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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.
Your payroll tax increased 2% on Jan 1, if you work. That is a 2% paycut to you, period.
The sequestor is effectively a 1% reduction in spending this year for the Federal government.
Translation: You need to do with less and not complain, if you force the government to reduce spending by a tiny amount doom will come for you.
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
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
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?
Wrong, its the failure of leadership to get something done and the leadership is the President. If he cannot build a culture where people can agree to disagree but come out with a win-win then its his fault 100%.
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
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.
You mean the House Republicans who passed not one but two bills as alternatives to replace sequestration while the Senate Democrats did nothing (except to complain that the Republicans hadn't agreed to raise taxes even more) and when the President finally actually proposed something it included mostly more tax increases and a lot of "cuts" that were undefined.
Of course, the other part of your post that I have to challenge is the idea that cutting the amount that government spending increases will somehow "cripple" the government. Not only are the cuts in this sequestration not significant, they are merely reductions in how much federal spending will increase not reductions in actual amounts spent.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Cut it all - Starting with congresscritter pensions and benefits (don't get distracted by their salaries, just a drop in the bucket compared to their real cost).
The problem with this whole sequester (aside from not going nearly far enough) comes from the whitehouse thinking themselves clever for having made an uncallable bluff - From assuming that the Republicans would never let the military suffer any real cuts. Well, whaddya know, in a surprising show of sanity, the larger principle of getting government spending under control trumped even their favorite special interest.
Yeah, we (by which I mean fiscal conservatives, not to imply I would ever voluntarily associate myself with the GOP) would all rather see the real problems addressed - End social security, end security theater, and cut HHS and the DOD in half (at least). But this current farce? Hey, better than nothing, but at least it counts as a start.
Cut. It. All!
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
Really, how long are we going to swallow absolute FUD without question?
The sequester is $1.2 trillion....OVER TEN YEARS. So $120 bill a year (I've seen it reported as $85 bill for this year).
The idea - as promulgated by the spenders in Congress and White House - is that ANY cut in spending by the US gov't will radically and catastrophically affect (whatever service is important to the listener). This is a bald-faced lie.
This morning, a senior administration official claimed that sequestration would CANCEL all military service person training for the rest of the year (outside of actually-deployed servicepeople). Seriously? A 5% cut in budget cancels 75% of a training schedule?
One example: Obama/Tiger Golf Trip cost $989,207 to the Fed and $78,205 to local police...the average american household paid $1372 in income tax... So ~728 American households had to pay taxes for an entire year to fund the golf trip...
And yet we're crying that we can't cut anything from the US budget? Really?
My understanding - I'm not an economist - is that if we simply STOPPED programmed-increases in spending for 6 years, the US budget would be balanced. That doesn't seem that painful, given that most American businesses (except Wall Street, I suppose) have suffered far worse over the past 5 years already.
On NPR this morning, they discussed the previous sequestration of 2% that happened in 1991. The bureaucrat they talked to discussed "how hard it was to implement this 2% cut in everything", using as an example a call he got from a Parks person, asking how they implement a 2% cut in service that scrapes bird shit off of channel buoys. His response was to "...only scrape 98% of the crap off".
This, my friends, is what passes for both intelligent thought in government bureaucrats...either he (most likely) thought that was an ironic, humorous reply to what he felt was an unjust budget cutting (which it really wasn't) or he thought that was ACTUALLY a way to reduce his 'poop scraping' service costs by 2%.
As much as they try to make it so, it's pretty simple: expenditure cannot exceed income. Period, full stop. ANY OTHER SOLUTION IS GAME-PLAYING.
Oh, and for those with a party bias? I'll just remind everyone that this has been a problem for 50 years REGARDLESS of which party controlled Congress and the White House. It wouldn't be this bad, if both parties weren't generally colluding.
-Styopa
$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
Actually, the sequester doesn't cut federal spending at all, or rather it cuts it only in the Washington sense of any reduction from projected baseline increases is a cut. In reality, even if the sequester goes through, the federal government will spend more every single year.
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/fairy-tale-spending-cuts
Spending will still go up, just not as much.
During all the Chicken Little propaganda blitz, not a mention in any of the media outlets about the > $100B in wasteful spending that the Government Accountability Office found. Go to WSJ.com and search for the article "Billions in Bloat Uncovered in Beltway". Last week Rand Paul returned $600k in surplus operating budget back to the Treasury, up from $500k he returned last year. I'm sure there are plenty of Congressmen(women) that could do the same. I'm sure they could if more of them actually had respect for our tax dollars. How about slashing Congress' budget?
Or how about cutting down on the hundreds of millions of dollars in conferences that Gov't employees attend every year? Do conferences have to be in Vegas? Can we setup a few of these conferences in Detroit for a change, even if it's not as much fun? That is, if they're so important because of the work being done. Hmmm?
Also no mention of the fact that there is still plenty of discretion as to what each agency gets to cut. Planes won't fall out of the sky if you furlough paper pushers instead of Air Traffic Controllers.
Truth is, not every Federal employee is critical, and they are now starting to average better pay and more $100k+ workers and better benefits than the private sector. The Government shut down numerous times during Reagan's time, and nobody resorted to cannibalism because of it. Civilization is still here; for now. Notice how, up until last week, the message was all about all the different aspect of our lives that were going to break down due to these budget cuts. The President sounded like a prepper! Doesn't this tell us that we are WAAAY too dependent on government?
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
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!
Holy fuck that's some spin.
The Republican bills were complete pie-in-the-sky conservative fantasy that would NEVER have passed, and would have been disastrous if they did. The blame is on their shoulders for not putting forward anything that would have had a chance of making it. Those pieces of legislation were nothing more than symbolic gestures to pander to their base.
And you're pretty stupid for buying their BS.
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.
Percentage-wise, we're shaving off about 8%:
By an eerie coincidence, you can lose 8% of your body weight by decapitating yourself:
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Those passed budgets were a sham, gutting services and preserving tax rates on the wealthy.
It all comes down to where the axe should fall, and given Obama was re-elected campaigning to raise taxes on the wealthy and preserve services for the middle and lower classes, the majority of the blame goes to the Republicans for ignoring what the MAJORITY of voters want to do.
Bureaucrats have one goal in life. To accumulate more power and increase the size of their budgets. The thoughts of cutting waste and removing inefficiency never occur to their twisted minds.
If these microscopic little slowdowns in their budget increases (these are not cuts) have any effect on government services whatsoever, it is only because the bureaucrats implemented them in a way that would be most painful and most noticeable to the people.
If your spouse was a bureaucrat and you had to decrease household spending by 2.2%, the cut would be made by turning off the heat and electricity. The restaurant and entertainment budget that a sane person would cut first would not be touched. That way, the cuts would be as painful as possible so that you didn't DARE suggest a cut ever again.
It would be possible to cut the federal government by 33% without anyone but the bureaucratic parasites noticing.
Well, if the Senate would pass a budget then we would have some idea of what sort of budget might pass the Senate (and if it is reasonable to expect the House to pass such a budget). Since the Senate has not done so in somewhere around four years, the House has no way of knowing what kind of budget would pass the Senate and have reason to believe that the answer is that NO budget will pass the Senate. If the Senate will not pass any budget, how is the House supposed to pass one that has a chance to pass the Senate?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
You're looking at the budget as a monolithic blob. There are programs that are already underfunded and some that are ripe with waste. As inexplicable as it might seem, some organizations don't have that much wiggle room. In some cases, contracts have been signed, people have been relocated, buildings have been leased. When you cut 5% across the board, you're taking the simplistic approach to a complex problem and hoping that someone else works out the details.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
the Republicans have failed to budge from their stance against taxing the wealthy.
I thought they already gave Obama the tax increase he wanted at the beginning of the year. Obama was claiming that if they gave him a tax increase during the "fiscal cliff" negotiations than the sequester negotiations would be all about budget cuts.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.
They do and funding isn't automatic under the current system. That's why we have a government shutdown if no appropriation is passed by Congress and signed by the President (or repassed by Congressional supermajority over a Presidential veto.) Even so-called "non-discretionary" spending isn't automatic.
Baseline budgeting is simply a matter of how budget proposals are calculated and presented, it has no bearing on the actual substantive process and requirements around passing a budget.
Given that nobody is willing to step up to the plate and cut entitlements then the only way is across the board cuts. The US is broke. People like to toss around the $16T figure for debt... its far, far, larger when the PV of the entitlement programs is considered in full. You could cut all discretionary spending and we would still be broke.
Personally I would be happy to see an across the board 30% cut to everything. That would set us back to... OMFG: 2008!
Maybe, just maybe, this will wake people up that all their favorite discretionary spending is going away for good if something is not done now. One good place to start would be to bind and gag Paul Krugman and render him to ... anywhere else. As long as people keep believing his fantasy stories we are (queue FedEx commercial) Doomed!
Yes, because [the Republican plans to avoid sequester] are all total BS.
I don't think that's true. There was one suggestion to allow the president to make the choice of what to cut. With such a small cut, it should be easy to find things that won't cause huge damage. Obama threatened to veto it, because of pork-spending, jobs, defense, and kids. Think of the kids.
It's not clear to me the real reason why he opposes that bill.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That makes total sense. Let's punish all of those who were responsible and have saved for future to save those that spent beyond their means and have no way to pay back the debt they owe.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
I expect the real reason the GOP pushed to let Obama choose is so that they could turn around and blame him for any unpopular cuts. They tried to further abdicate responsibility, because it's Congress's job to choose funding levels.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Come on idiots, (not the poster, who probably just made a typo, but the mods who sent it up to +5) -- the TOTAL cumulative government debt is about $14 trillion. The deficit for this year will be in the neighborhood (probably under) of $1 trillion, still a large number but we need to keep the facts straight in these discussions.