State of Alabama Fighting NASA's New Plan

FleaPlus writes "Alabama politicians have formed a 'task force' dedicated to fighting NASA's new plans to cancel the costly Constellation/Ares program, which is largely based in Alabama. The chronically mismanaged Constellation project attempted to build new rockets in-house and replicate an Apollo-style lunar program with minimal investment in new technologies. NASA's new boosted budget revives formerly suppressed R&D efforts into critical technologies needed for a sustainable push towards Mars and intermediate waypoint destinations, works with (instead of trying to compete with) existing commercial rockets to transport cargo/crew to orbit, and funds a stream of robotic precursor missions to scout other worlds and demonstrate new technologies. The Alabama task force fighting the new plan includes former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and former Ares project manager Steve Cook."

Comments

Kill the Pork

[couchslug]

The Alabamans want to save their pork, plain and simple.

Their efforts should be attacked as being pure pork-barrel politics and characterized as a deliberate attempt to save a bad program purely for the money.

Re:Kill the Pork

[jfengel]

And what is the enemy of small business? Taxes.

Taxes are not the enemy of small business. Most small business pay very little in tax, for the simple reason that taxes are paid on profits. Most small businesses that fail, fail without paying a dime of tax.

The enemy of small business is the fact that starting a business requires a lot of up-front cash and you need income immediately to start paying that back. This is a difficult proposition even for a well-managed, well-conceived business plan.

Right now, the enemy of small business is the fact that they can't get those loans to begin in this economic climate. Blaming it on "taxes" is just the knee-jerk response, without foundation.

Re:Kill the Pork

[Vellmont]

You know what creates jobs? Small business. The overwhelming majority of Americans are employed by small businesses. And what is the enemy of small business?

Big Business? Healthcare costs? Under-expanding? Over-expanding? Lack of a certain skill? Unfair foreign competition? Lack of access to loans to expand? Key people leaving?

Taxes.

Err.. OK. I've been in several small businesses over the years, and the number one thing they worry about sure as hell isn't taxes. It's on the radar of course, but who doesn't like to complain about taxes? Any business that sits around and worries about taxes is already a very successful business to worry about such small scale issues. If you want to help small business, you probably shouldn't start with one of the things of least concern. I'm really tired of the same-old-same-old line from the Republican party that "if we just lower taxes, that'll fix everything!". So here we are with a far lower tax rate than we had during the 90s, and the economy is in the shitter. How many times do you have to do the same thing which doesn't work to realize it's not working?

Re:Kill the Pork

[the eric conspiracy]

The flaw in this is that Bush did not actually lower taxes. To do that you also need to lower spending. What Bush did was to DEFER taxes by reducing current taxes and borrow the difference. Obviously this is completely untenable as a long term policy. These borrowing will have to be repaid, with the money coming from - you guessed it tax increases, or maybe more subtly as increased inflation.

These is something very fundamental here. Your taxes are equal to what government SPENDS. Not what it collects as tax revenue. Some of those taxes are due immediately, others are payable at a later date.

The idea that Bush's tax cuts improved revenues is transparently wrong - the didn't, revenues went down. Not only that but unemployment is very high now, and we have accumulated a large debt from those tax cuts that will hamper our economy.

We want Change|Wait, that means things will change

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical, people complain about taxes and wasteful spending, then shit themselves when the government stops spending wastefully ON THEM.

I guess I understand it. People don't really care about whether taxes are high or being spent wisely. They only care about how much of it goes to them. To most, the government is nothing more than a big ciculating fan that sucks money from somewhere and blows it to somewhere else. You jockey for position to stand where the biggest cash dunes collect, and from there use the money to shape the future direction of the wind.

That's all this is. It's got nothing to do with actual space exploration or engineering or research.

Re:Well, shoot, son

[Anonymous Coward]

In that case, I've got a few nigger jokes I've been itching to tell someone...

Hey, it's just humor right?

Re:Well, shoot, son

[PeeAitchPee]

Not so. Making fun of ignorant WHITES is always accepted. But attempt to make the same type of humorous blanket commentary about the ignorance of any other ethnic group, and you'll immediately be branded a brown people-hating racist.

Re:Well, shoot, son

[pieszynski]

why yes, it is just humour, a nigger joke is no more racist than one that starts "there's an englishman, an irishman and a scotsman" Racism doesn't lie in the words you use but in the actions you take. Calling someone a nigger, kike, wop, etc etc doesn't make you racist. Not hiring someone because they happen to be black, refusing to allow your jewish daughter to marry a muslim, putting a sign on your hotel that says "no irish" those sort of things are racist. If the word itself is racist then most hip hop should be labeled hate speech, instead we use these words as a crude marker: "if you say x you believe y" isn't a good enough way to deal with whats a very contentious issue.