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."

Comments

How are we going to pay for it though?

[JDAustin]

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.

Re:How are we going to pay for it though?

[dgatwood]

Social security is not discretionary spending, and it is not part of the federal budget. It is a separate trust fund funded by separate taxes. Even if you got rid of social security completely, unless you raise income tax, the federal budget won't be affected.

There is no reason you have to eliminate social security in order to raise the income tax rate, so the federal budget and social security are orthogonal.

Okay, so pedantically there would be a very small increase from the income tax that you would otherwise have paid on the money you paid in social security taxes, but that's such a small amount of money that it basically qualifies as noise.

I am totes optimistic about this.

[bistromath007]

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.

Perspective by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

[sl4shd0rk]

Obama's at least talking in the right direction.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbIZU8cQWXc

Re:Not gonna happen

[AuMatar]

He wasn't trying to spend his way out of debt. He was trying to spend his way out of recession- something that does work if you borrow (or use savings) the money you do it on and the cause of the recession was lack of consumer confidence/demand or lack of capital (which this was in part). The trick is that you have to make up for it in good times by repaying the debt, something we've been bad at. Also, it helps if the extra money being spent is on things with long term results like infrastructure and R&D. Spending it on things like wars will give a short term bump but no long term advantages.

THe fact is right now our debt not only doesn't matter, any business leader in the world would be telling us to take on more of it. We're borrowing at about 1% interest. That means if we have anything to invest in that would pay better than 1% return, we ought to borrow to pay for it. Since the rate of inflation is higher than that, anything with any real long term value is a good buy, as the principal will be less when due than it is now. Debt really isn't a short term problem for us.

Re:Mr. President

[AuMatar]

We spend more money on the military than every other country on earth combined. This with an existing nuclear arsenal that could destroy any country 10 times over. We should be slashing military spending to the bone- its just not needed. How about reducing military spending to even just say triple what China (the number 2 country) spends? We're fucking ridiculous.

Re:Not gonna happen

[DragonWriter]

That's because the President keeps spending money. You can't spend your way out of debt, it's ludicrous

If it was ludicrous to spend more money in the short term to expand the long-term ability to earn revenue for all purposes, including paying down debt, businesses would never issue bonds (and if they tried to issue them, no one would ever buy them; and even if the businesses issued them and gullible fools bought them, both the issuing businesses and the foolish investors would collapse.)

In the real world, businesses use deficit spending to grow their ability to earn revenue all the time.

Re:Mr. President

[Lendrick]

That sounded suspect, so I thought I'd take a quick look at some real numbers, which probably aren't of interest to you, but should be seen by other people so they don't take your statement at face value.

• The combined income of everyone in America is roughly 13 trillion dollars (http://bber.unm.edu/econ/us-tpi.htm)
• This year's projected deficit is about $850 billion (http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/12/3230392/growth-in-us-budget-deficit-slows.html)
• The top 10% of earners account for about 22% of the total income (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/10/30/nyregion/where-the-one-percent-fit-in-the-hierarchy-of-income.html), or just under 3 trillion dollars per year.

A 100% tax on their income would close the deficit twice over, even if no spending cuts were made, and that's assuming that they're already paying the maximum marginal tax rate of 39 percent (hint: many extremely wealthy people are making money from capital gains, and are taxed at 15% on that income).

Your statement is demonstrably false.

When Obama was elected, I had hope

[Nyder]

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?

Re:Not gonna happen

[SydShamino]

You can't spend your way out of debt, it's ludicrous

Isn't this what every start-up company that accepts venture capital is trying to do?

This article isn't talking about spending on food stamps or fallacious broken windows. It's talking about spending on fundamental research - the kind chase-the-quarter capitalism doesn't do very well - so as to yield a return in new industries to create employment years and decades from now. This isn't that much different than what start-ups are trying to do, except the government can think on a much longer scale - something that I'm glad a government can take time to do.

Won't Ever Happen

[organgtool]

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.

Re:Not gonna happen

[dkleinsc]

That's because the President keeps spending money.

That's wrong on a lot of levels:
1. The President can't carry out any of the laws of the US without spending money, unless you somehow think that all the civil servants and soldiers and contractors are suddenly going to do things on a volunteer basis. No money for government = no government.

2. The President can't (legally) spend a dime without authorization from Congress. Congress has passed laws either allowing him or demanding him to spend exactly what he's spending.

3. Total federal spending as a percentage of GDP wase the same in 2012 as 1983 under that notorious liberal Ronald Reagan. There was a spike between 2008 and 2009 because the country's economy crashed, but it's gone down ever since.

4. Federal tax receipts are the lowest since 1945. It's not a stretch to suggest that this might have some sort of effect on budget deficits.

5. The Republicans in the House have opposed proposals by the president that involve combinations of tax increases and spending cuts to reduce the deficit. That means they're making decisions based on principles that have nothing to do with the deficit.

6. To get a balanced budget, you have to cut approximately 1/3 of the federal budget, immediately. Some math: If we completely eliminated the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Interior, Health and Human Services, Labor, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, and stopped paying anyone who works at the White House, we'd still not have a balanced budget. So what would you suggest that Obama stop spending money on?

Re:Mr. President

[Lendrick]

For the record, nowhere in my comment did I advocate taxing the wealthy at 100% of their income. That would be incredibly stupid, for exactly the reasons you stated. No one in their right mind would advocate a 100% income tax -- it's just that people tend to oversimplify their reasoning, like this:

"A 100% income tax is clearly worse than a 0% income tax, therefore a 0% income tax is optimal in all cases."

Just because no tax may be better than a 100% tax, it doesn't follow that the benefit of income tax decreases linearly as the income tax goes from 0 to 100 percent. There's a point somewhere between 0 and 100 percent that's optimal for the economy, and economic performance data over the last half century or so would seem to indicate that we're below that point at the moment.

Here:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/signal/does-28-top-marginal-tax-rate-mean-175706337.html#3INcoOV

The article claims that there's absolutely no connection between a higher marginal tax rate and GDP growth. A closer look at that graph reveals that the article in question doesn't even go far enough -- If you draw a regression line in the GDP growth data (so as to smooth out the bumps of a typical economic cycle) you'll notice that overall GDP growth has actually *decreased* slightly as marginal tax rates have decreased.

If the data is any indication (and it probably is), raising taxes on the wealthy would have little or no effect on our economic growth, *and* it would be a big step toward eliminating the deficit.