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'YouCut' Targets National Science Foundation Budget
jamie writes "As some of you may have heard, the incoming Republican majority in Congress has a new initiative called YouCut, which lets ordinary Americans like me propose government programs for termination. So imagine how excited I was to learn that YouCut's first target — yes, its first target — was that notoriously bloated white elephant, the National Science Foundation."
The smart move is to cut YouCut, because your Congressman should already be cutting the crap you dislike,
Rocket technology
Early computers
Internet
Countless advances made by publicly funded scientists
Of course you could argue that EVENTUALLY, all these would have been done by private interests. I don't believe that is true, but even if it is... the question is becomes how long would it have taken and how closely would it be controlled?
Great Intellect...
From time to time, I act as a grant reviewer and panelist for the NSF. I can quite frankly attest that the NSF is anything but bloated. The number of excellent and virtuous projects that do not get funded is always a crying shame. Of course, some proposals are utter rubbish. However, far fewer projects get funded than are deserving of funding. Not only that, the NSF provide us with a small *per deium*, from which we have to pay our own hotel, meals, transportation and everything else, apart from travel costs. One is lucky to break even, when working for the NSF. In addition, it is hard work! Our lunch break is usually just long enough to run across the road to a food court and then we eat as we work. In the evenings, there are summaries to write. I only do it because I believe that it makes the world a better place. However, if this is what the Republicans are intending, there will be no need for more business bailouts, as they will just outsource the whole country to multinationals (who usually don't pay tax, due to off-shore 'arrangements'). Thus, this is a strategy only Osama bin Laden could rationally endorse.
Your math is wrong. Not everyone pays the same amount in taxes. So you cant average it out over the entire population. People that pay no federal income tax paid $0 dollars to Defense and Science.
The three biggest items in the national budget are: (2009 numbers)
Dept. of Health and Human services $834 Billion
Dept. of Defense $685
Social Security $678
For perspective:
NSF $6.5 Billion
Interest due for the national debt $189 Billion
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1305
Ummm, I hate to break it to you, but it WASN'T in the 90s that the U.S. debt soared. Since WWII, there are have been precisely two periods where the ratio of U.S debt to GDP rose in a sustained way. The first was under Reagan/Bush, when under Reagan especially, the (democratic) congress consistently approved a budget that was lower than what the president recommended. The second was under Bush Jr./Obama. Regarding the latter, Obama isn't spending at any greater rate than Bush Jr. did, but at least he has the excuse that deficit spending is the only thing that has kept the economy from going into a full blown depression.
The bottom line however, isn't that this is the end of the world, the U.S. just needs to ensure that the deficit spending is being spent on things that will improve the economy in the long-term. However, tax cuts are absolutely the worst way to improve the GDP in the long-term. It would be better to spend the money on replacing aging infrastructure and building new infrastructure, or other things that have a direct and unambiguous effect on the economy.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
The Republicans don't have a majority in Congress, they have a majority in the United States House, one of the two houses of Congress, the other house, the United States Senate retains a Democratic majority.
DARPA's research predates Metcalf's Law by more than a decade. As a leader in network research Metcalf must have been famliar with ARPANet. It is quite likely that work influenced Metcalf's perception of networking. Regardless, Metcalf's law doesn't say anything about network reliability.
Prior to DARPA the prevailing theory was that circuit-switched networks were the way to go. The entire phone system was built on circuit-switched networks. There is no reason to think a packet-switched network would have suddenly become popular without a little prodding by the government.
Long after DARPA's research, commercial entities such as AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe had their own ideas about how computer networks should function. If a commercial entity had invented the Internet it would have functioned like the AOL of 1993 where all content has to be approved by a single corporation. That corporation would collect a tax on all transactions. It would kick out anyone it did not agree with. It would be far, far different than the Internet we have today and it would have undoubtedly happened much later.
My dad was a protesting baby boomer. He was and is a republican. He strongly supported the Vietnam War. He strongly supported building more nuclear weapons, more bombers, more submarines, and so on. He loved Reagan's proposed defense against ICBMs.
Yep, he'd be out there holding a sign to protest against nuclear treaties, defense cutbacks, etc. He got arrested for chopping down political signs for liberals. He would attend rallies for republicans. He did his best to support Goldwater. He wrote to congresscritters and talked to several in person. He wrote letters to the editor.
These days he spends his time at Tea Party meetings. He's certain that Obama wasn't born in the USA, based on an admission by Obama's own grandmother.
Your willful ignorance amuses me greatly. There's this wonderful site called Google you can use to look up various facts and figures on issues like this. It takes literally 5 minutes to find multiple sources for the obvious fact that as much as a dirty spending whore as Dubya was, Obama will far, far outpace him in spending.
At least jump to the usual mealy mouthed whore excuse and claim it's because he had to clean up "Booosh"'s failures.
What's funny is even most of the Obama projections are lies, he'll end up spending far more than projected because it's the conservative (i.e. made up) numbers they tend to use, in real life we'll spend a lot more on everything - especially health care.
No it's not that simple. I wish the people saying this would go to the Congressional Budget Office web site and actually try reading some of the budget projections instead of parroting some line which happens to fit their worldview.
In a nutshell, U.S. military spending has more or less been steadily declining as a percentage of the GDP and percentage of the budget, up until 9/11. After 9/11 it started to tick upwards, but is still near the lowest it's been since WWII. It's actually one of the few parts of the budget which has been getting smaller over the last 50 years.
What's killing the budget are the social programs. Specifically Medicare/Medicaid, though Social Security rears its head every now and then. Medicare and Medicaid are projected to grow so much and so quickly that if we completely eliminated all military spending - dropped it to zero - within about 20-25 years the growth in Medicare/Medicaid will have consumed all of the savings.
This isn't a conservative problem, this isn't a liberal problem. It's a straight-up accounting/math problem, and I know most of the folks here are pretty good at math. Put aside any preconceptions you may have. Go read the the CBO report on the budget. See for yourself where the problems in the budget are.
Interesting isn't it that it only takes a few minutes to look up the fact that 1.7856 trillion was added to the national debt between Oct 1, 2008 and Sept 30, 2009 (Bush's last budget period)... but between Oct 1, 2009 and Sept 30, 2010 only 1.6411 trillion was added (Obama's first budget period).
The first projections for deficit for Obama's first budget was 1.8 trillion.. which happens to be more than it actually was. Your suggestion that Obama's numbers are "conservative" are basically bullshit.
Are the numbers good? Hell no. They'd be much better if that fucking idiot Bush hadn't cut taxes, and they'd be better in the future if the fucking conservatives didn't think that the top 2% of earners needed to keep their ridiculous tax cuts.
But lets lay blame where it goes... fucking idiots who fell for the bullshit trickle down economics crap, and the fucking idiots that don't understand that if you spend a dollar, you should be taking in a dollar.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's