Slashdot Mirror
US Scientific R&D Could Face Fiscal Cliff Doom
The tough economic times have had a huge effect on scientific research and development funding. The looming "fiscal cliff" may be the last straw for many programs. "The American science programs that landed the first man on the moon, found cures for deadly diseases and bred crops that feed the world now face the possibility of becoming relics in the story of human progress.
American scientific research and development stands to lose thousands of jobs and face a starvation diet of reduced funding if politicians fail to compromise and halt the United States' march towards the fiscal cliff's sequestration of federal funds."
into armed conflict by private banks, who, through their monetary policy are exerting undue political influence on the White House. It matters not which party sits in power, they have very little choice but to do what they are doing.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Um, there is a little detail you may have missed. The President doesn't have the AUTHORITY to change the tax structure. Congress does;
Well, no, he does not -- but he was leading the negotiations between D and R earlier and the only reason these negotiations fell apart is because the ratio of 80% spending cuts and 20% tax increases was still not acceptable to the tea party.
I think they were seriously hoping to negotiate to 100% and 0% compromise.
yet - gee - the same electorate returned who returned Obama also returned a Republican majority in the all important House of Representatives.
Not sure what your point is. Representatives are not a single unit (like the President). There is a significant ratio of incumbent retention, mostly due to gerrymandering. Barely 5% of the races tend to be competitive or even in doubt (unless the incumbent retires). I wouldn't read into this at all.
You add the productive folks in with the working poor who do all the distasteful, oftentimes dangerous jobs and you start to wonder why exactly we keep the "managerial class" around
We just kicked the president of Egypt in the teeth by threatening his pipeline of money via "Foreign Aid" into doing the right thing in this war between Israel and the Palestinians, resulting in the continued existence of our only really friendly country in the middle east, and in our not having to get involved militarily ourselves to achieve that. Without "foreign aid", we'd either have to abandon Israel to annihilation by the Muslim Hordes, or come to their aid with troops.
IOW, we're getting a lot of bang for our "foreign aid" buck, or more properly renamed, our "bribe to behave" which is what foreign aid really is.
The whole "fiscal cliff" doom the fox network is spreading (check who owns redneck eh discovery) just means that if congress digs in its heels and does nothing the President gets his way by default because tax breaks that the repubicans want to extend and increase for the rich will END!
Obama can just sit back and relax if he has the balls, he can get far more taxes by simply waiting out the republicans then trying to bargain with them. The smarter republicans know this (both of them) and are not at all please with their redneck counterparts trying to create a crisis that only exist in republican eyes.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
How about withdrawing tax benefits given to religious groups and instead tax Churches like any other business and use the money to fund tax breaks for science. As far as I can see science has done many things to make our lives better in recent years where as religion has just stood in the way of the progress of science.
Oh, and only about $700 billion is military, and much of that is spent in the U.S., so cutting it means less industry, less employed people, etc.
The GP is right. You must be blinded by "imperialism syndrome" to address 700 BILLIONS of Dollars with the adverb "just".
A lot of the problems USA faces today is the result of the very same policy you're defending as if means "more industries, more employed people, etc".
We must talking about efficiency. USA took 10 years and 2 TRILLION Dollars and something just to kill a single man. USA is clearly holding, I mean, doing something very wrong.
Granted, I'm not saying everything is wrong, neither that all the military expenses are unnecessary...
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
I'm happy if we tax the rich more, but our real problems are :
(1) Spending money on wasteful harmful shit, i.e. warfare (DoD, CIA, etc.), police state (FBI, NSA, etc.), drug war (DEA, etc.), etc.
(2) Permitting the financial industry to extract such insane rents on everything by not regulating them.
(3) Subsidizing established industries, especially oil, nuclear, and agricultural subsidies.
We could cut taxes by massive amounts if we halted all that waste, corruption, and exploitation.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
It needs to cut its budget by 50% or more. Many programs and federal departments need eliminated entirely.
The only programs that truly matter as far as the deficit is concerned are Medicare/Medicaid, Defense and Social Security. Those three together account for about two-thirds of the US budget. Get those programs under control and the problem is solved. All other discretionary spending combined accounts for less than 20% of the budget. Either we need to raise taxes to fully fund the programs we seem to want or we need to cut those programs to a level of taxation we are willing to accept. Either way will work but any argument about anything beyond Medicare and Defense (Social Security is easy to fix and self funding) is either naive or political pandering.
That's only some $650,000 per person that the government has borrowed on behalf of each and every one of you. No problem, right?
A meaningless statistic. As big as the debt is as a percent of GDP, we've had larger debts in our past that have been dealt with just fine, most notably after WWII. That doesn't mean it isn't serious but your attempt to frame the issue doesn't really address how the debt would be dealt with. Corporations pay quite a lot of tax and can be made to pay more if need be. A relatively small percentage of the population has a vast portion of the nation's wealth. Furthermore all the debt the US government has is denominated in US dollars which can be created at will (with some fairly serious negative effects).
We jumped off this cliff in 1971 in order to pay for the the Vietnam war. We've been falling ever since. It just hasn't looked like we're falling because we're all boxed up inside a Fiat currency. Now that we're nearing the bottom and bouncing off a few jagged boulders, people are starting to realize we might be screwed. I love how this "Fiscal cliff" they've invented is designed to scare everyone, even scientists, into letting them raise taxes and reduce services even more. Hilarious.
> resulting in the continued existence of our only really friendly country in the middle east, and in our not having to
> get involved militarily ourselves to achieve that. Without "foreign aid", we'd either have to abandon Israel to
> annihilation by the Muslim Hordes, or come to their aid with troops.
So lets cut them loose. Honestly, Isreal has done nearly everything they reasonably could to deserve it. They build settlements in areas that are internationally recognized as Palestinian, then, in the rare occasion when they do have to leave, demolish all of the buildings, extra effort and cost, just so as to leave nothing behind for the people whose land they were trying to steal? Fuck them. Let them get pushed into the sea they are asking for it with some of the shit they have been pulling.
Honestly, we don't need them, we could normalize relations with Iran a lot more easily than I think most people realize. We have a long history of cross cultural exposure with them, they are very westernized, and only through accident of revolution and some seriously bad policy on our part that really put us in the situation we are in now.
Few things are as useful to the "towel heads" (as one of my Iranian friends so affectionately calls the clerics) as sanctions and a general adversarial posture.
Here is the deal: According to the Tax Policy Center, if we cap itemized deductions at $50,000 and keep tax rates as they are today, we would raise $749 billion in tax revenue over ten years.
Moreover, according to the TPC's distribution table, 96.2% of the extra revenue would come from the top quintile, with 79.9% from the top one percent.