You could eliminate the non-defense discretionary budget 100% (elimiate every non-defense segment of the government) and we'd still be running a deficit.
And if you eliminated the defense budget 100%, we'd still be running a deficit.
In fact, our deficit would still be in the top five of all time....
A yes/no simple majority vote would be easy enough to decide if an amendment is related. Sometimes a simple solution is also the best one;)
So, under your system, the Democrats in the Senate can define anything they want to be "related", and the Republicans in the House can do likewise.
So, how is that different than now?
So, how long till Windows 7 is history?
on
Windows 8 Is Ready
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· Score: 1
Seriously, do I need to think about buying new computers before Win8 hits the streets if I don't want to be stuck with Win8?
I say this not because I have a particular problem with Win8, but because I prefer to let other people beta-test operating systems. I want one I KNOW will work right, not one I'm just hoping will work right.
Had the U.S. done that in the 30s, we would have lost in the 40s (old aircraft, slow ships, old rifles, broken tanks, no nukes).
It should be noted that R&D in the USA had almost no funding at all until...1939-1940.
Why? Because the US Military was, as is usual in peacetime (well, was usual pre-WW2 - the rules have changed since then) starved for funds.
They had to develop tank warfare doctrine with trucks as stand-ins for tanks, since they had no tanks made later than about 1920.
The M1 Garand "officially" replaced the 03 Springfield in 1936, but virtually the entire Army and Marine Corps began WW2 with Springfields.
The M4 Sherman tank began development in 1940.
The P-51 Mustang begain development in '39, in response to a British request for airplanes. The prototype wasn't flown until mid 1940, and production didn't start till 1941.
And on, and on....
On the other hand, the Navy got a slightly better deal, since they'd always been the "senior service".
Their "better deal consisted of (are you ready for this?) two (2) battleships laid down before WW2 began (both completed in 1923), seven (7) aircraft carriers (two completed in 1927, the rest in the mid-late '30s), ten (10) cruisers (only one in the '30s) and fifty-one (51) destroyers.
Note that three of the aircraft carriers and one cruiser of all that lot were not obsolescent by 1941. Or, in the case of the aircraft carriers, obsolescent as built, mostly - they were built under the limits of the Washington Naval Treaties, and tended to be too small to be really useful, or battlecruiser conversions.
So, for the most part, it was NOT our R&D of the '30s that saved us in WW2, it was our not getting involved (much) for the first couple of years of the war that gave our R&D of the '40s time to play catch-up.
Or, you know, we could be in the middle of a worldwide financial meltdown where hard decisions have to be made.
We are NOT in the middle of a worldwide financial meltdown.
What we ARE in is a period when a very large fraction of the populace are realizing that they're overextended on credit, so they're busy paying down their debts like mad.
Which means that rather than buying the latest in cars/computers/whatever, they're paying off the last ten years worth of spending more than they made.
Once they've paid their existing debt down to manageable levels, they'll go back to spending, and businesses who aren't selling can go back to selling and hiring....
Note that the only reason I'm not doing that is that my wife and I did this ten years ago. Amazing how little a mortgage crisis means when your mortgage was paid off a decade back, and you don't have to worry about car payments because you paid cash for your cars or did without....
1) Today's systems are cheep enough that the lack of production at night doesn't keep them from being profitable to install. In addition solar's best energy producing hours are peak energy drawing hours when electricity can be more expensive.
If you only get solar in the daytime, you still have to have more "conventional" power for nighttime, since we don't stop using power at night.
3) The United States Government owns huge tracks of land. Google "government land map" and you should see. Those desert areas would be perfect for solar plants.
As I recall, last time we tried to build a solar plant in the desert, the environmental lobby got that stalled because a dozen or so tortoises lives onsite.
Nuclear reactors take 20+ years to build. The cost of solar will long since be cheaper than nuclear by the time any plant could be built.
Only argument here is that the real limiter on build time for a nuke plant is the lawyers.
Which will be the same limiter on building very large solar plants.
Note, by the by, that today's solar prices are heavily subsidized. Which means the prices only work if few people take advantage of them.
Where I live, the State and Federal government will cover ~80% of the cost of a solar system. Which really means other taxpayers will pay 4/5 of my costs. Which is fine until 100% of taxpayers start installing them - then each of us will end up paying the full cost, since our taxes will have to be raised to cover the extra costs of the subsidies....
...a whole 60m run. Less than ten seconds of exercise. I guess it's true what they say about the Navy.
The only thing a sailor needs to sprint for is battlestations. Which means from where you berth to your station.
Oddly enough, there's not usually a straight run longer than about 60 meters in that path. On the boat I was on, I had to go through two watertight hatches before I moved 60 meters from berthing - and you're NOT going to sprint through a watertight hatch....
Their "core defense program" figures seriously undercount the total expense of operating the military, which include a lot of expenses that they pawn off on other agencies. For example, the entire veterans' healthcare system should be counted as military spending: if we had fewer vets, we'd have less VA spending. In addition, a bunch of Department of Energy stuff is military, some of it ongoing research, and some of it cleaning up military-created Superfund messes [wikipedia.org].
If you add the VA to military spending, and ALL of the DoE to military spending, you get a total of about $860 billion (2012 budget).
Social Security alone is $779 billion.
Medicare is $485 billion.
"Income Security" (whatever the hell that means - I'm assuming Welfare and Unemployment) is $580 billion.
Hmm, those three items are over twice the most generous possible interpretation of the military budget (including the wars) - so how can the military budget manage to be 40%+ of the Federal Budget?
So, no, military spending isn't the lion's share of the budget.
If a $50M dollar plane can do the job, Congress finds a way to buy a $200M plane. Consequently they can only afford 1/4 as many planes. The $200M plane can't do the job of four $50M planes so the effectiveness of the force is diminished. Therefore that justifies buying twice as many planes as they can afford. The initial justification for the $200M plane is that it's so incredibly important that the pilots be as safe as possible when we put them in harm's way. But they don't give the common infantryman or even his commanding officer $200M worth of equipment. The fact is a fleet of 10x as many $20M planes could do more than the job of the $200M planes they intend to buy because quantity has a quality all its own.
This is just a continuation of the Congress' tendency to meddle in military procurement.
Last time it got like this, the Navy and the Air Force got the Phantom jet, which neither wanted. Now, they're going to get the F-35, which neither want. One reason Congress likes to monkey with things like this is that we've reached the point where we're buying few enough planes that it's hard to amortize the cost of development over the construction contracts. When you are buying 1000 planes to one design, you get a better per-plane rate than you would if you were building 250 planes to each of four different designs....
Another reason, of course, is that Congress loves a defense spending bill that is being spent in their district, and hates any other kind. And the more complicated the hardware, the easier it is to get parts for it built in all 432 Congressional districts.
Note, though, that this does NOT mean that four $50 million jets can do the work of one $200 million jet.
One example where this doesn't work is aboard an aircraft carrier - when you can only carry 75 planes, they've got to be very good planes. And 300 planes, even if they cost the same as the 75, still won't fit on the carrier, so they're still basically worthless to the Navy.
Had Nazi Germany not invaded its eastern neighbors and somehow failed to attract the attention of the U.S.
SOMEHOW failed to attract the attention of the USA?
I take it you think Hitler declaring war on the USA in the hopes that Japan would then declare war on the USSR was his way of "attracting the attention of the USA"?
Note that right after Pearl Harbor, the US Congress declared war on Japan right away, but NOT on Germany.
It wasn't until idiot-boy in his bunker declared war on us that we decided he needed a pounding too.
Enemy attacks; I retreat.
Enemy retreats; I follow.
Enemy stops; I watch.
Enemy tired; I attack.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
That worked pretty well for Mao, who had a second- (or third-)rate opponent.
In Vietnam, it should be remembered, the war wasn't won by the Vietcong using Mao's strategy, but by the North Vietnamese Army (using Germany's strategy).
Which was rather larger and much better equipped than the Wehrmacht was in 1940....
And they had to wait till the USA got disgusted with the whole thing and left.
How about national development of aquaponics to reduce food imports and in times of drought damn bloody import.
It should be noted that we're a net exporter of food. We ship out about three tons for every ton we import. In dollar terms, we import about 8.5% of our food, while exporting rather more than that.
It should also be noted that most of what we import are things that don't grow here (e.g. coffee), things that are not in season here (we import veggies from the southern hemisphere during our winter, for instance), and beer.
And, in general, I'm especially thankful for the last one. While there are some excellent small breweries in the USA, the run-of-the-mill beer made here sucks little green horny toads....
Funny how a pretend space program has a much bigger and loyal audience than a real space program. Just goes to prove that people are more willing to believe garbage and lies than the truth.
Hint: the "pretend space program" is...wait for it...interesting.
The real one is, alas, mostly boring. Wow, VW-sized robot goes to Mars. Yah, that'll get people excited!
Or not.
Put some men there, people might get excited. Or even send men back to the moon. But you don't get breathless anticipation and excitement out of "this again!?"....
I think the general lack of excitement is due to a number of factors, including what I perceive to be a general distrust of science by a significant part of the American population.
It has little, if anything, to do with a "general distrust of science".
More like a "lack of interest" in something that fits well within the "been there, done that" part of reality.
Mars won't be "exciting" again till we discover life (and then only for a few days), or send people there (and then only now and then - how long can you be excited by "astronaut Jim took a dump today"?).
And if we do Mars the way they did the moon (send a dozen people there, then give up on it), then it won't mean much even to those of us who would like to see men on Mars.
Note, by the way, that doing the same thing again and again doesn't get people to pay attention - doing it for the first time does....
Gun control does not infringe upon your right to bear arms. Total gun bans do.
Oddly enough, the Supremes disagree with you.
Note that by your logic, we'd have Freedom of the Press as long as the government didn't put more than, say, a 1,000,000% tax on printer's ink (that wouldn't be a "ban", just a tax).
Alas, the Supremes didn't buy that one either, when it came in front of them a couple hundred years ago.
no one--not even the Founding Fathers--ever intended for your right to bear arms to include private citizens acquiring weapons with little or no oversight capable of killing mass numbers of people outside the context of the military engaged in armed conflict.
Might want to read some of the writings of the Founding Fathers a bit more closely.
It should be noted, for the record, that before FDR became President, ALL gun control laws in the USA reduced down to "keep guns out of the hands of the [Irish][Italians][blacks][wogs]" - in other words, it was inherently racist.
FDR, being a freedom-loving guy, tried to pass gun control laws on everyone, and even his own Attorney General told him it was unconstitutional....
Wrong, the ATF didn't send any weapons to Mexico. What they did was try to track a few of the hundreds of thousands of guns purchased every year by individuals with suspicious purchasing patterns.
Umm, no.
The ATF told firearms dealers who reported suspicious purchases to go ahead and sell the guns anyway, so they could "trace them".
Then they didn't bother to trace them.
Note that telling a firearms dealer to go ahead and sell a gun to a criminal is illegal.
It is a demonstrated fact that any kook can get an assault rifle with a hundred round magazine to shoot up a senator, movie theater, etc.
Actually, no.
Requires an FFL to own an assault rifle (note that an AR-15 is NOT an assault rifle, since it is semi-automatic), which is rather harder to get than you might think.
Plus the supply of assault rifles is limited to what existed prior to the requirement for an FFL to own one - so they're pretty damn expensive.
And of course tens of thousands of US weapons flood into Mexico for their drug war every year purchased by people who are curiously buying dozens of weapons every month but oh well, they must be collectors.
Umm, no. The assault rifles being used in Mexico tend to be bought from Mexican Army supply sergeants.
Plus, of course, the ones the ATF decides the Mexicans need, of course....
Which will lead 'us' to either find other propellants, or other government.
Hmm, seem to remember reading once that, back in the early part of last century, you could make a decent smokeless powder by chopping up the film movies were made on (and delivered to the theatres on).
It's not really that hard to make up something that'll push a bullet out the barrel - you could even use fertilizer as the base, if you wanted to....
The key thing the parent missed out was that to be guilty of "going equipped" the police need reasonable suspicion of what you're going to do with the objects. If you "go equipped" with a baseball^Wcricket bat in the back of your car, you can quickly prove your innocence by saying "I was on my way back from playing cricket this morning". If you have a crowbar in the back of your car, you can simply say "I need to open a bunch of crates at work today", etc.
So, I have to prove my innocence if I carry tools in my car?
I'd count graft as at least a subset of corruption. It's still rotten.
That's your privilege, but it pretty much requires that you ignore the actual meaning of the words. Graft is bribes to do your job, corruption is bribes to break the law.
Note that accepting bribes to do your job is not illegal or immoral in most cultures.
In England you can be arrested for "going equipped". For example if you have a crowbar, pliers and other tools in your car they will claim that you are going equipped to commit burglary, you don't actually need to do the crime.
Interesting.
Upon reflection, I have a crowbar, pliers, and other tools in my car right now.
Upon further reflection, I have tools of one sort or another in there pretty much all the time.
In the East corrupt officials demand money to do their regular job for which they get paid salaries. Simple things like getting a driver's license or getting fitness certificate for your bus/truck, or getting a residency certificate to apply for a bank loan, or getting a legal heir certificate to probate a will, or to register a property deed, or police verification report to apply for passport or no objection certificate from the Urban Development Authority for something or the other, or from the water board for something else.... any thing you need to do, there are two things that are certain:
1. You will need certificates. No matter what you do. Anything you do must have an application, usually in triplicate, and it should be accompanied by certificates. Tons and tons of certificates.
2. All these certificates must be obtained by bribing some official or another.
What you are describing here is NOT "corruption". It is "graft". Subtle difference, possibly, but significant, from a cultural perspective - some cultures have no problems with graft (it's assumed to be one of the perks of the job)....
Meanwhile, I can't think of more than one person under 60 that doesn't have an account.
Never had much interest in old high school friends being able to find me, and my relatives and current friends know how to get in touch with me if needed.
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And if you eliminated the defense budget 100%, we'd still be running a deficit.
In fact, our deficit would still be in the top five of all time....
So, under your system, the Democrats in the Senate can define anything they want to be "related", and the Republicans in the House can do likewise.
So, how is that different than now?
Seriously, do I need to think about buying new computers before Win8 hits the streets if I don't want to be stuck with Win8?
I say this not because I have a particular problem with Win8, but because I prefer to let other people beta-test operating systems. I want one I KNOW will work right, not one I'm just hoping will work right.
It should be noted that R&D in the USA had almost no funding at all until...1939-1940.
Why? Because the US Military was, as is usual in peacetime (well, was usual pre-WW2 - the rules have changed since then) starved for funds.
They had to develop tank warfare doctrine with trucks as stand-ins for tanks, since they had no tanks made later than about 1920.
The M1 Garand "officially" replaced the 03 Springfield in 1936, but virtually the entire Army and Marine Corps began WW2 with Springfields.
The M4 Sherman tank began development in 1940.
The P-51 Mustang begain development in '39, in response to a British request for airplanes. The prototype wasn't flown until mid 1940, and production didn't start till 1941.
And on, and on....
On the other hand, the Navy got a slightly better deal, since they'd always been the "senior service".
Their "better deal consisted of (are you ready for this?) two (2) battleships laid down before WW2 began (both completed in 1923), seven (7) aircraft carriers (two completed in 1927, the rest in the mid-late '30s), ten (10) cruisers (only one in the '30s) and fifty-one (51) destroyers.
Note that three of the aircraft carriers and one cruiser of all that lot were not obsolescent by 1941. Or, in the case of the aircraft carriers, obsolescent as built, mostly - they were built under the limits of the Washington Naval Treaties, and tended to be too small to be really useful, or battlecruiser conversions.
So, for the most part, it was NOT our R&D of the '30s that saved us in WW2, it was our not getting involved (much) for the first couple of years of the war that gave our R&D of the '40s time to play catch-up.
We are NOT in the middle of a worldwide financial meltdown.
What we ARE in is a period when a very large fraction of the populace are realizing that they're overextended on credit, so they're busy paying down their debts like mad.
Which means that rather than buying the latest in cars/computers/whatever, they're paying off the last ten years worth of spending more than they made.
Once they've paid their existing debt down to manageable levels, they'll go back to spending, and businesses who aren't selling can go back to selling and hiring....
Note that the only reason I'm not doing that is that my wife and I did this ten years ago. Amazing how little a mortgage crisis means when your mortgage was paid off a decade back, and you don't have to worry about car payments because you paid cash for your cars or did without....
If you only get solar in the daytime, you still have to have more "conventional" power for nighttime, since we don't stop using power at night.
As I recall, last time we tried to build a solar plant in the desert, the environmental lobby got that stalled because a dozen or so tortoises lives onsite.
Only argument here is that the real limiter on build time for a nuke plant is the lawyers.
Which will be the same limiter on building very large solar plants.
Note, by the by, that today's solar prices are heavily subsidized. Which means the prices only work if few people take advantage of them.
Where I live, the State and Federal government will cover ~80% of the cost of a solar system. Which really means other taxpayers will pay 4/5 of my costs. Which is fine until 100% of taxpayers start installing them - then each of us will end up paying the full cost, since our taxes will have to be raised to cover the extra costs of the subsidies....
The only thing a sailor needs to sprint for is battlestations. Which means from where you berth to your station.
Oddly enough, there's not usually a straight run longer than about 60 meters in that path. On the boat I was on, I had to go through two watertight hatches before I moved 60 meters from berthing - and you're NOT going to sprint through a watertight hatch....
MiG-15. The -17 wasn't even in production in the USSR until '52.
Nope. But see how many factories and businesses are going to start when there's no reward for doing so.
If you add the VA to military spending, and ALL of the DoE to military spending, you get a total of about $860 billion (2012 budget).
Social Security alone is $779 billion.
Medicare is $485 billion.
"Income Security" (whatever the hell that means - I'm assuming Welfare and Unemployment) is $580 billion.
Hmm, those three items are over twice the most generous possible interpretation of the military budget (including the wars) - so how can the military budget manage to be 40%+ of the Federal Budget?
So, no, military spending isn't the lion's share of the budget.
This is just a continuation of the Congress' tendency to meddle in military procurement.
Last time it got like this, the Navy and the Air Force got the Phantom jet, which neither wanted. Now, they're going to get the F-35, which neither want. One reason Congress likes to monkey with things like this is that we've reached the point where we're buying few enough planes that it's hard to amortize the cost of development over the construction contracts. When you are buying 1000 planes to one design, you get a better per-plane rate than you would if you were building 250 planes to each of four different designs....
Another reason, of course, is that Congress loves a defense spending bill that is being spent in their district, and hates any other kind. And the more complicated the hardware, the easier it is to get parts for it built in all 432 Congressional districts.
Note, though, that this does NOT mean that four $50 million jets can do the work of one $200 million jet.
One example where this doesn't work is aboard an aircraft carrier - when you can only carry 75 planes, they've got to be very good planes. And 300 planes, even if they cost the same as the 75, still won't fit on the carrier, so they're still basically worthless to the Navy.
SOMEHOW failed to attract the attention of the USA?
I take it you think Hitler declaring war on the USA in the hopes that Japan would then declare war on the USSR was his way of "attracting the attention of the USA"?
Note that right after Pearl Harbor, the US Congress declared war on Japan right away, but NOT on Germany.
It wasn't until idiot-boy in his bunker declared war on us that we decided he needed a pounding too.
That worked pretty well for Mao, who had a second- (or third-)rate opponent.
In Vietnam, it should be remembered, the war wasn't won by the Vietcong using Mao's strategy, but by the North Vietnamese Army (using Germany's strategy).
Which was rather larger and much better equipped than the Wehrmacht was in 1940....
And they had to wait till the USA got disgusted with the whole thing and left.
It should be noted that we're a net exporter of food. We ship out about three tons for every ton we import. In dollar terms, we import about 8.5% of our food, while exporting rather more than that.
It should also be noted that most of what we import are things that don't grow here (e.g. coffee), things that are not in season here (we import veggies from the southern hemisphere during our winter, for instance), and beer.
And, in general, I'm especially thankful for the last one. While there are some excellent small breweries in the USA, the run-of-the-mill beer made here sucks little green horny toads....
Hint: the "pretend space program" is...wait for it...interesting.
The real one is, alas, mostly boring. Wow, VW-sized robot goes to Mars. Yah, that'll get people excited!
Or not.
Put some men there, people might get excited. Or even send men back to the moon. But you don't get breathless anticipation and excitement out of "this again!?"....
It has little, if anything, to do with a "general distrust of science".
More like a "lack of interest" in something that fits well within the "been there, done that" part of reality.
Mars won't be "exciting" again till we discover life (and then only for a few days), or send people there (and then only now and then - how long can you be excited by "astronaut Jim took a dump today"?).
And if we do Mars the way they did the moon (send a dozen people there, then give up on it), then it won't mean much even to those of us who would like to see men on Mars.
Note, by the way, that doing the same thing again and again doesn't get people to pay attention - doing it for the first time does....
Oddly enough, the Supremes disagree with you.
Note that by your logic, we'd have Freedom of the Press as long as the government didn't put more than, say, a 1,000,000% tax on printer's ink (that wouldn't be a "ban", just a tax).
Alas, the Supremes didn't buy that one either, when it came in front of them a couple hundred years ago.
Might want to read some of the writings of the Founding Fathers a bit more closely.
It should be noted, for the record, that before FDR became President, ALL gun control laws in the USA reduced down to "keep guns out of the hands of the [Irish][Italians][blacks][wogs]" - in other words, it was inherently racist.
FDR, being a freedom-loving guy, tried to pass gun control laws on everyone, and even his own Attorney General told him it was unconstitutional....
Umm, no.
The ATF told firearms dealers who reported suspicious purchases to go ahead and sell the guns anyway, so they could "trace them".
Then they didn't bother to trace them.
Note that telling a firearms dealer to go ahead and sell a gun to a criminal is illegal.
Actually, no.
Requires an FFL to own an assault rifle (note that an AR-15 is NOT an assault rifle, since it is semi-automatic), which is rather harder to get than you might think.
Plus the supply of assault rifles is limited to what existed prior to the requirement for an FFL to own one - so they're pretty damn expensive.
Umm, no. The assault rifles being used in Mexico tend to be bought from Mexican Army supply sergeants.
Plus, of course, the ones the ATF decides the Mexicans need, of course....
Hmm, seem to remember reading once that, back in the early part of last century, you could make a decent smokeless powder by chopping up the film movies were made on (and delivered to the theatres on).
It's not really that hard to make up something that'll push a bullet out the barrel - you could even use fertilizer as the base, if you wanted to....
So, I have to prove my innocence if I carry tools in my car?
Note to self: don't go to the UK.
That's your privilege, but it pretty much requires that you ignore the actual meaning of the words. Graft is bribes to do your job, corruption is bribes to break the law.
Note that accepting bribes to do your job is not illegal or immoral in most cultures.
Interesting.
Upon reflection, I have a crowbar, pliers, and other tools in my car right now.
Upon further reflection, I have tools of one sort or another in there pretty much all the time.
Note to self: don't go to the UK....
What you are describing here is NOT "corruption". It is "graft". Subtle difference, possibly, but significant, from a cultural perspective - some cultures have no problems with graft (it's assumed to be one of the perks of the job)....
Never had much interest in old high school friends being able to find me, and my relatives and current friends know how to get in touch with me if needed.