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What's Getting Cut From Science Part of the Federal Budget
Kristina at Science News writes "As part of the announcement of its proposed fiscal year 2010 budget, the Obama administration released a summary (called 'Terminations, Reductions, and Savings: Budget of the US Government, Fiscal Year 2010') that includes which science-related programs are getting cut. Two big programs are the nuclear waste storage project at Yucca Mountain in Nevada and a second prototype airborne laser missile-defense weapon." Update: 05/07 23:03 GMT by T : On the other hand, reader Dusty writes, "The NASA budget for 2010 has been announced, up
5% on 2009. Human space flight plans to be reviewed."
They found a fault runs right under Yucca Mountain anyway.. isn't exactly a good site for storage anymore anyway.
"n September 2007, it was discovered that the Bow Ridge fault line ran underneath the facility, hundreds of feet east of where it was originally thought to be located, beneath a storage pad where spent radioactive fuel canisters would be cooled before being sealed in a maze of tunnels. The discovery required several structures to be moved several hundred feet further to the east, and drew criticism from Robert R. Loux, head of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, who argues that Yucca administrators should have known about the fault line's location years prior, and called the movement of the structures "just-in-time engineering."[8][9]
In June 2008, a major nuclear equipment supplier, Holtec International, criticized the Department of Energy's safety plan for handling containers of radioactive waste before they are buried at the proposed Yucca Mountain dump. The concern is that, in an earthquake, the unanchored casks of nuclear waste material awaiting burial at Yucca Mountain could be sent into a "chaotic melee of bouncing and rolling juggernauts"."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_mountain#Earthquakes
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
STFU, you dumbass liberal wacko. It is those guns, bombers and soon particle weapons that allow you to be able to freely post things on sites like this. Every one LESS of those things is one more step towards a fascist, socialist slave future for all of us.
[snicker]
GPP was a take-off on a well-known quote:
"Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
Who said that? Well, that would be that well-known dumbass liberal socialist fascist wacko, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I was paraphrasing this guy:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, From a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
The "Fault" in Yucca is a joke. Nearly every place in the USA has a fault near it in some way. The "Fault" at Yucca is just another anti-industrial age strawman cooked up by a bunch of environmentalists. I ran Yucca mountain through the same earthquake simulations used by insurance companies all over the world, and the premiums were pretty damned low.
This is my sig.
www.budget.gov, which has a link to
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/fy2010_new_era/A_New_Era_of_Responsibility2.pdf
According to IRS statistics, the bottom 40% of Americans have no income tax liability. They pay no federal taxes. Zip, zero, nada. Yet the warships, guns, missiles, etc, are paid for with federal tax dollars.
*ahem*.
Except for all of the following:
1: Social Security Tax they pay.
1a: the SS tax their EMPLOYER pays on their behalf.
2: Transaction Fees
3: The FICA they pay out of EITC
4: The taxes that their EMPLOYER pays on the wealth this employee generates in excess of his wages.
So, yeah, aside from all those, the working poor pay no taxes.
Citation please? The thing is, that as a graduate student I fall into that bottom 40% in income, and I most certainly do pay federal (and state) taxes. Other graduate students I've talked to on the issue pay taxes as well. Given the size of the standard deduction, I can't see how anyone without dependents who made much more than $10,000/yr could avoid paying some taxes (except in select cases, like running a home business in the red).
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Oh, yes, I remember that part of our national anthem.
I suppose you've never heard the 4th stanza to the anthem.
http://www.thenationalanthemproject.org/lyrics.html
O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation!
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the Heaven-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must when our cause it is just
And this be our motto: "In God is our Trust."
And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
It's not stupid. It's Advanced.
Which, yours or mine? I've just said that I can state from personal experience that the statement, "the bottom 40% of Americans have no income tax liability" is simply false (based on the US income distribution reported here).
I never said anything about being poor, I only stated the objective fact that I fall below the 40th percentile of income.
Now if you look at a copy of the 1040 for 2008, you'll see that the standard deduction is $5,450 for those filing as single or married filing separately, $10,900 for those married filing jointly, and $8,000 for head of household. You get another deduction of $3,500 per exemption, which will be 1 (assuming no one can claim you as a dependent) plus the number of dependents. Obviously there are lots of possible permutations and there are there are various tax credits, the possibility of itemized deductions, etc., but it's clear from those numbers that plenty of people making less than the 40th percentile (about $35k/yr) will pay taxes. A single person with no dependents making over $9,000/yr can easily end up paying taxes, and a single parent (head of household plus one dependent) making more than $15,000/yr can end up paying tax.
So, it's clear that that factoid is bunk. I was legitimately curious where you got it from, because you're not the first person I've heard use it (or something similar). I even heard someone being interviewed on a news show say something similar.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy