Going Off the Fiscal Cliff Could Mean Missing the Next Hurricane Sandy

Lasrick writes "Alex Knapp has an excellent article pointing out that NOAA satellites enabled NOAA to predict the 'left hook' of Hurricane Sandy into the Eastern Seaboard, which in turn enabled local governments to prepare. Those satellites are at risk and there will be a gap of about a year between 2017 and 2018, when the old ones fail and the new ones are scheduled to launch. There's no alternative to getting that data, and the so-called 'fiscal cliff' will drive an 8% cut to NOAA's satellite program, so that those replacement satellites may go up even later than 2018."

Comments

About time

[Anonymous Coward]

GOOD. Everything NEEDS to be cut immediately, if not sooner. I myself would prefer that we go off of not just one, but at least three "fiscal cliffs" post haste.

Re:And the spin goes on ...

[tooyoung]

Republicans in particular shouldn't be concerned by this, as they already don't believe in climate modeling.

Re:Here's some ideas

[AlphaWolf_HK]

There's no war on immigrants in general, just those ones who don't offer anything of value and end up being a liability (which is the majority of those who come in illegally - Cubans being a notable exception.) H-1B immigrants are desirable. Illegal immigrants are not.

Although the French wrote "give me your poor" on the statue of liberty, that really isn't what you want. At least, not anymore due to "anchor baby" syndrome. The mere fact that somebody is born here automatically turns them into a citizen, and they automatically become eligible for welfare, food stamps, and better health care than the majority of Americans receive right now. Before these benefits existed, illegal immigration was more acceptable, but today it just costs us way too much.

Re:Same tired argument from government bureaucrats

[cmorriss]

So what war did Obama take us into to produce the massive spike in spending in the last four years?