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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.
Wait! You don't think.... No! Surely politicians wouldn't play games with government services for political gain? Say it isn't so!
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
A less than 3% cut in funding is going to set medical science back a generation? By that logic, if we were to increase funding by 3% (as we have more than done) we should have seen a generation's worth of progress. So where are my medical tricorders?
Methinks somebody is fearmongering. I'll be the first to say cutting research funding is a dumb idea, but is it too much to ask that the former head of the NIH assess the situation based on the facts and not Chicken Little "the sky is falling" theater?
It was "the government shutdown" a few years ago. And all sorts of people got on their soap box and blamed everyone else for it. Now it's called something else, the "sequester". And again let's point fingers and blame. However none of that has to do with the real problem - the US is spending more money than it takes in, spending more money than it can print, even, and has been doing this for YEARS. They scream at the federal banks to keep interest rates near zero to "stimulate the economy" meaning that everyone must bear the cost of the devaluation including those smart enough to put their money to work, and then they wonder why all the wealth is leaving the US dollar.
The US will be buried under its Keynesian nightmare. I just hope it doesn't take the whole world with it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'm sorry, but if a 2% cut to expenditure is crippling, then the system deserves to fail.
Know what a government with 2% less money looks like? Take a look at the budget from 2010. That's what it looks like.
I know, using the 2010 budget for 2013. Complete madness!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#Total_outlays_in_recent_budget_submissions
If you are really brave, take a look at the budget from 2001 (Clinton). 1.9 trillion.
I don't trust the Republicans in government further than I can comfortably spit a rat, but take off your partisan blinders for a moment and look around. The world is both weirder and more wonderful than your blinkered view will allow in.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
And it's not even a real cut. It's merely a reduction to the increase.
Baseline Budgeting ensures that ALL budgets increase by a certain percentage every year automatically. This is the elephant in the room when it comes to discussing the budget. The dollar value of the increases will get bigger and bigger as each subsequent increase is a percentage of large budget.
So when you hear people whining about a 2% cut, the are actually whining that they won't get the usual X% increase.
Baseline Budgeting needs to be killed...with fire if possible.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Oh, that's easy. Because first he lowered it at the start of 2011, to rob Social Security of its only source of funding and buy votes in the 2012 election, and then he let the cut lapse.
The "sequester cuts" are so shallow that all they do is decrease the amount by which spending is increasing this year. This year's spending is still higher than last year's, even after the "cuts."
Obama's biggest fear is that we'll see that everything is just fine without that 1%, and then maybe we'll start demanding more decreases.
Your payroll tax increased 2% on Jan 1, if you work.
Key point there, if you work. Guess how those mysteriously unaffected by the payroll tax increase tend to vote?
Follow the money.
/ Not a Republican.
GOOD!! If the program needs to maintain or increase then our representatives need to actively decide to increase funding. Funding should NOT be automatic.
Nice revisionist history there. The temporary payroll tax reduction act was allowed to expire by the dysfunctional house of representatives. They used it as a bargaining chip in their attempt to renew the temporary tax relief package that directly benefits the top 1% of income earners. Of course hypocrisy surfaced after the "fiscal conservatives" used the need to reduce the budget deficit as an excuse for letting this tax reduction expire even though these same individuals are still actively pushing to make their own temporary tax relief act permanent.
I single out one lobbyist in particular - Grover Norquist. True to form, he actually argued that the expiration of the payroll relief bill was NOT a tax increase, whereas the expiration of the Bush tax cut for the wealthy is undeniably a tax increase.
It takes some balls to place blame on solely Obama for increasing the payroll tax despite the fact that there are overwhelming amount of written and recorded documentation that shows it was the opposition at fault.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
rebuttal: the tax cut would have expired regardless of whether he signed that bill.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
It is, in fact, a real cut to the currently-appropriated spending and the current spending rate. While it is often the case that reductions in projected increases are sold as "cuts" in government budgets, this is not one of the cases.
The sequester has nothing to do with baseline budgeting, it has to do with cuts to funds that are already appropriated for the current period.
Also, nothing in the federal budget happens automatically. If an appropriation isn't passed for each year, there are no funds, period, full stop. Baseline budgeting has to do with how budget proposals are drafted and presented, it doesn't mean that if no legislative action is taken an appropriation automatically remains in effect indefinitely.
Actually, the sequester mechanism, when it was passed by Congress and signed by the President as part of a short-term funding agreement was designed by both sides to be painful because both sides wanted it that way so that it would be a disincentive to the other side to refuse to compromise on an actual budget agreement that would deal with specifics of addressing budget priorities going forward.
In a sense, it was a version of mutually-assured destruction that went into effect if bilateral action wasn't taken to avert it.
The problem with this is MAD may work when you have to take an active step to trigger it, it doesn't work as well when you have to have to jointly avoid it, because its easy to convince yourself that the other side will back down if you wait a little longer, so you don't have to compromise.
You know it's possible to dislike both Bush and Obama, right?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In addition, both sides can try to spin the situation as "We tried our best to avoid this but THE_OTHER_POLITICAL_PARTY wouldn't seriously negotiate with us. It's all the fault of THE_OTHER_POLITICAL_PARTY."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.