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Paul Ryan's Record On Science and Government
sciencehabit writes "U.S. Representatives Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) don't have much in common when it comes to politics. Kucinich is a very liberal Democrat who's leaving Congress this January after being defeated in a primary election by a more moderate colleague. Ryan is a conservative leader and now the Republican Party's presumptive candidate for vice president. A dozen years ago, however, the two men found one thing they could agree on—killing the National Ignition Facility, a multibillion dollar laser fusion project at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The article goes on to explore other impacts Ryan could have on science as VP."
...and it's one of the most impressive scientific endeavors we've undertaken.
Yes, one of it's missions is "stockpile stewardship" -- maintaining the integrity of the United States nuclear stockpile without nuclear testing, via simulations and tests.
But it also has a goal of initiating "ignition": a sustained ("sustained" being relative, here) fusion reaction which produces more power than was put in.
Even if there is no immediate practical application, understanding various aspects of fusion, and the science it takes to get there, is critical to our energy future.
In short, like many military and national security projects, this is a truly dual-use.
The NIF just made history by firing its 192 beams to deliver more than 500 terawatts and 1.85 megajoules of energy to its target -- more than 1000 times the power the United States uses at any particular instant, and more than 100 times the power of any other laser.
We do need science like NIF, and I'm still pained by the US decision to kill the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), what was to be the most powerful particle accelerator in the world -- significantly more so than the LHC -- after 14 miles of tunnels were dug and over $2 billion spent.
I hope this article wasn't unintentionally accurate when it called the SSC the "high water mark of American science"...(must see photos by the way).
We NEED big science.
The VP is generally considered a waste product. You don't pick your VP to match your views you pick your VP to fill in the blanks in your own personality. Romney is generally a centrist so he needs a fairly right wing VP. Romney being a Mormon needs a more "Christian" VP although I am surprised he didn't pick a protestant. Also you pick a VP from a swing state. Wisconsin could go either way and has an OK number of electoral collage votes. But at the same time you can't make it look like you have picked a token VP that is unbelievable. Obama has the black vote locked up so a black VP would be a waste and might actually lose Romney some white vote. The same with women voters. A token woman would doubtfully unlock many votes and again might have lost votes that he otherwise owns. The key for both candidates is to get out the existing vote and that is who you are picking the VP for. When I say lose votes I mean that they stay home not that they vote for the other guy.
Where I worry is that Romney's wealth is built upon going into companies that aren't performing well and unlocking hidden wealth. Often this came by doing short term things like cutting R&D. The wealth would be "unlocked" and they would sell the company and make a pile of money. They did other interesting short term things like loading these companies up with debt. This all was great for them when they could cut and run but a country is the opposite. When you look at a policy now you need to think about the implications a century from now.
If defense were to be cut in half and schools spending doubled the implications on defense would be immediate. But the benefits from the school increases might be 20 years down the road. But it would be glorious 20 years from now.
I am a Canadian but it looks like the US suffers from the common malady of all democracies. Somehow we end up with choices that are all crap. In my life I have had the option of voting for one politician who turned out to be good. Somehow we need to be able to weed out these guys earlier in the process. Or maybe eliminate the party system?
How can we have any hope that these guys(most world politicians) will spend wisely on science when they won't even listen to the majority of the population who want the war on drugs to end. Not a peep on an issue that is destroying the culture and economy of the US. This goes way past the issue of who some guy picked to be his spare.
Hardly. We are not managing the economy very well at the moment but that is very different from "broke".
Nice use of a "dog whistle".
What, exactly, is a "welfare state"?
Actually, done correctly, it will do a LOT for the deficit.
And, done correctly, it will do a lot to get manufacturing jobs back in this country.
Which will do a lot to get the middle class growing again.
Which will further help with the deficit and the economy.
I think you've just revealed the limitations of your position. You use the word "socialist" and you don't know what it means.
So just to be clear, you believe 13% is too high a tax rate for Romney level wealth?
Are you fucking insane?
Factors like, say, how much the non-lowest-bidder was willing to contribute to the selection committee's re-election campaigns?
Of course, the selection committee will say the contributions had nothing to do with picking that vendor - they looked at the company's skills and track record, and decided that, all things considered, this really is the best overall value even if it's not the lowest bid.
But you can't. Like I said these contractors did things by the book. They aren't doing anything illegal. It's just that in a business relationship sometimes you let things slide because both sides want the project to succeed so everyone can make a profit and can work together in the future. To government contractors it doesn't matter if a project is successful. As long as they follow the legality of the contract requirements they can make as much money as they can get away with. It's not like the government is going to run out of money.
Here is an example. We needed a test bed that you could mount a 150kh mass. Then accelerate it at 30m/s^2 for 4m and bring it to a stop in another 4m. It had to do this in the horizontal and in the vertical +z direction. Pretty simple request for proposal. A local company got the bid. They built it and we went to the acceptance test. It could do it horizontally but it didn't have the power to reach 30m/s^2 in the +z. We told them they needed to fix it. They said it met the requirement because you have to take into account that just sitting still it was resisting 9.8m/s^2 of acceleration from gravity. We said BS. We took it to the lawyers and they said since it was a small business contract they were going to side with the company. I then resigned the part that held the test mass to remove enough mass to get back the capabilities we needed. We did those mods on the tax pays dime.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Not only that, the private sector has far, far higher salaries especially as you go up the food chain. You can argue about whether that is waste or not, but it adds cost.
I've worked at a national lab and worked and consulted for a few Fortune 50 corporations, and while there is no apples to apples comparison, you get a hell of a bang for the buck at the labs. Frankly, I think some corps are lucky the labs are not competing in the market. Every time I visited one major diversified international corp based in MN, half the department was perpetually either checking their 401Ks, shooting the breeze, or in Cheeto-synchronous orbit around the vending machines. The only people worth anything were the dept manager, her second in command, and two student interns who were working their collective asses off. The labs had a few useless turds, sure, but mostly at the technician level, and not among the PEs and PhDs.
I'd planned on saying the only companies I've worked at that were more efficient than academic research labs were small start ups. I then realized the small start ups were less efficient than the labs I know too.
Anything big wastes money by the boatload. Avoid bigness unless absolutely necessary. In science, we usually avoid bigness whenever possible, just ain't always possible. In the corporate world, they try achieving bigness though stock value destroying mergers simply to justify a higher salary for the CEO.
If the U.S. doesn't do the science, someone else will. And someone else will reap the rewards. American PhD who wish to actually *do* science are already moving to places like China. America is done.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Back in college I worked at a restaraunt. The dishwasher there was a nice guy, and a good worker. Not a rocket scientist. He'd been working there a very long time. He'd been turning down raises for a decade, not because he wanted less money, but because it would put him above some arbitrary line that allowed him to have low rent housing. That's the kind of sillyness that 'step' based systems encourage, whether they be in assistance programs or part of the tax code.
One thing that never seems to get much mention is that you can have a "simple" progressive tax. I think people very much like the idea of a flat tax because it seems simple and fair. I also think the "skin in the game" argument has merit. There is no reason we can't do something reasonable like say 5% of income at the bottom, XX% at the top, and a nice smooth line between those two whose equation calculates your taxes. Screw deductions. You pay on your real income. No loop holes, the super rich don't get off, everyone has stake (and a reason to pay attention to gov't efficienty), and it's simple. If people can't afford to pay 5% in taxes, then jack the mimimum wage to a reasonable level. The money comes from somewhere anyway, paid to the government or paid to workers. The mechanisms for the payments are very important even of the dollars in your pocket remains the same.
It seems absurd to me that with capital gains you are taxed less than someone who actually had to earn that money. It seems equally absurd that 50% of americans don't pay any taxes at all, and a good chunk of those actually get money back.
When you have to depend on the goverment just to make ends meet, that is a very, very bad thing. And that is what 50%+ of us do.