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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."
Just ask Kim YoungOne for some data from the North Korean satellites. They will clearly be ahead of NASA by then! :-)
Give us more money, or people die.
The CrIS hyper spectral sounder is enabling much more precise forecasting. Proving once again that it's not the number of pixels, but the quality of them.
http://npp.gsfc.nasa.gov/cris.html
Sheldon
These are cuts in the rate of spending increases! Not budget cuts as we all know them.
This is such bullshit.
Doesn't the USA military have any satellites capable of filling the temporary gap in NOAA ones?
Military weather is classified, you insensitive clod.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The only reason NOAA even managed to predict the left-hook was because they integrate the so-called Euro Model predictions from the ECMWF. The Euro model predicted the left hook, while GFS, which is the NOAA's model, predicted Sandy to go NNE.
So for example, on Sailing Anarchy, there were people who were preparing for the Sandy left hook days before NOAA started warning about it, thanks to DryArmor reading the euro model data before NOAA did.
The Big Gray Ships headed out from Norfolk over a day before NOAA warned about the left hook too.
If you have a better idea, please elaborate. For some reason completely oblivious to you, preparation against catastrophic events costs money.
... the best forecasting system for predicting Sandy was not American, rather it was the model of the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) in Reading, England.
Disclaimer: I worked on a sat program for a met office.
Weather forecasts are usually made by combining many sources of data from literally thousands of instruments. Ground sensors, weather balloons, satellites and such all contribute. If the current weather forecasting models depend on a certain type of information from certain satellites, it will take years to re-calibrate them to data from other satellites that are constructed differently. It may be that some types of data from CriS under certain circumstances are more accurate, but that doesn't mean that it will be compatible or adaptable to the current software being used to make the forecasts.
The second problem is that there is only one CriS that orbits the planet in 14 parts, only coming back to a location about once a day. The NOAA satellites are geostationary and there are two. Together, they can do 24/7 covering of the USA. For weather forecasts, especially for short term hurricane directions that matter for evacuation alerts and such, you can't have just once in 24 hour coverage, you want 15 minute updates.
CriS is certainly a nice instrument, but it's totally inadequate to replace the geostationary satellites NOAA has, since it's function and trajectory are totally not suitable for what the NOAA birds are for.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
These days satellites are often programmed (or simply put into a suitably decaying orbit) so that they burn up and don't leave stuff hanging around in orbit at the equivalent of Mach 25. I don't know if it's the case with these ones, but causing a satellite to re-enter at the end of its design life is considered "best practice" these days. (Except the Chinese, who have a habit of generating a lot of orbital debris.)
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Fiscal Cliff or not, the United States' inability to pay bills are finally coming to a head. Complain all you want, but it's going to get to a point where the only way to sort this out is to cut federal services
Or war against those who hold the chits. Given the history of this country, what do you think is most likely?
Yes, this "fiscal cliff" is all misleading the public, and both sides play their parts. It's like bickering over how to treat a wound on your toe, ignoring that your femurial artery is gushing blood. It's somewhat surprising that the average American doesn't yet see how deep in shit he really is, with the country owing three times his salary, which he has to pay back with interest. Delaying it is just going to make the payments worse.
Give us more money, or people die.
Exactly.
When local governments have a shortfall the first to go is police officers and school teachers and firemen.
Bureaucrats seem to hold on to their jobs some how. Rat hole money sponge projects seem to linger on forever.
When the federal government has a shortfall (don't they always), its more of the same, with each agency finding the biggest scaremongering headlines they can possibly put forward.
8% isn't that big, you can find that much fat in any departmental budget, and money can be siphoned off of other projects and moved to these satellites at a moment's notice. Worst case, take the money out of FEMA or the TSA and save everybody some suffering.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
What are you going to do, shoot at the hurricanes? I mean, sure they do have "eyes", but, well, you're going to be dissapointed. And wet.
If you read TFA, you'd know the big concern isn't that the satellites are going to stop working, but that the expertise needed to design, build and operate the replacement satellites will retire or move on. This is a real concern.
People who've never run an engineering project think you can take a project that is budgeted to cost X dollars, put it on hold when you've spent 0.7X dollars for some arbitrary length of time, then pick it up much later and finish it for 0.3X dollars. It doesn't work that way. Every time you restart a project it's can be logistically like starting from scratch -- sometimes even worse. I've had customers who take deliverables and sit on them from months. Since I can't keep my team sitting on its hands for months I put the team on something else. Then suddenly the customer signs off on the deliverables and wants work on the next phase to start right away. The team has to refamiliarize itself with the project and figure out what they were up to and why -- if the team is still intact.
Delay is a potent driver of cost overruns and a major source of quality problems.
In any case, this kind of reason drives me nuts. Yes, a solid, conservative piece of engineering often exceeds its design specs. In fact, it's surprising if it doesn't. So you can expect a satellite with a ten year planned lifetime not to conk out at ten years and a day unless you are very unlucky, *but you don't factor that into your planning* otherwise design specs mean nothing. The "happy accident" of a system outperforming its specification is no accident, it's the product of respecting the boundaries of what can be guaranteed.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Kinda hard to fear-monger if you insist on bringing out logic and fact, you know.
Besides, what makes better eyeball-grabbing media headlines and budgetary attention?
* "NOAA may have to cut back a bit due to scheduled 8% budget cuts from the fiscal cliff"
- or -
* "NOAA sez the fiscal cliff will kill us all in a wall of hurricane water! AIEEEEE!"
Hell, if you think about it, almost every government agency out there has similar tales of dire prediction:
- TSA says terrorists will win if they don't get more money
- SSA says old people will be forced to eat dog food if they don't get more money
- HHS says the poor will die and be thrown to the streets if they don't get more money
- DOD says we'll lose wars if they don't get more money
etc, etc...
Funny part is, I'm willing to wager that all of these departments could stand a massive cut of fundage if they just got rid of the middle-management bloat, and stopped embracing that stupid '7:00 to 4:30' mentality that most gov't employees seem to worship.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
If you have a better idea, please elaborate. For some reason completely oblivious to you, preparation against catastrophic events costs money.
The problem I have is that when times are good, governments spend the excess on crap, and then when it comes time to make cuts, they whine about how they'll have to cut essential services. We see it all the time with local governments as property taxes fluctuate. When revenues are down they say they have to cut police and fire departments and teachers, but there's never any talk about cutting what was _added_ during the fat years. We always had teachers and police and fire departments during the previous lean years, so what's the problem with going back to how it was?
We're seeing the same thing on the federal level, the difference being that there haven't been good times (ie: surplus) in over a decade. Replace "good times" with "when we're borrowing even more from China."
We had money to fund NOAA before the current people in charge borrowed more money than all previous administrations combined, why can't we go back to that? I think that's what the GP is getting at.
If you have a better idea, please elaborate. For some reason completely oblivious to you, preparation against catastrophic events costs money.
Preparation against catastrophic events?
So these satellites are able to turn back the storm, and prevent damage?
If they are so essential, why is there ALREADY a planned one year satellite gap?
Did they shut down the Hurricane Hunters as well?
Look, its obvious that this is a posturing scare tactic, but if you can't see that and are content to be whip-sawed by bureaucratic scare mongering, just call your congressman and tell him to knuckle under and tax you more.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
8% isn't that big, you can find that much fat in any departmental budget, and money can be siphoned off of other projects and moved to these satellites at a moment's notice. Worst case, take the money out of FEMA or the TSA and save everybody some suffering.
If people's wages remain static, then it means 8% of adults (and some similar percentage of families) without an income. Sure, you might say those 8% were doing nothing important, but now they will be left with no money, empty stomachs and anger. This does have the potential to destabilize society.
Then to argue that only the fat of a budget will be cut is too idealistic. If those departments can't run themselves efficiently (as a result of corruption, which is partly why there is a problem in the first place), then how will they cut their budgets appropriately?
The real solution to the "fiscal" woes in the US (as it was for other empires) is for it to shake off all the free-loading interest groups and nation states that do not contribute to its welfare, and to return the control of money to the people through the restoration of democratic process, but the political will for this is non-existent.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Preparation against catastrophic events? So these satellites are able to turn back the storm, and prevent damage?
Preparation in this case means 'early warning'
The idea is that if people are notified of the risk of a storm striking earlier, they will have more time to prepare, and therefore: their preparations will be more effective, and thus damage will be reduced.
It won't be true in all cases -- sometimes the 'early warning' may be ignored, because it hasn't shown to be reliable. Also, the NOAA makes predictions, and predictions that far in advance have some inherent uncertainty, due to technological limitations and limitations of the science, modelling, and statistical techniques used in weather prediction.
I'm sorry, I must have missed the DNC budget passed in the Senate that included NOAA funding increases. Whats that? The truth is no budget has even been proposed by the Senate controled by the DNC in the last 5 years? None of Obama's proposed budgets have received a SINGLE vote from the DNC or the GOP? As I recall the GOP controlled House is the ONLY part of government that has proposed and passed a budget, but none of them have been brought up for a vote in the Senate. Perhaps you could enlighten us on how the GOP defunds NOAA when they haven't actually done anything.
And that couldn't possibly be because the GOP has systematically filibustered any piece of legislation from the democrats in the senate that they have the slightest issue with, basically making it impossible for anything to come up for a vote.
If they are so essential, why is there ALREADY a planned one year satellite gap?
You're operating under the flawed assumption that congress has the public's best interest in mind. There was no PLANNED one year satellite gap, you fucking fool.
Here, from June, 2012:
Congressional budget cutting will delay the launch of a key weather satellite and hinder tracking of killer hurricanes, tornadoes and other severe weather, officials warn.
...
...
...
The satellite, which had been scheduled to launch in 2016, will be postponed 18 months because of spending cuts and delays. The threat during that gap is that National Weather Service forecasts will become fuzzier, with the paths of hurricanes and tornadoes even less predictable.
With more budget cuts looming, further delays are possible — something President Obama alluded to last week.
"There will be a data gap. That data gap will have very serious consequences to our ability to do severe storm warnings, long-term weather forecasts, search and rescue and good weather forecasts," Jane Lubchenco, NOAA administrator, told members of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in April.
Forecasters issued warnings five days ahead of tornadoes that struck Tuscaloosa, Ala., and five other states in April. A barrage of 312 tornadoes swept across the Southeast, killing 321 people. On storm day, forecasters gave warnings averaging 27 minutes before actual touchdowns.
Likewise, when a tornado struck Joplin, Mo., killing 151 on May 22, forecasters gave warnings averaging 24 minutes before strikes.
"The satellites are an important part of that early warning process," said Christopher Vaccaro, a spokesman for the service.
Lubchenco said without information from the polar satellite, forecasts for a massive storm nicknamed "snowmageddon," which hit Washington in February 2010, would have had the location wrong by 200 to 300 miles and would have underestimated the snowfall by 10 inches. Hurricane tracking would also suffer, she said.
"Our severe storm warnings will be seriously degraded," Lubchenco testified April 1 before the House Appropriations subcommittee governing the agency.
Lawmakers and scientists lauded the value of the program, which provides forecasts for military troop deployments, ocean search-and-rescue missions and farmers tending crops.
"It's important for public safety," said Christine McEntee, executive director of the American Geophysical Union. Cutting the funding "would be penny-wise and pound-foolish."
Lubchenco credited the satellites with helping save 295 people in 2010 by helping track rescue beacons aboard ships.
"That's saving lives, that's saving money," said Rep. Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat on the House panel that oversees NOAA funding.
But reduced federal spending threatens all domestic programs. Congress cut spending $38.5 billion in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. House Republicans propose to cut another $30 billion next year.
So, there was never a planned gap. The damn funding got cut, and now it's getting cut some more. What's the point of having scientists advise on these issues if they get ignored? Fuck them, and fuck you. Can't prioritize anything or even look at the data and reason for yourselves. Go sleep in a tar-pit, you dickheads are hindering the herd.
No, he went with more reliable Greek bonds, not those junk US government bonds.
Learn to love Alaska
If you have a better idea, please elaborate. For some reason completely oblivious to you, preparation against catastrophic events costs money.
Well, then. Let's see what we have here:
1) Reduce the number of aircraft carriers from 10 (+3 under construction) to 5
2) Spend less on military than the rest of the world combined. Reduce the amount by half.
3) Stop waging war in Afghanistan. Pull out of Afghanistan entirely and bring our people home.
4) Stop the war on drugs. Release everyone jailed for non-violent drug-related crime.
5) Stop the war on immigrants. Allow an easy and expensive path to citizenship. (Note: Our population is declining and we need more taxpayers.)
6) Stop the war on tourism. Disband homeland security, allow unencumbered and easy travel within the US. Redirect the TSA money away from worthless scanners and put it towards intelligence.
That's just off the top of my head. Search for "ways the federal government can save money" and get a zillion hits. Google is your friend.
(Ending Saturday delivery of mail would save an est. $1.7 - $3.1 billion alone. How much did you say those satellites cost?)
Considering that the majority of the Federal government today *IS* fat, I have no problem asking for cuts across the board.
But I go even further with "returning the control of money" to the people. The Fed needs to go away, for one thing.
Not so different from corporations in the end. No matter what it's all about power.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Furthermore, we have a plan in place to stop deficit spending. While we are calling it a fiscal cliff, it is more like a train approaching from a half mile away. There is time to get out of the way, though not to stop the train. For most people, there are two major issues with the current plan. On is that the income of average people is going to drop by a few hundreds of dollars every month, which means this is money they are no longer have to spend. This is only a problem because due to the Bush era tax cuts and other conservative policy, pay has remained relatively stagnant over the past 10 years. The way to fix this is to encourage pay levels to increase. One way to do this is increase taxes disproportionately on the wealthy and corporations so they have an incentive to pay more to workers, which is not taxed to the employer.
The other complaint with the current plan is that it hurts the military. Again, the goal should be free market based. We should not be so dependent on the military pay, or federal orders. It should be the consumer that drives the economy. It should not be government contracts that makes boenng one of the largest receivers of the dole in the country. We can choose to become a country of small business owners, entrepreneurs, and corporations that provide extremely well paid jobs to consumers. Or we can continue paying out entitlement to corporations.
To the matter at hand. As has been said, the feds have a rich set of data from local and other sources that allows it to predict what will happen in terms of atmospheric disturbances. This is not just to predict the odd hurricane. In fact it is used to determine how we as a country can best use our resources to maximize profits. The mistake that many make is that each event is unrelated to anything else. In fact we ideally make decisions based on what will maximize future return. If these storms are going to impact the upper eastern seaboard repeatedly, we need to know. And to know we need data.
Conservatives tend to be very bad at this. For instance the gov of Texas, Rick Perry. puts very little money in planning and conservation, yet expects things to be paid for when this lack of planning results in a major crisis. Two instance come to mind. First, the last big hurricane on the texas gulf coast resulted in huge power outages that cost huge amounts of money. Lack of planning meant it cost much more than it should, and the rate payers had to pay the price for the lack of planning. Second, lack of forestry maintenance resulted in huge wildfires in texas. While the feds paid for part of it, Perry wanted to be fully compensated, by the US taxpayers for his incompetence. Doesn't seem very fair.
Yet if hurricanes become a significant threat to the upper east coast, and we allow the status quo, the US taxpayer is going to be in the hole again and again so that the elite can have their barrier island homes. Or we can get better data from better equipment, determine what the risk is, and make an informed choice.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I have a better idea. Stop spending money on stupid shit, and spend it on this instead. We have troops in over 100 countries at the moment. Cut that down to 50 (still ridiculous) and we'd have plenty of money for this program. End farm subsidies. Stop borrowing money so 30cents of every dollar isn't spent on interest anymore. This is a very simple problem, but the governments of the world are so addicted to spending money in the least efficient way possible that they have to invent a crisis like this to try and extort even more money out of us. Going over the "Fiscal cliff" will likely be one of the best things that could happen to this country.
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.
How is this Insightful? How about -1 Trite. Is it that hard to believe that government can and does provide useful services, especially those that have such a long time horizon and capital investment that the market will not provide them? Is it also that hard to understand that these valuable programs and the people who run them (at a huge discount relative to the private sector) suffer under the vagaries of political brinksmanship?
Since the Government has failed accounting & budgeting, the people need to take it over.
A sequence of Twitter posts made some time ago, feel free to re-post them to twitter or elsewhere.
#taxes 1) The Declaration of independence recognized the peoples rights & duty to ... remove budgeting & accounting failed tasks from Gov't.
#taxes 2) for proper representation, given all the budgeting & accounting fails, &more, the people must direct where their taxes R 2 B used.
#taxes 3) For the people 2 voice where their taxes R 2 B used, forms R required to be created and made available by all Gov't tax collectors
#taxes 4) each taxpayers direction of where their taxes R 2 B used is with the constraint of generating teamwork benefits they can share in.
#taxes 5) for those who trust gov't, there is option of letting the government decide where their taxes, or some portion, R 2 B used.
#taxes 6) Address political/election faild promises R replaced w/taxpayer direction. Elected R hired to sum & implement taxpayer direction.
#taxes 7) For amount of taxes the taxpayers "trust" the government with, #voters not only help hire the elected but help direct these funds
#taxes 8) For people 2 know where their taxes are needed, Gov't must become transparent 2 inform the people of funding needs. People decide.
#taxes 9) Clarity, I decide on where the taxes I pay are used, you on yours, etc.. This is a republic where all voices are accounted for.
#taxes 10) We have plenty proof this tax directing change works. Open Source Software, Iceland's recovery, & many crowd sourced projects.
#taxes 11) either you trust the people 2 do the right thing, or you rig #elections 2 have some perceived unfair advantage over the people
#taxes 12) We shall NOT vote on this right & duty of the people to direct where their taxes are to be used. It has already been established
#taxes 13) The tax processor jobs are in position to allocate a taxpayer taxes according to that taxpayer's direction. And provide receipt.
#taxes 14) Should Gov't fail this job, the people can set it up through Credit unions & provide receipts/proof to tax processors of tax paid
#taxes 15) In event of going through Credit Unions, funding access will require proof of proper spending in accord with taxpayer directions.
#taxes 16) #1 priority directing taxes is 4 creation & availability of required forms giving taxpayers voice, allowing proper representation
#taxes 17) on the check you use to pay your taxes there is a what's it for line to fill in, use it to get the peoples voice forms produced.
Because generally, it is the only one authorized to.
(Of course, the Senate can propose amendments to those bills.)
How much does one launch cost? How much does it cost to blow up innocent people (women and children included though I value them neither more nor less than males) by drone just about every day of the year.
I really don't know where my priorities are at -- what the fuck is wrong with me for valuing interesting scientific data over blowing up random people and making enemies of the survivors.
Yeah -- a big FUCK YOU to that. It's totally warranted and really, not even a tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction of percent harsh enough for the total FUCKHEADS in WA DC.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
Yes, the USAF has flown polar-orbiting weather satellites since the 1960s (the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, or DMSP). That program is in even worse shape than the NOAA program because of a horrifically run/financed attempt to merge the NOAA and USAF prorgrams (overseen by NASA, the spoiled child of Government science) over the past decade (google NPOESS). The USAF and NOAA systems as they now exist are at most barely compatible and have different goals. There is some overlap, which will undoubtably be used if the NOAA satellites all die and there are still healthy DMSP satellite flying, but that's a thin reed. Also, the USAF has no geostationary weather satellites, which do much of the heavy lifting for hurricane tracking. NOAA runs all of those. The answer for all of this is for Congress to grow up and make some unpopular (with their rabid base) decisions.
You can't hire and train up young talent if there isn't a job for them. And if you do, but let them go afterwards, you've just wasted money you'll never get back again.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
One of my favorite recent /. stories along these lines was this anonymous anecdote from last year. A company "flexes" staff in times of low engineering demand, then decides to expand a plant later, only to find out that, oops, they have nobody left who understands how the plant works. The unsurprising result is that they had to hire back some old employees as contractors at 2-3x their previous salaries and try to recover the know-how.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Cant your government strike a deal with Germany (or another nation) for some time share on a weather satellite like last time?
Tomorrow is another day...
... because the name "Sandy" has been officialy 'retired'.
]
Government cannot keep growing indefinitely (which is what it's doing at the moment).
Based on what metric?
Peak government employment? That was back in the 70s or 80s. Even now, government employment rolls are DOWN. That's right, lots of government employees have been laid off since the economy went sour. And Obama still has less people working for him than Reagan did.
http://www.opm.gov/feddata/historicaltables/totalgovernmentsince1962.asp
Per Capita spending? Adjusted for inflation, it's not actually significantly higher, unless you mindlessly include tax cuts as spending.
So please, tell us how you've concluded government is growing, and on what terms. Give us some sources.
Or just mindlessly claim something is happening, and don't make the effort to be sure your words are true.
Give us more, the hard way, or Zimbabwe Ben Bernanke and his magic printing press can do it Quantitatively Easy way.
As we own you in either case, your choice is pro forma.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
> Production has doubled, but wages stayed the same instead of doubling.
> Measured how, and since when?
Doubling is the wrong concept. Production in the 20th century increased annually at 2% compounded. Get your data from BLS.gov (the Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Although not doubling, wages have not kept pace, which has resulted in a linear vs asymptotic (to the wage of the 70's) gap in inequality that widens at an exponential rate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhLh4g4EGVc
Across the board cuts will accomplish nothing more than cutting 8% of the fat, along with 8% of the muscle, bones, organs, and brains.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
One of my favorite recent /. stories along these lines was this anonymous anecdote from last year. A company "flexes" staff in times of low engineering demand, then decides to expand a plant later, only to find out that, oops, they have nobody left who understands how the plant works. The unsurprising result is that they had to hire back some old employees as contractors at 2-3x their previous salaries and try to recover the know-how.
Sadly this might have actually saved the company net money. Employees are not just salary, but employer FICA/Medicare contributions, benefits (like 401K, medical, FUTA, etc), office space, and software licences, etc, etc. Plus, when you recover the know-how after a few months, you can dump the contractors on their ass. It's unfortunate that this possibility exists, but sometimes it true...
We had money to fund NOAA before the current people in charge borrowed more money than all previous administrations combined, why can't we go back to that?
We blew the largest part of our budget surplus on the Bush Tax Cuts, the second largest part on the two wars, and the third largest part on stimulus and all of this, including the stimulus, was spent before the current people in charge took office. Under Obama we did spend additional money on stimulus, but all of that stimulus spending together, including stimulus tax cuts, are still less than the Bush Tax Cuts. Even if you believe that the stimulus spending was ill advised (which seems to be at odds with the results) the answer to the issue you raise about why we had money for NOAA before but not now is clear: we didn't. We never had the money to spend on those tax cuts, and all of the budgetary pain that we're going through now is the result.
I agree, it most definitely is. Because well over half of Americans think that going over the fiscal cliff will increase the deficit, when in fact the exact opposite will occur: Taxes go up, spending is cut, deficit problem mitigated significantly. If your goal is reducing the deficit, you should be rooting for them to not come to any kind of deal.
Oh, I do hope the "fiscal cliff" will kick in, but it's woefully inadequate to stop the deficiency. Far more drastic measures are needed, including slashing the military budgets (why do we need a military that costs more than the 14 other highest military spenders combinedK/I>?) and increasing taxes to levels common in other parts of the world (40-45% income tax, 20-25% VAT).
For the next decade or so, we need to pay off the debt we have amassed, and only spend enough to be still be called human, i.e. prevent people from falling off the shallow end.
It'll be tough anyhow, the question is whether you want it to be moderately tough for you, or horribly tough for your children. The conservatives and democrats have pretty much decided on the latter, hoping for a miracle to come around before then, and trusting the voters to be as short sighted as voters always are.
Homeland security, the world's most massive and expensive military, drones creating terrorists in other lands, off the books and off the charts spending on spying (foreign and domestic). Cut all that (save the *defence* force the USA actually needs) and you could easily balance the budget.
Do Tax Cuts Increase Revenues? No, Tax cuts do not Increase Revenue
This is the second result (was a bad link, but I found it with some digging):
Deficit Fraud Romney: Jobless Benefits Are Too Expensive, But The Bush Tax Cuts Increase Revenue
Quote from that second one:
When it comes to the Bush tax cuts, revenue surely did not increase. In total dollars, the government collected about $1 trillion in income tax receipts in 2001, according to the Office of Management and Budget. This fell below one trillion for the next five years following the Bush tax cuts, not climbing above that level again until 2006.
results of your search are very mixed. the saddest thing i found when going through the google results is that I could tell what the article was going to say based on the source, ie all seemed partisan. Do you have any economic papers or non mass media sources that back up your analysis? This seemed to be the best source (on page 4 of hte results). But it seems to say the bush tax cuts were unsuccessful in their goals.
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/bush-tax-cuts/index.cfm
Actually paying for the ones the previous administration put on credit cards. Seriously look at the tax plans he isn't Spending any more than Bush did. the problem is that the long term loans are starting to come due and The US government can't pay for it.
In Clintons last couple of lame duck years the republican controlled house and senate forced through some decent long term tax and social security plans the kind to prevent the situation we are in now. The thing is Bush wiped those plans out and cut the interest rate for 8 years down to nothing to stimulate the economy. Which worked for only the housing market but that was enough to cloud the issue up. It also led to numerous secondary issues like the housing bubble, and the lack of incoming taxes effectively hobbled the government which then had to take loans to cover short term debt. Those loans are what Obama is trying to cover up.
Personally I am just waiting for the other shoe to completely drop. either we stagnate just like we are for about 8-10 more years or the bottom completely falls out and all that money the 1% have been saving up becomes worthless as the value of the dollar collapses completely.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
"Across the board cuts will accomplish nothing more than cutting 8% of the fat, along with 8% of the muscle, bones, organs, and brains."
But whose fault is that? Not that of the citizens, but of government itself.
If the people mandate cuts, and the government cuts important stuff rather than the fat, the government has nobody to blame but themselves. And WE have nobody to blame but them. This is not one of those "it's the peoples' fault" scenarios.
They have to cut, sooner or later, and the sooner they do it, the less damage there will be. Just about everybody knows that. So why aren't you hounding your politicians about it?
I do.
Do you have any economic papers or non mass media sources that back up your analysis?
Unfortunately not anymore. I looked this stuff up several years ago, getting federal revenue and tax rates from different sources. "Original research" I suppose. I don't remember which sites those were at exactly. It took me about half an hour, iirc.
Sorry I can't give you any better than that.
The Forbes link:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikepatton/2012/10/15/do-tax-cuts-increase-government-revenue/
has a very clear graph, showing the slope changing significantly (from negative to positive) when Bush changed the rate of the top bracket.
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?
For anyone who thinks domestic spending is the problem - please consider this:
It is possible to hide military and homeland security spending as black projects. Some of this is known to be hidden in civilian projects. (For example, it was recently revealed that a lot of National Endowment for the Arts spending, from the 50s through 80s or later, was hidden CIA funding for black projects to make the USSR look bad). There are many current examples, such as Dept. of Transportation roads that pass through stateside miltary bases and are heavily developed until the edge of those bases (or at least as far as the tank parking compounds and tank ranges), but are budgeted as being for special access to low income communities on the back sides of those bases (even though they are gravel from the base edge on). There is no evidence ever for a civilian agency being able to hide any funding in the military or security budgets.
If you look back at cases where people have admitted there exist black projects, there are many where the person has given the impression where the projects are hidden in other parts of the military budget but never has any government representitve openly stated that black projects are always confined to the military side, and there are known counterexamples. Some statements look carefully crafted to give the public the impression black projects aren't hidden in the civil side, without technically lying when testifying to congress.
It is literally impossible to prove that 'entitlement' or other civiilian side spending is responsible for the current economy, as the general public is not told what part of that entitlement spending is really black projects. It may be possible in theory to prove that even the open record military/security budget is driving the debt, since the real total must be greater, not less, but proving the reverse is impossible without having access to things the general public does not get to see. Anyone who advances the claim is either making it without enough real information to be sure, or has just violated an oath and revealed classified information.
Who is John Cabal?
It's been well demonstrated that if we had a hurricane constantly in every school, there would be no shootings. More hurricanes!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."