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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."
Now, I dun know so much about rockets and flyin' to the moon and all that, but hooey, when you wanna start talkin' bout putting some downhome good ol' boys out of work, well, sir, I just gotta speak my mind. This ain't a threat, son. You take those jobs away from us here and God Almighty help us, we ain't gonna have nothin better to do than march on up to Washington and have us an ol' fashioned conference with each individual congresscritter that 'pposed us. Alabama style.
You catch my drift, fellas?
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.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
Not surprised Griffin is trying this. He's always had some agenda. When he took office, the constellation program was based on building a new capsule onto existing launch vehicles, while doing R&D on new launch vehicles and other approaches. (Essentially the exact same program that is being put back in place). He threw out years worth of development to develop 2 launch vehicles and manned capsule concurrently, which is a much more expensive and complicated process.
About the only thing that survived was the X-37 and that is because it is a USAF run program. It is scheduled to launch in April.
It is much, much easier to design a single system than interlocking systems. Each weight gain on Ares results in a weight loss on Orion. Until they finalize the design of the launch platform, they can not really make much of a guess as to the final design of the manned capsule. In the 1960's, they were able to do that for Saturn and the CSM because Von Braun did not believe the initial weight budgets for the proposed Saturn rocket, so he allowed for a large degree of error in those estimates before giving the base design requirements for the CSM. That did not happen with Ares and Orion. They made their mass budgets with little room for error, so any growth outside the projected mass had a rather large impact on Orion.
(Seriously, it was bizarre how Griffin came in and years of design work on X-38, OSP, CEV, X-33.. *everything* was thrown out. The one R&D program he could not touch that started in 2006 is set to fly a demo in about 2 months. X-38 and others were much further along in their development path than Orion is now. If he had not monkeyed with the OSP program, its a pretty reasonable guess we would be flying hardware now).
So, to recap:
Alabama congresscritters vote to cut taxes and argue that we should reduce government. The citizens call Obama everything from a socialist to a fascist, and argue that they are Taxed Enough Already (that's the TEA in teabagger) and that government is full of waste. Yet when the Democrats want to cut a program that hasn't produced in an effort to save money, the Alabamanites are upset?
Pure hypocracy.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Remember the Republican mottos, kids:
- Earmarks are bad, except in my district!
- Government spending can't create jobs, except in my district!
"Troll" ?!? Excuse me!?!?
That's how it works in Washington. We have the same thing here in GA. Saxby Chamblis (R) and the rest our mostly Republican congressional team bashes Obama's spending ALL the time but when it comes to the F-22 project (they're made here in Marietta), he's got his hand out just like any other politician.
Both parties are guilty of it. WTF is it with you people, someone makes an observation that's actually true but says something negative you mod it down?!?
Some of you people are such ignoramuses! Troll indeed!
This is the legacy of Ronald Reagan. He believed that if we replace federal workers as much as possible with private contractors, we could shift the size of government at will - increasing or decreasing the labor force in tune with the changing priorities and budgets.
The fallacy is that when you have federal tax dollars flowing into a locale, that locale becomes dependent on the influx. To cut that flow off - whether through salaries or contracts - means killing growth in a district. A district which will look to its congressman as their champion to right that "wrong." In effect, all we've done is add more overhead (contract administration on both sides, procurement processes, and profit for the contractors). Well, that and forced the core engineers and scientists out of NASA, so that when we really need continuity we can't get it.
There are things that can be outsourced efficiently. I outsource cleaning my office, office supplies, and telecommunications. If I chose a different vendor for any of those, it's no big deal. But when you're dealing with a $4T budget, it means that switching vendors or stopping a project has a major impact on whatever area your vendor was set up in. Sadly, we don't really have the money to pay everyone - no matter what your congressman promised two years ago.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
These taxes on small businesses ARE unfair, because they dramatically raise the bar for starting or operating a small business. You might argue that even if that tax were placed square on the employee, then businesses would have to raise their wages so that employees could afford to pay. And that's valid. But at least then it wouldn't be a half-hidden cost. It would be direct, and people would have a much better idea of where the money is coming from, and where it is going. Which is ALWAYS better.
So let me reiterate, for the record, that I am a small business owner, bringing several years experience to the discussion. I'm also the one who's absorbing all of this alleged unfairness.
In fact I do agree with you that it's ridiculous to assign half of each employee's FICA to the business rather than the employee. Unlike you I don't think it's ridiculous because it's unfair to the business, rather I think it's ridiculous because it's transparently just a tax on the employee that's being "hidden" by stashing it on the employer's books rather than on the employee's tax statement. Anyone who pays self-employment tax knows that the government will gladly take both halves from the worker when there's no business to hide it behind. And furthermore, any competent business owner makes hiring decisions based on loaded employee cost (including taxes, benefits, etc.) anyway, so they're already folding those cost into the employee's take-home wage. (Like I already said, the exception here is minimum-wage employees.)
You might argue that even if that tax were placed square on the employee, then businesses would have to raise their wages so that employees could afford to pay. And that's valid.
This is the entire point. I wish that the tax were placed transparently on the employee. But the existence of these taxes is hardly a secret and I'm confident that the market is pricing them in quite effectively. Moving them over to the employee's side of the ledger wouldn't magically make it easier to start or run a small business. It sounds great in a Slashdot post, but it's almost meaningless as public policy.
The only tangible exception to this rule is the case of minimum-wage employees. If you moved the employer's share of the tax onto the employee then thousands of fast food franchises would benefit, but they'd do it at the expense of their worst-paid employees. If you want to help small businesses, don't do it on the backs of people who are making sub-poverty-level wages.
All that said, let me say that on a personal level I really, really hate payroll taxes. Not because it hurts my business, but because it's a transparent ripoff. You see, payroll taxes only apply to the first $100k or so of income, so they're essentially a tax on the working class. Anyone with a really high income is paying a much lower tax rate. That would be ok if these taxes were actually being used to finance retirement benefits, but back in the 1980s a Republican President and a Republican Fed Chairman hiked them way above the level needed to fund benefits. That excess money was (and still is) being used to finance huge tax cuts which primarily benefit the wealthy. I see this as a crime against the American people and it absolutely disgusts me. So while I'd like to see these taxes reformed, I absolutely do not trust the Republican party to fix it. Just my two cents.