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How the U.S. Sequester Will Hurt Science and Tech
Later today, the U.S. government will enter the sequestration process, a series of across-the-board budget cuts put into place automatically because U.S. politicians are bad at agreeing on things. "At that moment, somewhere in the bowels of the Treasury Department, officials will take offline the computers that process payments for school construction and clean energy bonds to reprogram them for reduced rates. Payments will be delayed while they are made manually for the next six weeks." The cuts will directly affect science- and tech-related spending throughout the country. Tom Levenson writes, '[s]equester cuts will strike bluntly across the scientific community. The illustrious can move a bit of money around, but even in large labs, a predictable result will be a reduction in the number of graduate student and post – doc slots available — and as those junior and early-stage researchers do a whole lot of the at-the-bench level research, such cuts will have an immediate effect on research productivity. The longer term risk is obvious too: fewer students and post-docs mean on an ongoing drop from baseline in the amount of work to be done year over year.' The former director of the National Institute of Health says it will set back medical science for a generation. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has laid out how the cuts will affect the U.S. space program. He said, "The Congress wasn’t able to do what they were supposed to do, so we’re going to suffer." The sequester will also prevent billions of dollars from flowing into the tech industry. This comes at a time when there's a pressing need in the tech sector for professionals versed in the use of Linux, and salaries for those workers are on the rise.
the federal government will spend $14,000,000,000 more this year than last, even with these "cuts."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Colin Macilwain. Science should be ready to jump off ‘the cliff’. Nature 491, 639 (29 November 2012) doi:10.1038/491639a
These aren't real scientists asking that government money stick around, but lobbyists for companies that feed upon science funding. Scientists love more government money of course, but many scientists understand that far must be cut, especially in military spending.
Sequestration merely provides an opportunity to re-evaluate what is important. Our question should be : Do we decide "important" by consulting lobbyists or by looking at the work that gets done.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
$13 TRILLION dollars a year in deficit spending
Not even remotely close to accurate. It spends approximately $3.8 trillion in total this year, and of that about $900 billion was originally going to be borrowed.
It's great to try to ensure all Americans have healthcare options available to them. But nobody has really tried, yet, to do anything about the massive (and constantly rising) COSTS of healthcare, which SOMEBODY gets the bill for, whether it's an uninsured individual or the insurance company covering that individual by govt. mandate.
Actually, RomneyObamaCare (I call it that because Obama basically took Mitt Romney's plan in Massachusetts and made it national) has various attempts to do just that, to curb the growth in medical costs, most notably in reducing spending on unnecessary procedures. It's unclear if they'll work, but we haven't even had a chance to find out yet.
The approach that was dismissed as unrealistically liberal, Medicare for All, did in fact mean that everyone would have had the benefit of Medicare's tough negotiating. It was a non-starter because the insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and hospitals all opposed that.
I am officially gone from
You mean the House Republicans who passed not one but two bills as alternatives to replace sequestration
Republicans passed those bills in the 112th Congressional session.
Which means those bills are dead right now, since we're in the 113th session.
They'd need to be resubmitted and brought back for a vote if Republicans were serious about putting them into play.
*Here's a summary of the Democratic proposal from Feb 14th which the Republican House leadership has refused to allow a vote on.
And the full text of the bill HR 699: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr699/text
The real problem is that Republicans think that cutting spending is the only way to fix the budget,
despite the fact that taxes are at historic lows and austerity is actually a really shitty idea (see: europe).
*skip down to the last section if you don't want to read a bunch of political posturing
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
But I do have to note that the Republican-controlled House has been passing budgets while the Dem-controlled Senate has not, which is why we've been running on continuing resolutions (and thus running up $1T per year in new debt).
Those "budgets" gutted various provisions of the ACA, which Republicans are ideologically opposed to. That, and the for-profit medical industry has their collective dicks in various congressional asses.
Basically, those budgets aren't really in good faith, cutting services (you know, services for the citizens that the taxes are ultimately drawn from) instead of drawing more revenue from places like the wealthy and wall-street (the biggest fraud perpetrators in the history of the world).
I have to note that the President has threatened to veto all of the ways the Republicans have proposed to avoid the sequester
Yes, because they are all total BS. I could also counter-note your note and observe the Republicans have failed to budge from their stance against taxing the wealthy. We're at loggerheads and while both sides are responsible, raising taxes on the wealthy was a specific platform of Obama's re-election and thus I would argue the Republicans are thwarting the will of the electorate in this matter.
A recent judicial nomination, by two Republican senators, had been blocked and sat for 263 days, only to pass 93-0. While not technically a "filibuster", neither was the Hagel delay (wink, wink). We just also confirmed a judge after 300 days, and another guy's been waiting over 330.
When it comes to Senate filibusters, we are no longer playing with rational actors.