projects, which would raise a lot of money, start charging market rates for ranchers who graze their cattle on federal lands, start charging market rates for oil, gas and mineral leases on federal lands, end rural telecommunications subsidies, which would save money on my phone bills, require that 95 percent of all federal gasoline tax revenues stay in the state they're raised in instead of the current 90 percent figure, which would be a good deal for the blue states and wouldn't really hurt you because you don't mind driving on gravel roads.
I'm a citizen of the United States who lives in Seattle, Washington, and I hate you fucking red state welfare parasites.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Great. We have 2 billion people living on less than $2 a day and we spend $16 billion on space exploration. (And $500 billion on a useless military...)
--Nick
I'm sure you'll find some way of justifying pissing away money that can save peoples lives, so I'll shut up now.
thanks.