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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."
On others, that is. The fiscal cliff thing is just idiotic: basically, it came about because congress would not agree to pay for the budget it had voted for and set itself an ultimatum so terrifying that it would have to get its collective act together.
It turns out that the amount of pain the Congress is ready to inflict on random individuals who were just unlucky is very, very large. And this thread is full of crazies thinking it is oh-so-brave to cut funding for weather (they leave far from the hurrican paths), to stop giving money to the unemployed (they themselves have a cushy job they think is entirely due to their hard work), to not give people health care (because cancer/car accidents are the product of bad lifestyle -- always. Also, they themselves have good insurance).
So maybe the US deserves to go over the cliff and have a good 3 point of GDP recession. After all, the economy is doing so well... Or maybe the American electorate needs to pull the plug on the Republicans and the Libertards. Then the Democracts can be split into a centre right and a centre left party.
Well, the most recent spending boom by the Federal Government was for two badly executed invasions and a bunch "Homeland Security" BS. I agree with you, let's cut out that BS and get back to the 90's.
Plus, both the President Bush and President Obama Tax cuts were supply side biased, and the Bank/Mortgage bailouts were 100% supply side* Togther these represent 4 really huge commitments to test the theory behind trickle down/supply side and they have failed disasterously every single time. So listening to the people who backed and continue to back supply side at all is like listening to a doctor who still advocates bleeding the patients, shaking rattles at them to drive off evil spirits, and treating Malaria with crocodile dung. Whatever will actually help the economy, it's NOT going to come from the Supply-siders.
* The tax cuts were biased about 2 to 1 for supply side - that is, economists on all sides of the issue agreed that the individual consumers were together driving about 69 to 70 % of all spending, and NOBODY who studied sales figures came up with another number, but both years tax cuts paid out about 35 % to individual consumers and 65 % to the supply side minority, in the form of accelerated business depreciation. The Mortgage bailouts were very close to 100% supply side - the only way they really could have been demand side was directly paying off bad loans to let people keep their houses. That's what supply side and demand side mean. You know all the right wing guys who are claiming these bailouts are socialist? That they are a bigger problem than the two off-the-books wars? They were also exactly what the right advocated, and got. When some idiots try something four times, for what they themselves have claimed were the four largest single expenditures ever by any nation, and then they themselves claim it made the economy worse in the end, why is anyone still listening to them?
Note: I'm not claiming here that Keynesians or the real Socialists or any other particular economic theorists are definitely right and have all the answers, but if they are all wrong, at least in part, the supply-siders and trickle-downers and so on are definitively so much more totally wrong, we need some whole new ideas in economics. Deciding, for example, the Keynesians are wrong, without first spending as much as just one of the bailouts or stimuli to test it, and then testing supply side four times without learning anything, is all the proof anyone half rational needs that some of our economists and politicians are quacks at best, brutal, child-destroying, war-mongering monsters at the worst still reasonable interpretation, and criminals by the same sort of standards we would not hesitate to apply to a profession such as engineering or medicine.
Who is John Cabal?