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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."
People just don't get it. The US government does not need to cut its budget by 3%. It needs to cut its budget by 50% or more.
It really isn't that simple, though. The process has to be gradual or everything will implode. Cut the budget by 50% and the economy will take such hit that US collected taxes will drop more than 50% (presumably necessitating further cuts, and so on). Not to mention how many people might starve without foodstamps while you are doing this.
Anyway, a good start would be to force our politicians to keep all wars IN the budget. Iraq and Afganistan are staying outside of the budget in "emergency appropriations" or whatever they are called.
Sorry, the US electorate just finished voting in President Santa Claus who's mandate was "give us more free stuff" you won't see that budget cut of 50%,
Pure bullshit. Obama was chosen by the US electorate because he has promised to increase taxes to, you know, bring in more revenue. He is quite willing to cut spending, though to a lesser degree than Republicans. The budget can be balanced by either cutting spending, increasing income or, most likely by a combination of the two (one can argue where the balance lies)
Let's be realistic though. You guys are fucked, plain and simple and you're heading for a screaming doom much like Europe is unless you figure out that trying to spend your way out of debt is a bad idea.
Where are you based, anyway? How is your country managing? Got any good suggestions?
Um, there is a little detail you may have missed. The President doesn't have the AUTHORITY to change the tax structure. Congress does; yet - gee - the same electorate returned who returned Obama also returned a Republican majority in the all important House of Representatives.
Does not that then suggests that the government should cut back on military spending? But no, they prefer to cut NASA's budget. After the priority is to blow people and clog the banksters with money.
Don't forget the TSA monstrosity that has done absolutely nothing to stop a single terrorist in 11 years (and counting). That's an easy place to start cutting.
Also, much of the Iraq/Afganistan war spending was funded through "supplementary spending" bills, thus these expenses were never in the budget to begin with! Clever, n'est pas?
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.
That only works if you are winning hands down. Once the war comes to homeland, it stops being such fun and profitable experience you all think it is.
I don't know if it's even possible for most people to be rational on this issue but I'll make a stab at it.
Is it scientific spending that is bankrupting the US government?
No it is not.
This is NOT where the cut should come. The cut should be everything else.
I won't state what should be cut because things are so ideological and people are so irrational on the subject that their eyes will roll back into their heads and start foaming at the mouth. But I think we can all agree that it isn't scientific spending that is generating the US debt.
Very well. Cut what is driving spending up.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...the primary cause of our budget woes is Medicare/Medicaid and to a lesser extent Social Security.
Yes, it would seem that way when you use Hollywood accounting methods. The CBO is not non-partisan. It is bi-partisan. It conforms to how both parties want to to steal our pensions. What they want to call entitlements is much more correctly labeled earned benefits. And that money was outright stolen from underneath our noses. Put the tax rates back to what we had in the 50s, bring our work force AND our troops back home, and watch the shortfalls evaporate. We are being robbed in broad daylight, and when mass media screams, "Hey! Look over there!", we fall for it every time.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I've posted this so many times on /. I feel like I'm pounding my head against a brick wall.
You are.
. I know it goes against people's political inclinations here,
Some, certainly.
but it's the truth so here it is again.
Ah and there's the brick wall...
Did you know that on our current course, Medicare/Medicaid will grow to consume 18% of GDP some time around 2050-2070?
(xkcd alert:) Is your hobby extrapolating?
We're being driven to bankruptcy by voters wanting stuff in their old age without having to pay for (most of) it.
No, Medicare is expensive because of the insane medical system in the US, with its insane regulatory structure. Somehow most European countries manages to have a social security safety net, and a public health system without spending more than their entire tax revenues on it.
The solution isn't to slash social security, it's to stop companies creaming off most of money for themselves.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Jesus! That Wall Street jizz tastes mighty good, doesn't it? Those 'entitlements' were fully funded before the banks robbed them blind to finance their stock market fraud. Restore the Pre-Reagan tax rates and make the Federal Reserve stop subsidizing the derivatives markets. Eliminate the social security tax cap. Tell big business to use domestic labor, or lose their corporate charters and tax give-a-ways. Ending the wars is a gimme. Abolish prohibition. These are just some of the ways to put an end to this nonsense.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The US government does not need to cut its budget by 3%. It needs to cut its budget by 50% or more. Many programs and federal departments need eliminated entirely. It's not even about the $16 Trillion debt. If the government ran honest accounts, it's about the $200 Trillion debt.
Or what? The sky will fall in and the US will go bankrupt? Civilisation will cease?
You've been fed the biggest, most damaging lie of the last four years, which is government debt works the same as personal household debt. It doesn't.
Deficits aren't the issue here. They go up, they go down, they have always been with us and always will be. That is the nature of the beast. Keynes taught us that deficits are structural, and more or less look after themselves. The key is to keep growth as high as possible. That means investment and government spending during bad runs. Eventually, the ratio of deficit to GDP stabalises. This happened here in the UK post 1945, where government spending hit something like 70% of GDP. The sky didn't fall in then, and it sure as hell won't now.
The US is recovering a shedload faster than the Eurozone and the UK because so far it hasn't bought into the austerity argument. Austerity will do nothing except destroy the fragile recovery. The austerity idea that the private sector will bridge public sector spending cuts is an outright lie.
The budget cut argument is nothing more than a mechanism to transfer wealth to the rich. It is their argument and their ideas that you are parroting, for their benefit. To the rest of us it causes nothing but harm.
Funny, Canada has a balanced budget and we have a more robust welfare system(that less people are forced to take advantage of prior to old-age because it is robust and includes education and sometimes FORCED education programs.
We also spend 10% per capita on health care of what you spend and get LONGER life expectancies. Emergency treatment isn't as good(but only for SOME things, generally rarer things/situations that a country with 10% of your population base isn't going to have a very large absolute number of people needing attention for), but preventative measures are used in every possible case where they can have a strong benefit.
Most americans are so fucking narrow minded its mind-boggling. Even some american friends who I would otherwise consider relatively intelligent just can't see the fucking forest because they get hung up on one or two trees.
You do realize that the derivatives that you are speaking up consisted of mortgage-backed securities, which were created to monetize otherwise high risk loans, right? In turn these mortgages were pushed by certain loan programs to give mortgages to people who would not otherwise receive them.
Yes, actual foreclosures caused by the mortgages were a small amount of money compared to the derivatives, but those bad mortgages not only provided the basis for some of the worst of the derivatives, but foreclosures are an extremely demoralizing event, not only for the family itself, but for the whole market. When you see foreclosures, you see people losing their homes. That affects everyone, and that is why you want to keep them low, because when everyone feels poorer, everyone IS poorer. That's how the economy works these days.
Needless to say, blaming greed is always the right answer for issues like this, but having worked for one of the companies that did provide those securities, I saw that there was also another greed working as well, a greed for more popularity and votes by making people think that you were giving them something that they otherwise would not qualify for. I saw it in pretty, glossy, nearly tabloid sized literature that had company officers and various politicians shown handing keys to people. It was a nice warm fuzzy feeling, until you realized just how they were actually profiting from loans that they otherwise wouldn't be able to collect on.
If those people in those pamphlets were renting today, having never "owned" a house I can say they would have been objectively better off now than those who got to "own" a house they couldn't pay for, and then lost it. That's why you don't decree that you have to pay loans to people who can't afford them. You're not dealing with corporate greed, you're starting to fight against the smart people who use math and research to determine who is a reasonable risk for a loan. And when you stop listening to those people, corporations start turning to the sorts of people who promise they can turn straw into gold and create things like mortgage-backed securities based on garbage.