Slashdot Mirror
Congress Dumps James Webb Space Telescope
Teancum writes "On the list of items on the upcoming federal budget for 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives has announced they are going to cancel the continued development of the James Webb Space Telescope. While this debate is certainly still very much a preliminary draft, the road ahead for this project is now very much uncertain. In this time of budget cuts, it seems unlikely that this project is going to survive at this time. It certainly will be an uphill battle for fans of this telescope if they want to keep it alive."
Defense spending is hardly untouchable. Defense is about the only part of the Federal budget which has been consistently decreasing over the last 50 years as a percentage of GDP. It's ticked up a bit since 9/11, but is still lower than during Reagan's build-up in the 1980s, and nowhere near as high as during the Vietnam War.
The thing that's threatening to bust the budget is entitlements. Medicare and Medicaid speciically. Just the growth predicted for entitlements between now and 2035 will exceed the entire defense budget. Go read the CBO's long-term outlooks if you don't believe me. I'm not saying entitlements have to go, but any budget plan which refuses to change entitlements is doomed to fail before it even starts.
...No shit they paid it back. They bought treasury bonds with the money loaned to them at discount interest rates and sat on them until the treasury yields balanced their books. It was just a hand out by any other name. They repaid the loans with devalued capital, after using that money during a liquidity crunch to hostile takeover their competitors who didn't qualify for a government handout.
If you convert the loan to gold at the time it was made and then make the same conversion when it was repaid you'll see that the tax payer was robbed of nearly 200 billion dollars, the majority of which sailed off in to the sunset as golden parachutes and bonuses for the people who crashed the american economy.
The insult to injury here is that the Treasury department begged congress for unconditional trust and then turned right around and engaged in the largest example of graft in recorded human history - Carting wheelbarrows full of money out the back door in the form of secret purchases of toxic mortgages at 500% of their market value. The beneficiary? The treasury secretary's former employer Goldman Sachs and the new banking cartels: JP Morgan and Bank of America.
These assholes caused the crisis and in return were handed majority ownership of the entire american real estate market on the backs of the people who they cheated out of house and home.
Treason fails to communicate the gravity/magnitude of the events which you are so eager to forget. Why so forgiving? I suspect because holding a grudge would cause your illusion of democracy to dissolve if it meant that your favorite sock puppet was no less corrupt than his predecessor? Cognitive dissonance is a bitch ain't she?