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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 article acknowledges that the LINL project still suffers from some of the fiscal management problems which Ryan objected to, which were some of the same problems the SSC suffered from as well. I guess we are to conclude that wasting taxpayer money on bureaucratic snafus is necessary for the advancement of science.
When was the last time we had one that didn't flip flop? The straight shooters usually don't make it past the primaries.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Every branch of government and every government funded project wastes money. Every. Single. One. Are we to conclude that we should just shutdown all government because it isn't 100% efficient with its cash flow? Given the potential for huge scientific advances, the interest such projects can invoke in our children, and the relatively paltry amount of spending in comparison to other government agencies and departments, like DARPA and the DoD, we can easily justify absorbing the budget overflow.
There is no memory shortage. yes I have heard of XFCE. Go away.
We NEED big science.
And we need health care...
and welfare...
and food stamps...
and national defense...
and the space program is really important...
and drug rehabilitation programs...
and the FDA...
and the EPA...
and without the NEA our kids won't learn about art and learning about art has been shown a correlation with higher math and science scores...
and we need to protect our borders...
and did I mention healthcare??
Nearly everything our government does is important to someone but it's clear from our high taxes and massive deficit that we just can't afford it all. Cutting waste will help but it won't enough. Some programs that are good and useful need to be shrunk or eliminated too. Doing so is of course unpopular. Whether or not this particular program was the best one to cut, I'm glad Ryan has the guts to make the hard decisions that need to be made and deal with the political fallout.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
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.
Nearly everything our government does is important to someone but it's clear from our high taxes and massive deficit that we just can't afford it all.
What're you, poor or middle class?
All sardonic social commentary aside, tax rates, at least on the wealthiest of Americans (that's not you nor I, BTW), is the lowest it's been in over half a century.
Not to say the government of today isn't chock-full of waste and bloat, just pointing out facts.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Politifact is useless. You won't believe me so I won't even cite, Google it yourself.
The important numbers are the percentage of the budget shouldered by the top income earners vs their share of total income. Go look it up and compare it to Europe. Anyone who even utters the phrase 'fair share' must first go see that number for themselves and THEN define exactly how much more they think they can extract before they say 'fuck it' and go somewhere else. I want a percentage. Define it.
Democrat delenda est
I'm from Kucinich's district, and I'm hardly surprised he worked with Paul Ryan. For instance, he worked a lot with Ron Paul trying to cut back military spending and Iraq War funding, because the two of them arrived to the same conclusion for completely different reasons.
For the most part, it's been a record of futility, though: His own party's leadership hates him because he doesn't toe the party line on issues like health care (he once kicked Nancy Pelosi out of his office when she tried to force his hand). And of course John Boehner and friends hate him for being a Democrat. So none of his bills or resolutions make it anywhere unless he has support from other backbenchers, hence the strange bedfellows.
I am officially gone from
You may think taxes are low, but the U.S. corporate tax rate is the highest in the world.
You might be able to raise taxes even more on just the working class, but you'd not come within spitting distance of even eliminating the DEFICIT, much less actual debt.
The only serious way out involves LOTS of cuts, everywhere. If you pretend otherwise you are simply ignorant or on a mission to doom us all. Sure some taxes will be raised also, but it's foolish to pretend taxing will get you all the pretty baubles of government rule you have grown accustomed to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Every branch of government and every government funded project wastes money. Every. Single. One. Are we to conclude that we should just shutdown all government
Are we NOT to conclude that we should shut down wasteful programs, that we should just carry on?
Eventually you run out of other people's money, and then what?
Wasting money in one program means the eventual starvation of programs that do NOT waste money. If no-one is willing to stand up to boondoggles like the bridge to nowhere, the whole government will collapse and how does that help anyone?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Are we NOT to conclude that we should shut down wasteful programs, that we should just carry on?
The answer to waste in a program isn't always to shut down the program. Sometimes you should get rid of the waste within the program.
Ziggitz is right. While we all love to grouse about government waste, government is not really all that unique. The stereotypical hyper-efficient corporation is a myth - most of us know of stunning wastes of money at our own employer. And our vaunted household finances, while smaller in magnitude, probably include some waste too.
Every human endeavor has waste, and if scrutinized under a microscope, something that somebody could interpret as corruption is nearly everywhere too.
We're not always angels, and we're not always robots. But let's not let that stop us from doing what good we can.
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.
Name one government or corporate program that doesn't waste any money. There is a big difference between mismanagement and wasting small amounts of resources. You're right in that projects like the bridge to nowhere should be stopped. The problem from people I know involved in government projects is that companies will bid low to get a contract and then make up their money in change orders. This is the same whether it is an IT project, a construction job, or a defense contract.
Defense contractors are so good at it that they build factories everywhere imposing enormous inefficiency transporting goods needlessly. If the government tries to reign in this project then thousands of jobs are lost across many districts impacting a large number of representatives. So there is no incentive to fix the inefficiency to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars but we can instead tackle waste in small places to the tune of tens of millions. Makes a lot of sense doesn't it?
If you think Ryan is some sort of deficit hawk looking out for the nation's debt and deficit, you haven't seen his voting record over the last ten years.
There is no memory shortage. yes I have heard of XFCE. Go away.
You won't believe me so I won't even cite.
This is perhaps the most cowardly comment ever made on Slashdot.
But what if it's a pro-reality bias as well? What kind of balance are you hoping for anyway? I actually thought the article itself was as unbiased as possible. I read slashdot in part because I am a scientist and I care deeply about these kinds of issues. Also science funding is not strictly a democrat/republican issue. The Clinton presidency (actually the congressional election that followed it) marked the beginning of the end of basic science in the U.S. with the cancellation of the SSC.
I want to hear about our candidates individual science policies before I vote. I'm not voting on the basis of party affiliation. It's very hard these days to squeeze out details of science policy, but this article does a good job. My take on the prospects of the U.S. remaining relevant in global, basic science is:
Obama: bad
Romney: maybe slightly worse?
Ryan: horrible
Expectations given the economy: poor
This matters to me, and if my conclusion is wrong due to a media bias, then please let me know! But balance is not bias. I don't need 10 climatologists and 10 anti-global-warming creationists to get the facts on global warming. To gauge Ryan's stance on basic science funding I need nothing more than a careful analysis of his own budget proposals and voting record. This is great stuff! By contrast, in the 2004 election I searched and searched through platforms and speeches to find any mention of basic science at all. I eventually found very brief statements from Kerry and Bush deeply buried in lengthy platform statements. Kerry said that basic science should remain on a par with applied science spending. Bush said that basic science should be privately funded. Since industry has proven to be irrelevant in recent years (post Bell labs) when it comes to basic science, I voted ... well I got outvoted.
The same is also true of every Business project as well. The idea that a project can be ran without wasting money is ridiculous. Evidently these people are supposed to have future vision to know how things will change and what paths wont work in advance.
Nobody is forced at gunpoint to invest in any given business. The same is not true for Government programs. If you don't pay your taxes, sooner or later men with guns will come arrest you. Nice try at a strawman though.
As numerous sources have pointed out, his proposals do not work mathematically. Coming to even this conclusion is problematic because Romney maintains his budget proposals cannot be scored". I don't think this satisfies a common-sense definition of a "clear plan."
The OMB submits a budget recommendation every year. The House also passes a budget every year, the last one was passed under the Budget Control Act.
You're confusing a knock against Senate Democrats with a knock against Barack Obama, a complaint which is itself baseless and relying on semantics.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
well, i can think of LOTS of 'projects' that could've saved the trillions of dollars, in absolute, 100% waste. The B1 bomber. The B2 bomber. The stealth bomber. The F22. The F35. The war in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan. Shall I go on?
Cutting welfare payments to red states would fix the budge problem in a few years. If they don't want socialism, and they don't pay taxes b/c they are too poor, then why should my blue state profits help 'em?
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I've worked in private industry and for government and let me tell you the difference from what I've seen.
In business if you put out a quote for a project you can shop around and use other companies reputation and try to come to a decision.If there is is something vague they will call you and try to figure it out. They will sometimes let little changes go. But sometimes they won't. Let's say you pick a company and they nickel and dime you on changes. You finish that project and decide never to use them again if you though you got screwed.
In government it's the opposite. The lowest bidder get's the job as long as they have the capabilities to do it. If there are two ways to interpret something they intentionally pick the wrong way and deliver it so that they can get paid to make the changes. They are legally right. And next time there is a job they are right back in line and you can't bar them from bidding. A companies reputation for screwing over the government doesn't prevent them from winning the bid. What this does is cause the government to waste even more time and effort to make "perfect" requirements. But as any of us know when you are building something from scratch your requirements are going to evolve.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Every branch of government and every government funded project wastes money
The same can largely be said of the private sector as well.
That we are already far more progressive in our tax policy than countries with outright socialists in charge. In other words, we are almost certainly maxed out and probably way on the bad side of the Laffer Curve.
You haven't cited anything to support this. The fact is, no one has any idea what side of the Laffer Curve we are on. Odds are, we're on the side that says we're collecting too little in taxes.
The bottom half are already getting more from the State than they pay in all taxes combined.
That's not saying much when you take into account the fact that they don't have shit to start with. You make it sound like the bottom half is driving around in Rolls Royces.
Ten percent. For everybody with absolutely no deductions, classes of income (capital gains, unearned, etc) credits (refundable or none) or anything.
Ahh, so you're a Regressive. Glad to have that cleared up.
Because anyone with half a brain can realize that "flat" taxes are inherently regressive, and shift most of the tax burden to the poor and middle class. 10% from someone making $10,000/year is felt far, far more than 10% from someone making $100k/year, and that is felt more than 10% from someone making $1MM/year.
Not to mention the fact that the 10% would not actually bring in enough revenue.
The tax should be even at all levels of income, period end of statement. That is the Constitutional answer, as well as the most logical and "Fair". If I pay 13%, then some person making a bazillion dollars a year should pay 13%. If that person pays 10%, I pay 10%.
No. This is inherently Regressive, and has absolutely nothing to do with "Constitutionality".
It doesn't hurt the rich at all, like everything it rolls downhill and hurts US
A rich person paying their fair share in taxes does NOT hurt "us". It helps us.
Higher tax rates force the rich to switch from asset appreciation and economic growth to wealth preservation and tax avoidance.
And they magically decide to pay taxes when they're lower?
I see the same stuff in business though. Anytime consultants are brought in I see it again and again. I saw it big time when dealing with IBM and even bigger when dealing with Oracle. This problem is not unique to government but it definitely happens a lot more and to large excess which is unfortunate, tragic, and completely unnecessary.
Of course parent I was replying to was trying to say this problem was unique to government implying that government only wastes money and that's simply untrue. I look at hundreds of low-income housing projects just in Arizona and even though the projects come in over budget they do a great deal in helping people get back on their feet after prolonged periods of unemployment. I look at the alternatives and feel like I have to conclude that it was worth it. Hordes of homeless have a tendency to cause a whole host of other problems and I suspect when you add up all the other costs that you at least break even.
There definitely needs to be more accountability in regards to government contracts. My impression is that there simply isn't enough personell available to oversee all the projects that are in motion. Of course this is just because I have friends that work in government so it's mostly hearsey as to the true causes of the bloated spending.
I would love to see a GA database that includes a company's history. If they are always over budget then that should definitely be considered when accepting a low bid from them.
what a cool experiment that would be!!
red states 'hate soshalizm'? fine, let them stand on their own. no federal funding, no federal support, etc etc.
all the blue states benefit since they're not afraid of the concept of sharing. (boggles my mind: all evolved people understand that when you share, you all win. why do people keep trying to deny this?)
maybe after the red states endure some hardships, they'll understand what being part of a civilized society is all about!
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
We NEED big science.
And we need health care... and welfare... and food stamps... and national defense... and the space program is really important... and drug rehabilitation programs... and the FDA... and the EPA... and without the NEA our kids won't learn about art and learning about art has been shown a correlation with higher math and science scores... and we need to protect our borders... and did I mention healthcare?? Nearly everything our government does is important to someone but it's clear from our high taxes and massive deficit that we just can't afford it all. Cutting waste will help but it won't enough. Some programs that are good and useful need to be shrunk or eliminated too. Doing so is of course unpopular. Whether or not this particular program was the best one to cut, I'm glad Ryan has the guts to make the hard decisions that need to be made and deal with the political fallout.
Yep we do need all that, and I can think of three things that we don't need. We don't need to spend more than the rest of the planet combined on our military, we don't need a massively expensive police/surveillance state, and we don't need to have almost trivially small tax rates for the richest people. Imagine that! We could get rid of a handful of things we don't need and be able to pay for the things we do need!
-- QED
What are the alternatives to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security? Let the old, poor and jobless just die? Are you comfortable with this?
The parent offered one solution right off the bat: economic growth. Guess you missed that. There are damn few problems in the US that wouldn't be fixed by some actual wealth creation. Here are some others ideas:
2. Means test Social Security. Most recipients are fully enfranchised members of the wealthiest class of humans in the history of the species — the US elderly. Those SS checks are icing on their cake and they don't actually need as much as their getting, regardless of what they pay the AARP to tell your representatives.
3. Stop the crazy fast growth in medical costs. There are no solutions when the problem keeps growing 8% a year. AMA regulatory capture, trial lawyers and academic monopoly are the biggest parts of this.
4. Reform the tax code. You can't fund benefits when nobody is paying taxes. The lower half of the income histogram is paying nothing to the Treasury. The corps and the rich are skating by as well with byzantine tax law written by tax attorneys for tax evasion.. Lower rates and eliminate most of the deductions and exemptions with a net result of a few percent higher net revenue.
Do those four things and the problem is solved, assuming the saved/collected revenue isn't then used to buy votes with other new programs.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Nobody is forced at gunpoint to invest in any given business. The same is not true for Government programs. If you don't pay your taxes, sooner or later men with guns will come arrest you. Nice try at a strawman though.
That's the price you pay for living on a country with a government. Not coincidentally, everyplace with a decent standard of living has a very expensive government.
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.
The lowest bidder that could claim to do the job always got the work anywhere I worked, except when there was nepotism involved (*cough*Paul Ryan*Cough).
Oh, come off it! Businesses and Gov't both screw up and get screwed. It's part of buying goods and services. The gov't stands out from private enterprise only because whenever society needs something done and it's too expensive to get anyone to pay for it we have the gov't do it. So the numbers are bigger and the loses are too.
Like cars? Like Roads? Guess what, a highway system was too expensive for private industry to bother with. Too much investment, there were better places to make short term gains. Same is true for drugs. You didn't think those companies actually PAID for their research, did you? Lately they can't even get the US gov't to pay for it (deficit cuts you see), and it's all done in Europe. They the drug Co's move it, do a little bit of testing, and release a product. Privatize the profits and socialize the loses. Capitalism at it's finest.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
Give it a rest with this tired "other people's money" line. You're not fooling anybody but yourself.
What do you think taxes are?
You are not misdirecting anyone reading Slashdot, as much as you want to.
And I've never been in an organization, public or private, that didn't waste *some* money/time/other resources. It's nearly impossible not to.
Nor have I. The difference is that a company cannot waste what money they have forever, or they cease to get money.
A publicly funded project can keep going on indefinitely regardless of stupidity or lack of results.
There is FAR less accountability and oversight in a public project.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Paying taxes is an obligation of a citizen, and has been for somewhere between six and ten thousand years. Don't like it, move to Somalia.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You don't seriously believe trickle-down economics actually work, do you? It may interest you to know that with the incredibly high unemployment in the US right now, and the rampant foreclosures and bankruptcy in the working class, the NYSE is trading at record highs, and corporate income is higher than it was 5 years ago...
You haven't cited anything to support this. The fact is, no one has any idea what side of the Laffer Curve we are on. Odds are, we're on the side that says we're collecting too little in taxes.
Actually, a group of economists crunched the numbers and found that the optimal top marginal tax rate was somewhere between 70% and 85%. So we do know which side of the Laffer curve we're on, and it's the side that means that lower tax rates mean less revenue and higher tax rates mean higher revenue. In other words, just like you'd expect, not the bizzaro world where up is down. And yes, reality backs up what the researchers found: For instance, when Bush cut taxes from 39.5% to 35% in 2001, revenue dropped.
The Laffer Curve argument is basically a fraud. You can make the argument that government should always have low taxes, but you can't make it on that basis and have a leg to stand on.
I am officially gone from
10% from someone making $10,000/year is felt far, far more than 10% from someone making $100k/year
Sure, because how it "feels" should be an important factor to consider.
"His name was James Damore."
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
With Ryan as the VP he will no longer be able to vote on his own bill :/ With him out of the House, negotiating the bill falls on John Boehner and Eric Cantor.
If I want the Ryan bill, my most logical course of action is to vote for a Republican House rep, and a Tea Partier in the primary.
As it is, Romney has already started undoing the Ryan budget's Medicare cuts, because he's running for president.
That's the most unconstitutional thing I've ever heard. President's don't "ram" budgets through; don't you remember the Bush administration, when the most pork-laden, deficit-spending omnibuses were drafted and signed without even token opposition from the White House?
I'm not telling anyone to vote for anybody, someone made an argument that had no basis in fact, and I corrected it.
Meanwhile, "blithering incompetence" compared to what? Was the Iraq War "competent"? Was holding House voting open for three hours in order to strong-arm reps into voting for Medicare Part D "competent"? Was the Senate floor debate on Terri Schaivo's life support "competent"? Was flat employment and a lost decade of stagnant wages "competent"? Was the response to Hurricane Katrina "competent"?
I don't know if you're defending Republicans, but I don't understand the "competence" criterion. If running government was about "competence" and "logic" we wouldn't need to hold election. The whole point is that rational, very smart people disagree, and that people, Republican and Democrat, are perfectly happy to live with unsolved problem X if it gets them objective Y. What you call incompetence I call priorities.
How does a vice president "temper" a president? VPs have no institutional authority -- at least Cheney had a Rolodex, a long memory and a history with the Bush family. Did Quayle temper Bush I? Did Gore temper Clinton? Does Joe Biden temper Obama?
Your complete interpretation of American politics is ahistorical and groundless, and seems to go no further than shallow sloganeering. It is bullshit. Which is not to say you're voting for the wrong guy, but good luck convincing anyone else.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Have you ever tried making a budget with income below the poverty line? It's fairly enlightening. Any cut hurts, even just 5%. The GP didn't mean "feel" in a pseudo-psychological viewpoint, but in a "how much money do I have left" viewpoint. The guy making 100k/year, if getting higher taxes, will hold off on the 2012 TV and keep the 2010 one, or he'll take a smaller car next time, or he'll do 3-week vacations every two years instead of every year. The guy making 20k/year can't cut shit. He's already tight between the rent, food, transportation, hygiene, school/business and perhaps the occasional entertainment.
If you can't realize that living off 90k instead of 100k is much easier than living off 18k instead of 20k, you haven't put much thought into it.
Coincidentally, the CBO analysis of the Ryan plan shows a shutdown of the entire government within a decade except defense, medicare, and social security.
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3708
Does that seem sane, smart, wise?
What is with this insistance on keeping a defense budget over the total of the next 20 nations combined? Could we perhaps get by on a defense budget over the total of the next 10 nations combined and leave a little money for the SEC, the agencies that prevent massive chemical spills, those who fund the national high way system, perhaps a small space program, etc?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If you think there's no waste in private industry, I suggest spending a few years at a Fortune 50. Or a startup, for that matter -- everywhere I've been has focused on optimizing for one thing and failed at optimizing others, with an end result of massive waste. Whether it's spending massive man-hours to reimplement the wheel in-house because we're unwilling to spend any actual cash (startups!), disregarding opportunity costs (and man-hours) in hopeless pursuit of big contracts that never pan out (different startups!), pursuing false economies by optimizing for an individual department's budget rather than the profitability of the company as a whole (enterprise!), preferring to buy a "platform" that needs just as much customization to convert to the desired product as that product would cost to build in the first place (different enterprise!), but... well.
I've never seen any kind of a business run in a truly efficient manner. Profitably, yes, but good enough to satisfy those who would call any waste justification for a shutdown? Never.