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President Obama Calls For New 'Space Race' Funding
New submitter dmfinn writes "While his union address covered a wide range of topics, President Obama made sure not to skip over the U.S.'s space program. The talking point was nearly identical to the one he gave in 2009, in which he called for space R&D spending to be increased past the levels seen during the the original cold war space race. Now, 4 years after that speech, it appears things have gone the opposite way. Since 2009 NASA has seen some serious cuts. Not only has the space-shuttle program been deactivated, but the agency was forced to endure harsh funding cuts during the presidents latter term. Despite an ominous history, it now seems that Obama is back on the space objective, pushing congress to increase non-defensive R&D spending to 3% of the U.S. GDP. It's important to keep in mind that not all of this money goes directly to space related programs, though under the proposed budget the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology Laboratories will have their budgets doubled. There will also be an increase in tax credits towards companies and organizations working on these R&D projects. Should the U.S. go back to its 'Let's put a man on the moon' ideology, or is the federal government fighting an uphill battle against newly emerging private space expeditions? Either way, the question remains whether or not Obama will act on any of the propositions."
In the 50's and 60's, discretionary spending accounted for 70% of the federal budget. Now, mandated spending accounts for 70%+ of the fed budget.
The United States is headed for another trillion dollar deficit. (Even the rosy CBO numbers project an $800 billion deficit.) And beyond that the debt bomb of unfunded entitlements and pension liabilities only threatens to make things worse.
"If you add up the total debt — state, local, the works — every man, woman, and child in this country owes 200 grand (which is rather more than the average Greek does). Every American family owes about three-quarters of a million bucks."
Where is the brokest nation in the history of the world going to borrow the money for more space flight? When hyperinflation kicks in, we won't be able to afford it or much of anything else.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Turn the printing presses at the treasury up to eleven! Print the money faster!!!
Somebody call JG Wentworth. Oby wants cash and he want s it now!
I'd like to see Moon Base Gingrich as much as the next geek, but it's simply not going to happen with this Congress and this President. The reason is that the Republicans in Congress have decided as pretty much a matter of policy that they will vote against anything the President proposes.
I am officially gone from
It's time for an extraterrestrial presidential bunker.
We'll just magically pull the funding out of our ass, then watch as we go 3x over budget and Red Bull still gets a man to Mars before us.
But I'm not bitter.
/*Insert boring sig here*/
I am hella certain this will actually change something and is not just something he said so he could keep being "the cool president." He most def won't take actions in the future that are directly counter to this goal. Also, we should have cold fusion in about a month.
With all due respect, where will we get the money for this? Money is being bled so much from the DOD that we can barely maintain standards. If the men and women who serve are being asked to "do more with less", then how can you insist on spending so much money left and right? Can we at least attempt to pay off the debts our country has racked up over the years? If you want to spend money on such projects, then by all means, do it after we don't owe other countries insane amounts of money. Cut back on Government spending, Balance the budget, bring the Troops home.
The only sensible way to approach this, other than decrying obscene levels of politicial incompetence, is to imagine that obaminator wants to invest in space R&D to re-prime the science and consumer tech boom windfalls of the previous space race, that gave rise to the information era.
However, those windfalls were the result of brand new technologies, and old technologies being miniaturized to fit in the limited space and energy budgets of spacecraft. Those problems have now been satisfactorily solved, and additional funding will only fund refinements of existing technologies. No big windfall can come from a tree that has already been shaken.
As such, space investment must be a gambit that some valuable commodity that cannot be obtained on earth will be discovered, and a market opened up by space funding. We have sent many dozens of unmanned probes armed with a wide array of sensory aparatus. We have not found anything that would suggest such a gambit is reasonable.
As such, the president's suggestion that space funding should be expanded, while the nation teeters on the brink of bankruptcy and loss of confidence with foriegn investors, is woefully irresponsible.
Mr Obama, "Austerity', do you speak it?
Like America isn't broke enough yet. Please, what money do they have to invest if they dont even have the money for their museums and libraries
operation freedom moon pies,
i am sure they have wmd's
obviously the moon is too big to fail.
Obama's at least talking in the right direction.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbIZU8cQWXc
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I'd say the timing of this announcement is unsettling. Chelyabinsk? DA14? Now what?
So, Obama wants to get NASA's budget higher than it was at the height of the space race? Presuming we're talking in inflation-adjusted dollars here (and not percentage of federal budget, because that would be nuts), that's an increase to about 2.1x the current budget.
It seems to me that doubling NASA's budget is not terribly likely. America's chances of comprehensive space travel seem like they have little chance except through the dramatically lower cost of commercial spaceflight.
No they shouldn't. People seem to easily forget that the Apollo missions, at least up until Apollo 11, were exactly that - ideology. The ideology that the American way was better than the Soviet way, replete with the American Hero striding out where no man has gone before - albeit that last part was probably largely accidental, as the idea of sending a black man, or (God forbid) a woman probably never occurred to anyone and the career path to being an astronaut didn't allow for it anyway.
The whole construct of the lingering notions of colonising near earth objects (like the Moon or Mars) is based upon the frontier myth - a combination of misremembered American history and a version of the future shaped by movies. In reality, the frontier is not what you remember from grade school lessons, spaghetti westerns and Little House on the Prairie. In reality, space travel and exploration will never be like Star Trek or Avatar. At best, we might get as far as (the original) Planet of the Apes - without the apes. No amount of effort will shape reality into the myth.
At some point China will probably do a moon landing. It won't benefit them any more than it did the US, but it will be so embarrassing. Especially if they send the remains of the US flag back.
What is more important, in the LONG haul? The space 'race' will be more like a long drawn out marathon punctuated with the occasional leap forward, which would be better news than what we're hearing on a daily basis...
Some will argue that the science or the technology isn't there yet. Well, we still need to get started somewhere. Look at the discovery and settlement of the american continent: from the day of first setting foot in 1492 to having an independent government established, how much time has passed? Using 1789 as a reference, that's nearly 300 years. Look at the numerous innovations that happened in between ; not to mention the numerous failures, human or otherwise. But all things considered, it was a worthwhile fight and we're all much better off today thanks to the efforts of our predecessors.
Achieving the conquest of space is the greatest challenge of humanity has yet to face. It will take a change of perspective as the planning timescales will shift from years to decades, if not centuries. But look at it this way, will we all not be better off in the end? Won't the effort bring many new discoveries and economic stability in the mean time..?
It is said that the first step in any endeavor is the most difficult. I, for one, vote to take it. Enough with the political bickering already! We've got better things to do as an intelligent species.
Nothing is enough for whom enough is too little - Confucius
Get out of NASA's way!
Every administration uses the space program as a token to look all sciency and stuff. Every administration, in this attempt, derails NASA by pushing them in a new direction. NASA loses tons of money when this happens just by shelving old plans. Let NASA move in their own direction. They know better than any president and all of their advisors. Let NASA work something from blue prints to launch without some presidential doofus trying to look forward thinking by dismissing the old administrations plans and moving in a new direction.
I wonder if funding would be easier to get if that Russian meteor had exploded over DC instead of Siberia.
He managed to time it with the whole asteroid and russian meteor thing... maybe THIS will gather some public attention.
Start using money creation for funding government instead of giving private banks exclusive use of it, and limit government spending based on hitting the inflation target; you can pay for this and much more beyond it.
I know neoliberals/neoclassicists/libertarians will skewer me for even suggesting this (and will probably get downmodded to hell), and I know 'conventional knowledge' says using money creation for funding is an unspeakable evil, but when you break this taboo and purposely limit spending by the inflation target, it transforms much of what people think they know about economics.
Post Keynesian's, like Steve Keen (the only person to both predict and model the current economic crisis before it developed), Stephanie Kelton, and Bill Mitchell (among many others), are going a long way towards dragging economics out of the dark ages, and towards developing it into a proper science.
It's quite hard to believe that economics, in its current neoclassical form, has survived the economic crisis and is still taken credibly; virtually the entire field outside of heterodox schools, failed to spot something as blindingly obvious as private-debt vs GDP, as a massive indicator of an upcoming crisis.
You don't say?
after reviewing report after report of the BILLIONS of rounds of ammunition purchased in the last year (more than the entire amount of ammunition spent in 6yrs of conflict in Iraq) for agencies like the NOAA and Social Security Administration, I would not be in the least surprised to hear that this proposed spending increase was yet another way to buy and arm more federal branches of the government while doing nothing to the status quot of the functionality of the departments themselves. Increasing spending to a branch of government isnt the same thing as actually doing something productive, not anymore it seems. Ever wonder how, after having 3x the amount of IRS employees we did in 2008, for the first time in my living history the federal government has failed to get all the tax forms approved by jan 31st? Now all federal refunds depending on some of these forms are delayed until mid march. Included in this group is the amortization of mortgage interest.. thats no small percentage of population getting affected.
16 months ago, Robert Zubrin wrote an essay exposing Obama's real intentions regarding NASA.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Perhaps Obama's proposals will lead to benefits, perhaps they won't. However, calls for austerity and budget tightening show either an ignorance of how our economy works, or a crippling indoctrination by those that would profit from the mindless parroting of Washington think tank talking points.
New technology doesn't just magically happen, it gets discovered and developed. That requires research and researchers. Research happens because of grants and investment. Researchers come from a developed and functional educational system.
All of these things require expenditures. Practically speaking, the only thing with big enough pockets for all of that is the government.
but then it changed.
How about we stop the stupid war in the middle east, spend that money on some good old space programs? How about we stop bullying other nations and instead work with them with a common goal, like space travel/colonies?
Be seeing you...
"Should the U.S. go back to its 'Let's put a man on the moon' ideology, or is the federal government fighting an uphill battle against newly emerging private space expeditions?"
Why is that the only choice? Why can't we do something useful in space, like build power plants or prospect for valuable minerals or, most pressingly, deflect asteroids? Those are worthy goals of a new space race. They are achievable with the resources we have.
Oh, right, because none of those involve sending humans to plant American flags on the rocks and planets of space. None of those provide a pretense for NASA to spend billions building a monster rocket that they can't finish and couldn't afford to fly if they did.
if we tell Obama the moon's packed with "undocumented immigrants" or people whose votes he can buy by giving them food stamps, he'll fully fund moon missions that will put Apollo to shame.
See how dumb that is? Just plain dumb.
I presume you do not like the idea that the GOP is willing to spend money on national defense (something the constitution specifically requires the Federal govt to do) but you're fine with the trillions we spend every year on social spending (which the constitution not only does not require, but arguably forbids (the constitution lists a few duties of the Federal govt and then says everything else is in the hands of the states and the citizens) ). Your comment makes a cartoon of the idea that one party is at least trying to follow the basic idea of our founding document.
And fund the master race.
I personally want more research and development specially in the area of space research! But how to pay for it? we are already borrowing as much as taxes bring in to the Federal Government. That unsustainable.
I've been saying this for a while. The last space race we had allowed 440,000 engineers to make advances in almost every sector of industry. From materials that could withstand the cold of space and the heat of re-entry to the computer and hardware that controlled the spacecraft, that decade was one of the most productive periods of technical advancement in human history. And we don't stand a chance of doing it again, not because there's a shortage of big technological problems, but because of the fact that there is a large segment of the population that believes that the government should not be involved in such technological advancements - the private sector should do it alone. And here we stand, at the sunset of the American empire, and many Americans are too ideological to see the value in having the government work in cooperation with the private sector to make another technological push that will propel us further out into the lead. We've already reduced government's role in technology quite a bit and yet we seem to be losing ground to the Chinese who are using a combination of the public and private sector to push forward. I know many people are rightly concerned about our national debt, but you have to spend money to make money. We just have to be a LOT better at taking the money we make and actually paying off our debt for once.
Let's have a standard of living race.
become the enforcer of Obamacare. In just 12 months, all Americans will be required to buy health insurance that meets Obama's specs. The IRS estimates that these policies will cost $20,000.00 per year per Adult (and $10,000.00 per year per child). If you do not buy this insurance for yourself, your spouse and your kids, you will be penalized by the IRS.... unless you are an illegal alien (they are specifically exempt from the penalty (it's right in the plain text of the law)). Oh, they do get the same care you get though if you and they show up at any hospital ER with equivalent injuries/illnesses; that's required by an earlier law that's still in force.
As for the many millions (billions now? could be I suppose) of rounds Obama has been having all the non-military agencies buy... I have heard no explanation... but it certainly dovetails interestingly with his desire to disarm the public; perhaps he is preparing to face a few million very angry people in the next couple of years and will need all the federal agents to be armed and assisting in the effort to disarm the public? (it's interesting to see so many elected democrats taking their masks off now and pushing legislation to grab guns) I do not know and I'm not one to prefer a foil hat, but there are questions that should be being asked, and would be asked if we still had any real journalists.
I mean, let's try something original. I am not opposing spending the money on something sciency but at least target something that has not been done before.
http://www.ibtimes.com/china-proposes-space-solar-power-collaboration-india-858330
If this happens, the USA, Europe, and the rest of the world are in deep deep trouble.
Imagine if one country (or a small group of countries) had access to unlimited and nearly free power. Every other country would probably end up in a perpetual resource war, and economically flattened.
Now imagine that country at the top being as racially bigoted and exclusionary as the current Chinese leaders.
We better get off our ass and get there first, otherwise the world doesn't stand a chance.
Welcome to the post 1984 world.
Guess Orwell got it right.
Obama was the one who created the "sequestration" plan (Liberal-favorite and Watergate hero journalists Bob Woodward reported this) and Obama signed it into law. Now he is demanding the GOP violate their principles as the price for avoiding sequestration... so the only way Obama will NOT chop NASA's funds is if the GOP caves-in on their principles and this might not happen; too many house Republicans have already outraged their base supporters by raising the limits on Obama's credit card over and over again (allowing him to drive-up nearly $7,000,000,000.000.00 in new debts). Obama is also the guy who tried to kill NASA's manned spaceflight capabilities; first he killed the bi-partisan Constellation program, then he shut-down shuttle operations (and ripped-up the infrastructure and tore the guts out of the orbiters (they all now have fake engines, gutted OMS pods and gutted FRCS modules) so they could never fly again). Sure, he has funded commercial cargo to ISS (this is the Bush "COTS" program, not an Obama program). Sure, he claims to be pushing "commercial" manned spaceflight (by tossing a little cash at 3 different companies), but [a] none of these companies has any firm commitment from the government (possibly why none has firm scheduled for manned flights) [b] they're not being given enough for a real program and [c] These programs are being run so slowly that none will carry anybody into orbit while Obama is in office. Congress (bi-partisan effort) forced Obama to plan to build the new SLS rocket and to keep working on the Orion capsule, but he has had his people slow-walk these programs in the apparent hope that dragging them out will frustrate congress and cause congress to cancel them (to such an extreme that the senate had to threaten legal action to get him to stop foot-dragging); there are no planned manned American space flights currently in any official NASA plan other than 1 possible flight around the moon (no landing) many yeas from now, possibly. maybe.
Mars, bitches!
Bush did this. Now Obama is doing it. The simple fact is that there wasn't money for it in Bush's administration, and there isn't money for it now.
Fat chance at funding research, NASA, infrastructure, or anything else.
Congress passes budgets, not the president, and the GOP controls the House. I hope you like more slash & burn, tax cuts for billionaires, etc. We no longer have the capacity to do anything great because the Koch brothers don't want to pay any extra taxes. As more money funnels to the top, the consumer class (making up 70% of our economy) no longer have the money to consume. This further depresses the economy, making the labor market worse, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle, unless the government comes in and jump-starts things by increasing demand... Of course when things return to normal those same government actions turn into distortions and the debt must then be repaid. No idea why so many seem to think the same solution must be applicable to all circumstances.
Of course those genius job creators are investing and hiring more.... Aahahahahahaah I can't even finish that sentence. Their money is either parked doing nothing or rapidly chasing anything that looks like yield, regardless of quality.
China is mis-allocating capital in much the same way, though for different reasons. When too much money accumulates at the top it drives investment bubbles as the money looks for something, anything to invest in, driving the cost of borrowing/taking on investors down even for risky propositions. As the risk no longer correlates with costs, people dogpile into wasteful areas (overbuilding in China, empty cities, etc or tech bubble/housing bubble here).
Some idiots think the CRA or deadbeat borrowers caused the housing collapse but the banks were desperate to fling loans at anyone with a pulse because they wanted the sweet, sweet commissions and investors were eager to buy anything related to housing like CDOs, MBS, etc because they offered a nominal return of ~6% with supposedly "no risk". Banks went on a branch-building binge, including in poor ghettos, because they ran out of prime customers. They heavily pushed subprime and alternative loans as a way to find new people to loan to.
Anyway the point of this ramble is until the Republican FYGM generation dies off, we're destined to be a has-been country with no ability to accomplish great things. Losing the USSR as an enemy was the worst thing to happen to us because we no longer have a bogeyman we can use to shut down the conservative's bullshit. No one can argue against a tax to pay for an interstate system when we have the Ruskies to worry about! The people who bitched and moaned about science spending/NASA were told to STFU, we have to beat the Russians to the moon! We saw the pollution and environmental devastation of east Germany and Nixon signed the EPA into law.
It's just sad.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Do you think Obama makes people and business want to spend and invest their money? Are you kidding? Do you not understand that there is a very large contingent of people out there who feel attacked by Obama and his policies? He is direct and unashamed about his redistributionist plans.
/.
To many, he is the most anti-business president this country has seen in a long time. Note I said "anti". Not pro, not neutral but outright hostile.
Don't take my word for it, go ask the business owners (ie: your "rich" people). I don't think this is a big secret except maybe here on
I am not trying to be purposely political. I just think you are grossly overlooking how a lot of people perceive Obama. I don't know if you are doing it on purpose or what but nobody's trying to blame the black guy because he's black or some such goofy insinuation like you make. Many are concerned because his policies are anti-business.
And America's business is business. Always has been and always will be.
Cut military spending and shift that spending over to Space Research to win the next Space Race.
If we (our government) start talking about the shift sooner rather than later, then the big military contractors can higher and prepare for the switch over to being more involved with the Space Tech industry, or those people with mad space tech skills and experience can prepare for the inevitable move over to where they are needed sooner. My only concern is that the contractors will try and play fraud games, so it might be good to consider a bit of oversight on parts costs and such.
WARNING: Goatse link! Seriously, fuck you. This stopped being funny years ago.
Don't believe the AC. The tinyurl above goes to http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/oct/26/obama-readies-to-blast-nasa
Not really sure why that needed to be tiny.
And then give those drones to the police to make sure we aren't committing any crimes.
See, project Death Star has begun.
The man who destroyed NASA? The man who shutdown all space travel? You're an absolute idiot and a complete Democrat if you believe his daily lie.
There is only one kind of US Dollar.... Dollars are fungible... and Social Security is forbidden (by law) from investing in anything other than US debt
What this means:
These are facts. Get used to them; you'll be living with them for the rest of your life.
If you are under 30 (and if you've seen Obama's fiscal projections) you should be VERY concerned... this is all going to fall apart in your lifetime and you will be left eating dog food and w/o healthcare. When Obamacare finishes-off the insurance programs, which it's designed to do (by capping their profits, making them provide everything people want, and making them compete with govt actors who can operate in deficit) you will be offered "single-payer" as the solution to the mess (Obama and several of his advisers are on tape saying essentially these things, though not using the term "obamacare" as they were speaking years earlier). It will sound great (seems like a no-brainer to eliminate a layer of the free-market) ... but that eliminates two vital things: competition (which forces innovation and efficiency) and freedom (the option to "go somewhere else" for a service if a vendor is not performing). When a company screws-up, you can go to the govt for relief and another company for future business, but where do you go when the government screws up??? What happens when the feds are the source of your healthcare and the money runs out????? People used to feed themselves and their families, but now we have govt programs feeding the kids at school and the seniors.... but what happens when the feds can no longer print money???? The Germans ran a version of this experiment in fiscal recklessness and money-printing in the thirties... and it did not end well.
There is a basic law of the universe: Something which cannot go on forever, won't.
His ATF transferred THOUSANDS of so-called "Assault Weapons" to Mexican drug cartels and he claimed no personal knowledge. Then when congress demanded the documents from his Atty Gen (Eric Holder) his admin ignored the legal subpoenas (though he has jailed Americans for ignoring his subpoenas) and when things got too close to the courts, the president asserted "Executive Privilege" over all of it (something he cannot legally do if he was not personally involved from the start). Obama? Meet Nixon...
He got elected in 2008, in part, by going around denouncing Bush43 for waterboarding (done to three terror suspects, all of whom survived without permanent injury) but this Nobel Peace Prize winner has been sending drones out to convert anybody he puts on his secret "kill list" into piles of cooked sausage (often NOT in a war zone, where strikes are generally accepted a legitimate military activity) ... including US citizens whom he does not think need any rights or due-process. Ah, well, Arafat got one of those nice shiny medals too...
In his 2008 presidential election run he denounced Bush43 as un-patriotic, un-American, reckless, irresponsible and immoral for having run-up about $5Trillion on debt over 8 years (which included the costs of 9-11 and the wars) but Obama has run-up approx $6.5Trillion in new debt in just four years (with no 9-11 and while eliminating the Iraq war and now ending the Afghan war) and his budget proposals have been projected by the non-partisan CBO to take the nation to over $20Trillion in debt by the end of his 2nd term.
Obama claimed Bush43's "Patriot act" was awful... but once he got in office, he doubled-down. When the act was created, it contained sunset provisions (so some would go away automatically over time) but these have been removed. He allowed the TSA to unionize (when it was created, the Dems promised as part of the deal to make it govt, rather than private, that it would remain non-union). As a result, it'll be nearly impossible to ever reform it or eliminate it. He is buddies with the Google and Facebook operators and has increased the govt intrusions into private electronic communications, coincidence?
Need I go on?
Bush43 was a turkey... Obama is far worse
WHY would you want all the federal people packing?
As an old guy, I remember when you could go to an airport, walk-up to the counter, buy a ticket (for cash with no ID) hand the person at the ticket counter your suitcase (which went right-onto the conveyor out to the guys who loaded the planes) and then you could walk over to the "jet way" where you handed-over the ticket and walked onto the plane. No searches, no background checks, no grope-fests, no microwaves, no x-rays, no metal detectors. Flying was convenient and a generally good experience (the worst bits were sub-par food and jet-lag). No planes were falling from the skies or crashing into buildings.
The IRS used to mostly scare people with auditors (scary-geeky guys with glasses, green eye-shades and pocket protectors)
ATF? There was a day when they did not exist, and even after that a long time when the only people who ever saw them were liquor store and gun store owners who were being periodically checked for records compliance. When they pulled the Waco-thing, I remember having conversations will friends of all political stripes and we were all shocked that the ATF had all that tactical gear, and tanks and helicopters and was capable of doing a large-scale military-style assault on any group of Americans. (The Waco people were NUTS, but the scope, equipment, and scale of the ATF was a real eye-opener at that moment)
We are being turned into a police state and the young people who've never known America to be any different, very sadly, do not even know this or more importantly feel it at a gut-level the way this old vet does. I'm one of those old guys who gets a tear in his eye when he hears the national anthem and loves to see a flag flapping in the wind and who has not understood why so many younger folks do not seem to love the country at a gut-level in the same way... but I am starting to see that the country they have grown-up knowing has been developing a very different nature than the country I have lived with. Much of it is with the un-spoken threat (the same govt using the threat is too PC to SAY the words) that if we do not do this then "crazy radical Muslims" will blow us all up. We're supposed to forget that we've had to "deal with" radical violent Muslim forces every few decades since Jefferson was president (and never before did we do it by militarizing at home). They do not want us to notice that they are the ones who invited the wave of Muslim immigrants and visitors (both legals and illegals via leaky borders and poor visa tracking). They also do not want us to remember that it was their policies on how to handle hijackers that led the people on the 9-11 flights to not immediately resist, but that no American in his/her right mind would fail to try to stop or even kill any post 9-11 hijackers (and therefore we probably need LESS airport security now than we've ever needed before) We are not supposed to notice that many of the military-style law enforcement actions inside this country are to enforce laws that used to not even be on the books.
We Americans need to be asking some very basic questions of our politicians... no matter which party they are from and no matter whether we like their other policies or not. This was easier many years ago when the government did much less, and was therefore involved in many fewer things, and therefore politicians could not say "ignore the bad things I'm doing with my left hand, becase you love what I'm doing with my right hand"
Yeah, those wars cost money... but before we abandoned the place there was the hope that over the long-run we'd end-up saving money since we'd no longer need to keep providing forces to protect Saddam's neighbors from him (as we'd done for MANY years) and not need to periodically wage more limited wars to push him back into is own borders (see 1991 gulf war). Before the current drive to pull-out and abandon Afghanistan, there was the hope that enough years w/o the Taliban and with kids of both genders getting a proper education the place would become a better and more peaceful place that would prevent it being a launchpad for future violence (again, saving many billions from any future wars, post-terror attack re-building, etc)
Obama's "stimulus" law, however, borrowed-and-spent (in one law passed in one year) more money than both of Bush's wars cost in ten years... so some perspective is called for
We have dramatically reduced American military spending as a portion of the federal budget. It used to be the biggest item, now Social Security and Medicare are both bigger. The truth is that NASA's entire budget is so small it's just a "rounding error" in the federal budget. Obama could have doubled it with not much impact to the nation's budget if he had cared to do so. His one-year stimulus program could have funded NASA for 50+ years
Start using money creation for funding government instead of giving private banks exclusive use of it
Government has a wide variety of tools for creating money, both using leverage as the banks do, or merely printing it. There is no exclusivity here.
Blah blah blah Jobs. Blah blah blah LGBT, blah blah blah Gun Control, blah blah Education, blah blah......
Hit all the talking points so nobody is left out. Still nothing is being done except to spend us into oblivion.
Governments have this ability, yes, but money creation is not being used for government funding (and that is quite taboo); the capability is there, but for the moment the private banking system is getting exclusive use.
I like how the President promised to put Science back in it's rightful place, then cut the space program more than any previous President, then talked up the space program to get re-elected... Pity his supporters have such short attention spans/poor memories.
Ken
And that is one of the problems: Obama's latest SOTU is Like it was years past. Nothing still gets done. And when he focus's on something the focus may last a week or two.
As the Obama administration put it, there's allegedly not enough money available to shut down Guantanamo.
Also, there's purportedly not enough money for a number of other not-too-unimportant things to be funded properly, many of them in the field of education.
but money creation is not being used for government funding
There's always inflation. Also, QE might have been used to fund some recent paybacks of federal loans. For example, GM somehow managed to pay off rather large loans in a suspiciously short period of time. That money ends up in the US's general fund.
I didn't say there'd be no inflation; it's spending limited by the inflation target, i.e. money creation being used for spending, up to the point of the inflation target that is desired to be hit anyway.
It was Richard Nixon who said to those whose support of him was inadequate, "Watch what I do, not what I say". Well, here's Obama, who'll say anything to maintain his support by his dupes: he has no intention to do anything except increase his own power.
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With short term treasuries at essentially negative rates, I don't think there's any "open market" to get interest over a derisory 0.1%
I'm merely pointing out that the US government has a number of ways of creating money. It doesn't have to use banks as proxies for all money creation.
None of what you pointed out is straight-out, no strings attached, money creation. Certainly, none of it is analogous to government spending through money creation.
Spending through direct money creation is a very specific thing, and all of what you point out have side effects which direct money creation does not.
Spending through direct money creation is a very specific thing, and all of what you point out have side effects which direct money creation does not.
At this point, it sounds to me like the only example of "direct money creation" out there is quantitative easing which is not something which private banks can do. And all methods of money creation, direct or otherwise have the big string of inflation attached to them.
First, it was not Obama that cut the shuttle, or its funding. That was W/neo-cons (which I support that they did this).
Two, O was pushing up NASA's (along with other R&D). It was the neo-cons that massively cut the NASA/NSF budget They did this to punish O because he was pushing for private space to handle launch and space stations. In addition, a number of congress, mostly republicans, wanted to force NASA to remain going with constellation or now, the ghoulish SLS.
Hopefully, O can get money increased to R&D. We need it. However, there is little doubt that we must make cuts elsewhere to afford this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm not talking about quantitative easing (which is still a form of money creation, that goes directly to private banks), and I'm not talking about policies that are already being (or have in the past been) undertaken. I have not said money creation is not inflationary. I have said, government use of money creation for funding, limited by the inflation target.
I'm not talking about quantitative easing (which is still a form of money creation, that goes directly to private banks)
No, QE goes directly to the Fed, who then uses it to buy bonds, which might come from private banks, other businesses, or the federal government.
I have said, government use of money creation for funding, limited by the inflation target.
Banks have issues with any "money creation" methods they employ too. For example, fractional reserve has the problem that if your loans underperform (enough of the loans you make default) enough, then you're bankrupt. How much they have to underperform before bankruptcy happens, depends on how much reserve you have.
So yes, QE means money goes to private banks, in exchange for assets...the money goes to private banks.
I don't care about private banks anyway, the original point I made was less to do with debating over the extent money creation is directed to private banks, and almost entirely to do with the capability of using money creation for government spending (which is not done now), limited by inflation targets.