It isn't about ties. Without a clear majority (not plurality, but majority), the election is passed to Congress to decide.
Which is why our system is pretty much designed for two-party dominance, by the by (though which two parties is open for reconsideration at any time).
Clinton's elections (and I use those as only the most recent examples) would have been decided in Congress because Clinton never won a majority of the popular vote, and anything other than winner-take-all would have resulted in Clinton not getting his required majority of the Electoral College.
Now, it can be argued that the result in the Congress would not have followed the straight party line (in either or both of Clinton's elections). This is true. Might not have. But betting on the Party Line for something as important as a Presidential election is pretty much a no-brainer.
Note that you are assuming that the Electoral College will have no political bias. Don't be so foolish as to think that. Pick any seven people at random, and you'll have eight political opinions on any given subject....
Increasing the number of flights per year beyond that would require a corresponding increase in personnel, and therefore funding.
Surely would. Even so, the funding would increase less than linearly as the number of flights increase - because SOME of the overhead isn't per flight, it's per program. So you come ahead with more flights.
Note that I don't consider more funding for manned spaceflight a bad thing.
The shuttle is WAY too complex. It was designed to do everything
Possibly. A truck, by its nature, is pretty general purpose, so that's not necessarily a bad thing.
But, yes, a better set of vehicles could be designed. A better Shuttle would have been designed, if the Congress of the period hadn't gutted funding for the Shuttle over and over. A better Shuttle would exist now, if NASA had been budgeted for ongoing improvements in the basic design (I still think the SRB idea sucks - I'd prefer replacing each of them with an F-1 plus a fuel tank, in the same form-factor).
Real problem is that we were spent the wrong amount of money 0 it should have been enough more to make a serious effort, or none at all. Same for all the rest of the Space Program. Apollo wasn't worth doing without a follow-on (and I curse the Congress that ended Apollo on a regular basis to this date). A manned Mars mission won't be worth doing if we're going to go once or twice, then stop. Which is likely to be the way it works out, by the time the Congress 10-20 years along votes the funds.
Enough bitching about shortsighted pols. The weekend is almost here....
You probably see where I'm going with this: who in their right mind is actually awake at 5 AM to enjoy the daylight?????
That would be me. Oh, wait, you said "in their right mind", didn't you?
Seriously, stop drinking coffee, and in a few months, you might find you're quite wide awake at 5AM - I stopped doing caffeine 15 years ago. Since then, my alarm hasn't had to wake me up - I'm always wide awake and ready to go before the alarm goes off (at 5am)
As it is, I'm sick of the government sneaking into my home in the dead of the night twice a year to fuck with my clocks. If I wanted that kind of intrusiveness in my life, I would have chosen to be born in a socialist country.
But it doesn't bother you to have a "timezone"? Once upon a time, clocks were set so that the sun was at zenith at noon. And every town had its clock set a bit differently (well, except for town directly north-south of each other).
Timezones (at least in the USA) were instituted by the railroads (big corporations) in the 1883. The government made timezones "official" in the same legislation that implemented Daylight Savings Time, in 1918.
One must keep in mind, however, that Daylight Savings Time was implemented during WW1, largely for the purpose of allowing people to visit the Pubs before dark.
When they finally launched a nuclear bomb program (1940 or 41, I think), they realized that it would take them several years just to catch up to the Americans,
Fascinating, when you realize that the Manhattan Project didn't start until mid 1942. Yeah, there was a fair amount of work being done earlier in the US and UK (and the UK's atom bomb program started in 1941), but the serious "we're going to build us an atomic bomb" work didn't start until after the German program had been running a couple of years....
The current 'popular election' system where each state is 'winner take all' (with a couple exceptions) isn't the original design, but rather a cludge pasted onto it by the political party system to better enable them to get elected based popularity and momentary passions rather than merit and the deliberation of the electoral colledge.
Actually, the winner take all system for the Electoral College was put in to place largely to make it less likely that the President would be chosen by the Congress. Both of Clinton's elections would have been decided in the Congress, as an example, using the original system (which would likely have meant that Clinton would win the first one due to a clear Democratic majority in both Houses, and lose the second, due to a clear Republican majority in both Houses).
Also, who is going to pay for all of this fuel for a launch every 4 days?
The fuel is actually pretty cheap. It's a quite small part of the cost of a shuttle flight.
Isn't 91 flights a year overdoing it a bit?
Not really. Sure, it's changing the fundamental model of spaceflight. To what the Shuttle was meant to be - not a scientific vehicle, but a truck/bus to orbit. If we had the truck leaving every four days, we'd find lots of ways to use the capacity...
This sounds like one of those evil genious fantasys where you don't have to worry about the money and can build whatever you want.
To a certain extent, it is. But even at a couple billion per shuttle, that's only $100 billion for the fleet. And it wouldn't cost a couple billion each if we were to sign a contract for delivery of 50, plus replacement parts.
I hear people on/. complain all the time about the military budget ($400 billion and climbing) - take 5% of the military budget and dedicate it to a reasonable shuttle fleet, and we'd have had our 50 by 1990.
Operating costs for the shuttle include a lot of overhead, amortized over six flights per year. Spreading that overhead over 90 flights per year would lower the cost per flight (probably more than enough to cover the fuel costs;) )
Given that shuttles are estimated to have a disaster in about 1 out of every hundred flights (which has thus far borne out with our space program), that would mean we would have a shuttle lost every year or so.
Not necessarily. The first shuttle failure wouldn't have been prevented by a larger fleet (though it's safe to say the problem would still have been fixed after just one failure, and so no more of that particular failure mode would be seen ), but an extant space station (say, once it got to be 20 times as big as the ISS) would have allowed for both inspection of and repair to the damage suffered by our second failure. Being able to repair the shuttle at a space station would significantly reduce the failure rate (it would eliminate 50% of the failures we've seen to date;) )....
The problem isn't so much the Shuttle as the insanity of the ISS and the manned space programme as a whole. What are they for?
No, the problem is the shuttle. Or, perhaps, the manned space program, but not the way you mean it. Problem is we approached it as if it was never going to be anything other than a few scientists being lofted, instead of industrializing it.
If we'd built 50 shuttles, we could have a launch every four days (allowing 200 days between launches of each shuttle). We'd be able to put 2400T or thereabouts in orbit every year. Note that 2400T is more about ten times as much as the Mars Mission will require.
Fifteen years of that, with half devoted to the space station, and we'd have a REAL space station - 10000T+, capable of supporting some serious industry and whatever science wants to tag along for the ride.
Plus our moon base (and anyone else's who wants one - a real space station makes it much easier for newcomers to get into the game, as long as they play nice), an asteroid mission or two, maybe a probe to look at a monolith on Europa or some such...
The possibilities are endless...
Four, on the other hand. Essentially worthless - they can't do their design mission, they can't build a decent space station, they can't do much of anything....
The Army's most deadly aircraft the A-10 Warthog was designed and built in the 50's most flying today are 20+ years old.
The A-10 was designed in the 70's, not the 50's. And it belongs to the Air Force, not the Army.
Note also that we built about 700 A-10's. Not four. Hell, there were more than four prototypes of the A-10. If we'd built shuttles by the hundreds, they wouldn't have this sort of problem either.
Won't bother to comment on the rest - some of it is reasonable and correct, some isn't, and I don't have time to dig up the figures to argue the points I don't agree with. But...
And if it were Republicans who were setting the agenda, how do you explain the military cutbacks?
Contrary to popular rumours, Republicans have not, historically, been about a strong military. Traditionally, they've been rather more isolationist and treaditional. And the traditional US military has been very small.
The end of WW2 was the very first time the US didn't end a war and immediately disband its Army back to peacetime levels. There were a variety of reasons for this (many of them spelled USSR), but that's neither here nor there. And, yes, Truman drew the military down drastically after 1945 - so much so that the North Koreans almost kicked us out of South Korea in 1950.
We have maintained a large military (by US standards since then. And a very capable one, for the most part. If we were to drop back to traditional levels, our military would be perhaps 25% of its current size. And it would be incapable of doing much of anything other than serving as a training cadre when the next world war broke out. Which, absent some stabilizing factor, it would have by now.
Instead, we maintained what amounts to the Pax Americana. Wars, when they happened, were relatively minor affairs, really just skirmishes of the Cold War. If we had not been willing and able to fight pretty much anywhere on relatively short notice, I expect that Europe would be an extension of the USSR today, and the far east an extension of China. And Africa an even worse nightmare than it is today.
Note that the above opinions are not based on the USSR and China being "communist" - neither were very communist. Just based on the fact that both were restrained by us, and bothhad ample reason to redirect their populaces from internal problems by a "short, victorious war", the traditional diversion of dictators....
It's rather unfair to compare genocide with music piracy in that manner.
Wasn't comparing music piracy to genocide. Just commmenting on silliness of notion that "90% of us want something, so government should give it to us". That's the argument of a spoiled child....
Also, Congrats for siding with the gov't over the population - as an English Citizen, can I have 300 years back taxes
Sure, send your Army over to collect anytime at all. Though my ancestors paid taxes to your ancestors for 70 of those three hundred years - don't you English learn when the Revolution was? Or do your schools suck as badly as some of our schools?
One must keep in mind that, while the UK and Canada may be about mob rule, the USA is designed to limit the ability of the mob. That's the whole point of the Bill of Rights - there are some things the government is forbidden to do, even (especially) if 90% of the populace want it.
But yes, it's not "all" military expenditures in 2003 - about half.
About half? Less than half, I think. But call it half. Back when I stuck my nose into this thread, it was claimed (by you) that 80% of the interest on the debt could be assigned as the military's fair share of the deficit. 2003 was one of the biggest years for military expenditures ever, and it might account for half the deficit that year.
So how do you justify assigning 80% of the interest payments into the military column?
Note that I do not ignore the Debt:GDP ratio. I like to argue using actual figures, and the raw data isn't trivially available. Debt I can get from the Government easily. GDP history is a bit harder. Itemized Federal Budgets a bit harder. And since I'm actually interested, not in the size of the debt, but in the fraction of the debt that can be assigned to the military, I need all those figures to make a reasonable argument.
You, on the other hand, have taken as the premise that the military is responsible for the overwhelming majority of the debt. You have yet to provide any figures at all (other than those for 2003 after I brought the year up), much less proved your point.
Note that by your figures, 40% of the debt for 2003 can be attributed to the military. Even using that figure as a good rule of thumb (it's likely to be lower, since the military expeditures in 2003 were extraordinarily high by the standards of the last half century), the military share of the debt is actually LOWER than my original estimate.
And barely half of your own estimate. Which estimate you used to increase the amount of the military budget to make the military budget appear larger than it is - $400 billion or so out of a GDP of $11 trillion isn't really very high. Tiny by the standards of WW2.
The Republican party used to be abound in them - what happened to cause them to replace that noble species with "Tax cut hawks" who push the "Starve the beast" notion?
You really don't know? You just have to look back to 1995, when the new Republican Congress decided to slow the rate of growth of funding for the Federal Government. And were portrayed by the Democrats and the Media as "cutting spending" in a variety of popular programs. Or don't you remember the howls about "cutting the school free lunch program"? (Ilooked at the figures back then - the "cuts" being howled about were a per student INCREASE in funding greater than the rate of inflation.
Notwithstanding that, it was the Republican-controlled Congress that brought the deficit down during the latter part of the Clinton era. Clinton didn't stop it (one of the two things I applaud him for), but he certainly didn't encourage it much.
Note also that tax-cut types don't necessarily do it to starve the beast. They mostly want to grow the economy. For all that the Reagan years produced some colossal deficits, if you bother to check, you'll notice that tax revenues (adjusted for inflation) grew phenomenally during that time. If spending had remained flat (adjusted for inflation), the Reagan years would have seen massive reductions in debt, not massive increases in same.
I really hate when I accidently delete a post by not remembering I'm on Preview....
1950-2000, debt rose by a factor 21
Yes. That's completely irrelevant
Irrelevant that ~96% of our debt was accumulated in the last 50 years? I think not.
That said, I tossed that bit in because I deliberately chose the period post-WW2 for my number -crunching, and WW2 represents arguably the biggest military buildup in history.
I ignored the Reagan military buildup, I admit. If we move the Reagan years from the Peace column to the War Column, the military's share of the debt goes up to about 45%.
Assuming of course, that ALL debt accumulated during a "war" year is due to the military. This is demonstrably false - in fiscal 2003, for instance, the debt rose by $372 billion, though the military budget only rose by $53 billion.
Even adding in the supplmental costs of the Iraq war ($161 billion to date, according to one antiwar site), that still allows for a debt increase of $158 billion or so in 2003 that cannot reasonably be blamed on the military.
By the way, Coolidge's term is hardly something to be proud of, in terms of economic performance.
Never said I was "proud" of it. I do, however, find it interesting that a President that most consider mediocre at best, and many consider to be the root cause of the Great Depression, was the ONLY President to ever avoid a deficit every single year he was President.
Note that Andy Jackson did do an admirable job of paying down the debt during his terms in office. However, he DID run (small) deficits in his last two years in office.
Personally, I favour redusing the debt to zero as expeditiously as possible. Possible being defined as "using techniques that will NOT drive us into a Depression. Unfortunately, convincing politicians to spend less than they make is basically impossible (for those who love the idea of the Social Security Trust Fund, and adore Mr Clinton, I'll point out that he ran surpluses in the Public Debt during the last four years of his terms, but when you count the SS Trust Fund in, he ran deficits every single year - so either the SS Trust Fund is basically non-existant, or Clinton never ran a surplus, pick one). A Constitutional Amendment wouldn't even do it, since it would require an escape clause for emergencies, which would result in every year being an emergency.
Note that I don't have much faith in our government. Or any other government, for that matter. None of them can be trusted with money....
Factor in interest payments; since most of our debt was incurred to pay for wars,
Most of our debt was incurred to pay for wars? I think not.
In the period from 1950-2000, debt rose by a factor 21, from $257 billion to $5674 billion. During that period, we were at war for Korea, Vietnam, and Desert Storm. Let's assume that ALL debt accumulated during the war years was incurred to pay for the said wars. That adds up to about $624 billion. So, over the last half of the 20th century, we accumulated $624 billion of debt during wars, and $4793 billion during peace.
Let's further assume that EVERY penny of our pre-1950 debt was due to wars. Another $257 billion in the war column. So wars account for $881 billion (if we count fairly generously) and peace accounts for $4793 billion.
Looks to me like peacetime debt outweighs wartime debt by a factor of five. So why not try letting the DoD's share of the interest payments by the 16% it actually is, instead of the 80% you wish it was.
Social security has an even more dramatic history. In the leadup to the Great Depression, an almost mirror of modern Republican economic policies existed: deregulation, anti-antitrust, low corporate taxes, low federal economic interference, etc.
Interestingly enough, that's the only period a President got through two terms without increasing the National Debt. Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929) is the only president that NEVER ran a deficit.
When are these asshats going to clue in to the fact that we live in a democracy. If 90% of the population wants free music downloads, then the government and the media industry is in the wrong for trying to stop us.
If 90% of the population wants to kill every Amerind (Native American, whatever you're calling them now), does that make the government wrong for trying to stop you?
For that matter, if 90% of the population wants the USA to nuke Toronto (yeah, I was never very impressed with Toronto - just another big, ugly, city), would that mean that the government should just forward the request to Washington?
Remeber, democracy isn't quite the same thing as "Mob Rule", much as many people would like to make it so.
You obviously weren't paying attention. the "lockbox" was the IOU's. The SSA surplus has ALWAYS been tossed into the General Fund. Actually, ALL of the SSA tax receipts are tossed into the General Fund. And SS is paid out of that General Fund.
Everything else is the same sort of bookkeeping magic that lets a Company make zillions and still report a net loss for tax purposes.
Have you ever looked at the laws governing private pension plans? If the SSA were being run under those laws, even assuming the Trust Fund were real, the administrators would be in jail.
When you consider the magic inherent in lending yourself money to pay the bills, it becomes clear that the SSA is a Pay-as-you-go program. Which it is, and always has been - no problem there. The problem is the advertising that suggests quite strongly that it is a paid-in Pension Plan (this was done to convince stiff-necked Americans that it wasn't charity, since once upon a time, accepting charity was somewhat of an embarrassment to most Americans).
Umm, they don't actually pay interest on Intragovernmental debt. Only the "Public Debt" gets interest payments and fun things like that - these really are just IOU's....
And while it is true that I am assuming indefinite deficits, I don't think that that is a bad assumption. Our track record (yes, Clinton ran deficits too, just like every other President this century except Calvin Coolidge) isn't too good.
Our obvious desire for more government spending and fewer taxes works against us, of course. Or, alternatively, our desire for more government spending and more taxes.
Both sides seem to want to increase government spending, and the lads who want more taxes don't actually want taxes to pay down the deficit, they want taxes to fund still more government (note the 80's, when tax revenue increased at an astounding rate, while government expenditures increased even faster).
The last time they raised social security taxes was when they created the trust fund.
Yah, and people STILL treat that Trust Fund like it represented a promise from God. It isn't. It's an accounting gimmick intended to fool people into believing that Social Security surpluses aren't just being tossed into the General Fund like all the rest of the tax revenue....
Cygnus, why don't you finance your own retirement, then?
Here's what you do - you set aside 100% of your paycheck for your retirement account. Then you borrow that money from yourself to cover day to day expenses. Leave an IOU in your safe-deposit box to cover what you borrow, with the promise that you'll pay it back when it's needed.
Sound like a good plan to cover your retirement? Hell, it gives you a retirement income at 100% of your working income, and you still get to spend 100% of your working income while you work! What could be better?
Remember that when that "Trust Fund" (the IOU's) come due, the government has to find the money somewhere to redeem them. And pretty much the only way the government has to come up with money is to raise taxes. SO they raise taxes to redeem the IOU's, or, if there were no "trust fund", they raise taxes anyway to pay your Social Security (because the alternative is to get booted out of office, and then their successor raises taxes to pay your Social Security).
Bet on it. The "Trust Fund" will never be drawn down. It will continue to be a big pile of IOU's until the heat death of the Universe (that is, if the Universe is still expected to undergo a heat death - I haven't been paying much attention to the projected endtimes recently). And people will continue to point to that big pile of IOU's as if they meant something.
Isn't the social security trust fund the biggest part of the "intragovernmental debt?" It needs to get paid back... it's ostensibly owed to the rest of us.
Yes, it is. And no, it doesn't. If the government raises Social Security taxes again (that's what they did last time they decided Social Security was in danger of actually having to use that "Trust Fund", then the "Trust Fund" will continue to grow, and we'll all continue to get our checks.
The funny part of the "Social Security Trust Fund" is that it only means something if the government starts to draw it down. And if the government starts to draw it down, it will have to pay for that drawdown by...raising taxes.
Which is just what they'll have to do if they DON'T draw it down.
So, if the "intragovernmental debt" were real, they'll raise taxes, and if it isn't they'll raise taxes. Far as I'm concerned, if the presence of something and the absence of something cause the same effect, then it's quite safe to treat the "something" as non-existant.
It is an article of faith among many Americans that the presence of the "Social Security trust fund" means that their Social Security is inviolate. Hate to say this, but any Congress can repeal Social Security any time they want to. With or without the Trust Fund. Or they can reduce the payout, raise the retirement age, basically give you whatever they feel like giving you, whenever they feel like giving it to you, whether the Trust Fund exists or not.
Only reason they won't repeal Social Security (but NOT the Social Security tax) is because they know they'll get thrown out of office if they do. So they'll monkey with it other ways that are not so obvious, and raise the taxes when needed to make ends meet - the surplus will be spent on other programs, and more IOU's (that will never be redeemed) will be tossed into the kitty....
Liberals win elections because they at least are a semi-good government for Canada. We had a balanced/surplus budget for 8 years in a row now. Canada's national debt is down to about 550 billion (50% GDP) and dropping. US, with their "conservative" government, the federal debt is closer to 7.5 trillion (75% GDP) and growing fast.
US Public Debt (the part that isn't one part of the government owing another part of the government money) is ~$4.6 trillion. US GDP is ~$11 trillion.
So our Debt is ~42% of GDP.
As a percent of GDP, that makes the Canadian Debt a mite bigger than our National Debt.
Note, of course, that I ignored US "intragovernmental debt". Frankly, when the government writes itself an IOU and deposits said IOU in a vault, I don't consider that "debt". Any more than I would consider it debt if I wrote myself an IOU and left it in my safe-deposit box.
"and growing fast" - won't argue with that. Too damn fast to suit me. I hope that Canada can keep on paying its Debt down. I doubt it will, but I hope so. Be nice if ONE government showed some restraint.
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Which is why our system is pretty much designed for two-party dominance, by the by (though which two parties is open for reconsideration at any time).
Clinton's elections (and I use those as only the most recent examples) would have been decided in Congress because Clinton never won a majority of the popular vote, and anything other than winner-take-all would have resulted in Clinton not getting his required majority of the Electoral College.
Now, it can be argued that the result in the Congress would not have followed the straight party line (in either or both of Clinton's elections). This is true. Might not have. But betting on the Party Line for something as important as a Presidential election is pretty much a no-brainer.
Note that you are assuming that the Electoral College will have no political bias. Don't be so foolish as to think that. Pick any seven people at random, and you'll have eight political opinions on any given subject....
I get 7 hours of sleep most nights. Or 5-6, at least. I still wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed every morning.
If you're not taking caffeine, and have a hard time waking up, it's likely your diet sucks little green horny toads.
Surely would. Even so, the funding would increase less than linearly as the number of flights increase - because SOME of the overhead isn't per flight, it's per program. So you come ahead with more flights.
Note that I don't consider more funding for manned spaceflight a bad thing.
The shuttle is WAY too complex. It was designed to do everything
Possibly. A truck, by its nature, is pretty general purpose, so that's not necessarily a bad thing.
But, yes, a better set of vehicles could be designed. A better Shuttle would have been designed, if the Congress of the period hadn't gutted funding for the Shuttle over and over. A better Shuttle would exist now, if NASA had been budgeted for ongoing improvements in the basic design (I still think the SRB idea sucks - I'd prefer replacing each of them with an F-1 plus a fuel tank, in the same form-factor).
Real problem is that we were spent the wrong amount of money 0 it should have been enough more to make a serious effort, or none at all. Same for all the rest of the Space Program. Apollo wasn't worth doing without a follow-on (and I curse the Congress that ended Apollo on a regular basis to this date). A manned Mars mission won't be worth doing if we're going to go once or twice, then stop. Which is likely to be the way it works out, by the time the Congress 10-20 years along votes the funds.
Enough bitching about shortsighted pols. The weekend is almost here....
That would be me. Oh, wait, you said "in their right mind", didn't you?
Seriously, stop drinking coffee, and in a few months, you might find you're quite wide awake at 5AM - I stopped doing caffeine 15 years ago. Since then, my alarm hasn't had to wake me up - I'm always wide awake and ready to go before the alarm goes off (at 5am)
But it doesn't bother you to have a "timezone"? Once upon a time, clocks were set so that the sun was at zenith at noon. And every town had its clock set a bit differently (well, except for town directly north-south of each other).
Timezones (at least in the USA) were instituted by the railroads (big corporations) in the 1883. The government made timezones "official" in the same legislation that implemented Daylight Savings Time, in 1918.
One must keep in mind, however, that Daylight Savings Time was implemented during WW1, largely for the purpose of allowing people to visit the Pubs before dark.
Fascinating, when you realize that the Manhattan Project didn't start until mid 1942. Yeah, there was a fair amount of work being done earlier in the US and UK (and the UK's atom bomb program started in 1941), but the serious "we're going to build us an atomic bomb" work didn't start until after the German program had been running a couple of years....
Actually, the winner take all system for the Electoral College was put in to place largely to make it less likely that the President would be chosen by the Congress. Both of Clinton's elections would have been decided in the Congress, as an example, using the original system (which would likely have meant that Clinton would win the first one due to a clear Democratic majority in both Houses, and lose the second, due to a clear Republican majority in both Houses).
The fuel is actually pretty cheap. It's a quite small part of the cost of a shuttle flight.
Isn't 91 flights a year overdoing it a bit?
Not really. Sure, it's changing the fundamental model of spaceflight. To what the Shuttle was meant to be - not a scientific vehicle, but a truck/bus to orbit. If we had the truck leaving every four days, we'd find lots of ways to use the capacity...
This sounds like one of those evil genious fantasys where you don't have to worry about the money and can build whatever you want.
To a certain extent, it is. But even at a couple billion per shuttle, that's only $100 billion for the fleet. And it wouldn't cost a couple billion each if we were to sign a contract for delivery of 50, plus replacement parts.
I hear people on /. complain all the time about the military budget ($400 billion and climbing) - take 5% of the military budget and dedicate it to a reasonable shuttle fleet, and we'd have had our 50 by 1990.
Operating costs for the shuttle include a lot of overhead, amortized over six flights per year. Spreading that overhead over 90 flights per year would lower the cost per flight (probably more than enough to cover the fuel costs ;) )
Given that shuttles are estimated to have a disaster in about 1 out of every hundred flights (which has thus far borne out with our space program), that would mean we would have a shuttle lost every year or so.
Not necessarily. The first shuttle failure wouldn't have been prevented by a larger fleet (though it's safe to say the problem would still have been fixed after just one failure, and so no more of that particular failure mode would be seen ), but an extant space station (say, once it got to be 20 times as big as the ISS) would have allowed for both inspection of and repair to the damage suffered by our second failure. Being able to repair the shuttle at a space station would significantly reduce the failure rate (it would eliminate 50% of the failures we've seen to date ;) )....
No, the problem is the shuttle. Or, perhaps, the manned space program, but not the way you mean it. Problem is we approached it as if it was never going to be anything other than a few scientists being lofted, instead of industrializing it.
If we'd built 50 shuttles, we could have a launch every four days (allowing 200 days between launches of each shuttle). We'd be able to put 2400T or thereabouts in orbit every year. Note that 2400T is more about ten times as much as the Mars Mission will require.
Fifteen years of that, with half devoted to the space station, and we'd have a REAL space station - 10000T+, capable of supporting some serious industry and whatever science wants to tag along for the ride.
Plus our moon base (and anyone else's who wants one - a real space station makes it much easier for newcomers to get into the game, as long as they play nice), an asteroid mission or two, maybe a probe to look at a monolith on Europa or some such...
The possibilities are endless...
Four, on the other hand. Essentially worthless - they can't do their design mission, they can't build a decent space station, they can't do much of anything....
The A-10 was designed in the 70's, not the 50's. And it belongs to the Air Force, not the Army.
Note also that we built about 700 A-10's. Not four. Hell, there were more than four prototypes of the A-10. If we'd built shuttles by the hundreds, they wouldn't have this sort of problem either.
And if it were Republicans who were setting the agenda, how do you explain the military cutbacks?
Contrary to popular rumours, Republicans have not, historically, been about a strong military. Traditionally, they've been rather more isolationist and treaditional. And the traditional US military has been very small.
The end of WW2 was the very first time the US didn't end a war and immediately disband its Army back to peacetime levels. There were a variety of reasons for this (many of them spelled USSR), but that's neither here nor there. And, yes, Truman drew the military down drastically after 1945 - so much so that the North Koreans almost kicked us out of South Korea in 1950.
We have maintained a large military (by US standards since then. And a very capable one, for the most part. If we were to drop back to traditional levels, our military would be perhaps 25% of its current size. And it would be incapable of doing much of anything other than serving as a training cadre when the next world war broke out. Which, absent some stabilizing factor, it would have by now.
Instead, we maintained what amounts to the Pax Americana. Wars, when they happened, were relatively minor affairs, really just skirmishes of the Cold War. If we had not been willing and able to fight pretty much anywhere on relatively short notice, I expect that Europe would be an extension of the USSR today, and the far east an extension of China. And Africa an even worse nightmare than it is today.
Note that the above opinions are not based on the USSR and China being "communist" - neither were very communist. Just based on the fact that both were restrained by us, and bothhad ample reason to redirect their populaces from internal problems by a "short, victorious war", the traditional diversion of dictators....
Wasn't comparing music piracy to genocide. Just commmenting on silliness of notion that "90% of us want something, so government should give it to us". That's the argument of a spoiled child....
Also, Congrats for siding with the gov't over the population - as an English Citizen, can I have 300 years back taxes
Sure, send your Army over to collect anytime at all. Though my ancestors paid taxes to your ancestors for 70 of those three hundred years - don't you English learn when the Revolution was? Or do your schools suck as badly as some of our schools?
One must keep in mind that, while the UK and Canada may be about mob rule, the USA is designed to limit the ability of the mob. That's the whole point of the Bill of Rights - there are some things the government is forbidden to do, even (especially) if 90% of the populace want it.
About half? Less than half, I think. But call it half. Back when I stuck my nose into this thread, it was claimed (by you) that 80% of the interest on the debt could be assigned as the military's fair share of the deficit. 2003 was one of the biggest years for military expenditures ever, and it might account for half the deficit that year.
So how do you justify assigning 80% of the interest payments into the military column?
Note that I do not ignore the Debt:GDP ratio. I like to argue using actual figures, and the raw data isn't trivially available. Debt I can get from the Government easily. GDP history is a bit harder. Itemized Federal Budgets a bit harder. And since I'm actually interested, not in the size of the debt, but in the fraction of the debt that can be assigned to the military, I need all those figures to make a reasonable argument.
You, on the other hand, have taken as the premise that the military is responsible for the overwhelming majority of the debt. You have yet to provide any figures at all (other than those for 2003 after I brought the year up), much less proved your point.
Note that by your figures, 40% of the debt for 2003 can be attributed to the military. Even using that figure as a good rule of thumb (it's likely to be lower, since the military expeditures in 2003 were extraordinarily high by the standards of the last half century), the military share of the debt is actually LOWER than my original estimate.
And barely half of your own estimate. Which estimate you used to increase the amount of the military budget to make the military budget appear larger than it is - $400 billion or so out of a GDP of $11 trillion isn't really very high. Tiny by the standards of WW2.
The Republican party used to be abound in them - what happened to cause them to replace that noble species with "Tax cut hawks" who push the "Starve the beast" notion?
You really don't know? You just have to look back to 1995, when the new Republican Congress decided to slow the rate of growth of funding for the Federal Government. And were portrayed by the Democrats and the Media as "cutting spending" in a variety of popular programs. Or don't you remember the howls about "cutting the school free lunch program"? (Ilooked at the figures back then - the "cuts" being howled about were a per student INCREASE in funding greater than the rate of inflation.
Notwithstanding that, it was the Republican-controlled Congress that brought the deficit down during the latter part of the Clinton era. Clinton didn't stop it (one of the two things I applaud him for), but he certainly didn't encourage it much.
Note also that tax-cut types don't necessarily do it to starve the beast. They mostly want to grow the economy. For all that the Reagan years produced some colossal deficits, if you bother to check, you'll notice that tax revenues (adjusted for inflation) grew phenomenally during that time. If spending had remained flat (adjusted for inflation), the Reagan years would have seen massive reductions in debt, not massive increases in same.
1950-2000, debt rose by a factor 21
Yes. That's completely irrelevant
Irrelevant that ~96% of our debt was accumulated in the last 50 years? I think not.
That said, I tossed that bit in because I deliberately chose the period post-WW2 for my number -crunching, and WW2 represents arguably the biggest military buildup in history.
I ignored the Reagan military buildup, I admit. If we move the Reagan years from the Peace column to the War Column, the military's share of the debt goes up to about 45%.
Assuming of course, that ALL debt accumulated during a "war" year is due to the military. This is demonstrably false - in fiscal 2003, for instance, the debt rose by $372 billion, though the military budget only rose by $53 billion.
Even adding in the supplmental costs of the Iraq war ($161 billion to date, according to one antiwar site), that still allows for a debt increase of $158 billion or so in 2003 that cannot reasonably be blamed on the military.
By the way, Coolidge's term is hardly something to be proud of, in terms of economic performance.
Never said I was "proud" of it. I do, however, find it interesting that a President that most consider mediocre at best, and many consider to be the root cause of the Great Depression, was the ONLY President to ever avoid a deficit every single year he was President.
Note that Andy Jackson did do an admirable job of paying down the debt during his terms in office. However, he DID run (small) deficits in his last two years in office.
Personally, I favour redusing the debt to zero as expeditiously as possible. Possible being defined as "using techniques that will NOT drive us into a Depression. Unfortunately, convincing politicians to spend less than they make is basically impossible (for those who love the idea of the Social Security Trust Fund, and adore Mr Clinton, I'll point out that he ran surpluses in the Public Debt during the last four years of his terms, but when you count the SS Trust Fund in, he ran deficits every single year - so either the SS Trust Fund is basically non-existant, or Clinton never ran a surplus, pick one). A Constitutional Amendment wouldn't even do it, since it would require an escape clause for emergencies, which would result in every year being an emergency.
Note that I don't have much faith in our government. Or any other government, for that matter. None of them can be trusted with money....
Most of our debt was incurred to pay for wars? I think not.
In the period from 1950-2000, debt rose by a factor 21, from $257 billion to $5674 billion. During that period, we were at war for Korea, Vietnam, and Desert Storm. Let's assume that ALL debt accumulated during the war years was incurred to pay for the said wars. That adds up to about $624 billion. So, over the last half of the 20th century, we accumulated $624 billion of debt during wars, and $4793 billion during peace.
Let's further assume that EVERY penny of our pre-1950 debt was due to wars. Another $257 billion in the war column. So wars account for $881 billion (if we count fairly generously) and peace accounts for $4793 billion.
Looks to me like peacetime debt outweighs wartime debt by a factor of five. So why not try letting the DoD's share of the interest payments by the 16% it actually is, instead of the 80% you wish it was.
Social security has an even more dramatic history. In the leadup to the Great Depression, an almost mirror of modern Republican economic policies existed: deregulation, anti-antitrust, low corporate taxes, low federal economic interference, etc.
Interestingly enough, that's the only period a President got through two terms without increasing the National Debt. Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929) is the only president that NEVER ran a deficit.
Turns out it was only a few centimeters deep. And the lunar module did, in fact, sink those few centimeters.
Haven't been reading /. long, have you? The overwhelming majority of American /.'ers think GW Bush is the antiChrist.
If 90% of the population wants to kill every Amerind (Native American, whatever you're calling them now), does that make the government wrong for trying to stop you?
For that matter, if 90% of the population wants the USA to nuke Toronto (yeah, I was never very impressed with Toronto - just another big, ugly, city), would that mean that the government should just forward the request to Washington?
Remeber, democracy isn't quite the same thing as "Mob Rule", much as many people would like to make it so.
Everything else is the same sort of bookkeeping magic that lets a Company make zillions and still report a net loss for tax purposes.
Have you ever looked at the laws governing private pension plans? If the SSA were being run under those laws, even assuming the Trust Fund were real, the administrators would be in jail.
When you consider the magic inherent in lending yourself money to pay the bills, it becomes clear that the SSA is a Pay-as-you-go program. Which it is, and always has been - no problem there. The problem is the advertising that suggests quite strongly that it is a paid-in Pension Plan (this was done to convince stiff-necked Americans that it wasn't charity, since once upon a time, accepting charity was somewhat of an embarrassment to most Americans).
And while it is true that I am assuming indefinite deficits, I don't think that that is a bad assumption. Our track record (yes, Clinton ran deficits too, just like every other President this century except Calvin Coolidge) isn't too good.
Our obvious desire for more government spending and fewer taxes works against us, of course. Or, alternatively, our desire for more government spending and more taxes.
Both sides seem to want to increase government spending, and the lads who want more taxes don't actually want taxes to pay down the deficit, they want taxes to fund still more government (note the 80's, when tax revenue increased at an astounding rate, while government expenditures increased even faster).
The last time they raised social security taxes was when they created the trust fund.
Yah, and people STILL treat that Trust Fund like it represented a promise from God. It isn't. It's an accounting gimmick intended to fool people into believing that Social Security surpluses aren't just being tossed into the General Fund like all the rest of the tax revenue....
Here's what you do - you set aside 100% of your paycheck for your retirement account. Then you borrow that money from yourself to cover day to day expenses. Leave an IOU in your safe-deposit box to cover what you borrow, with the promise that you'll pay it back when it's needed.
Sound like a good plan to cover your retirement? Hell, it gives you a retirement income at 100% of your working income, and you still get to spend 100% of your working income while you work! What could be better?
Remember that when that "Trust Fund" (the IOU's) come due, the government has to find the money somewhere to redeem them. And pretty much the only way the government has to come up with money is to raise taxes. SO they raise taxes to redeem the IOU's, or, if there were no "trust fund", they raise taxes anyway to pay your Social Security (because the alternative is to get booted out of office, and then their successor raises taxes to pay your Social Security).
Bet on it. The "Trust Fund" will never be drawn down. It will continue to be a big pile of IOU's until the heat death of the Universe (that is, if the Universe is still expected to undergo a heat death - I haven't been paying much attention to the projected endtimes recently). And people will continue to point to that big pile of IOU's as if they meant something.
Yes, it is. And no, it doesn't. If the government raises Social Security taxes again (that's what they did last time they decided Social Security was in danger of actually having to use that "Trust Fund", then the "Trust Fund" will continue to grow, and we'll all continue to get our checks.
The funny part of the "Social Security Trust Fund" is that it only means something if the government starts to draw it down. And if the government starts to draw it down, it will have to pay for that drawdown by...raising taxes.
Which is just what they'll have to do if they DON'T draw it down.
So, if the "intragovernmental debt" were real, they'll raise taxes, and if it isn't they'll raise taxes. Far as I'm concerned, if the presence of something and the absence of something cause the same effect, then it's quite safe to treat the "something" as non-existant.
It is an article of faith among many Americans that the presence of the "Social Security trust fund" means that their Social Security is inviolate. Hate to say this, but any Congress can repeal Social Security any time they want to. With or without the Trust Fund. Or they can reduce the payout, raise the retirement age, basically give you whatever they feel like giving you, whenever they feel like giving it to you, whether the Trust Fund exists or not.
Only reason they won't repeal Social Security (but NOT the Social Security tax) is because they know they'll get thrown out of office if they do. So they'll monkey with it other ways that are not so obvious, and raise the taxes when needed to make ends meet - the surplus will be spent on other programs, and more IOU's (that will never be redeemed) will be tossed into the kitty....
THey don't hole a candle to New Orleans politicians, though.
It's fascinating to me that most people seem to take a perverse pride in how crooked their own politicians are.
US Public Debt (the part that isn't one part of the government owing another part of the government money) is ~$4.6 trillion. US GDP is ~$11 trillion. So our Debt is ~42% of GDP.
As a percent of GDP, that makes the Canadian Debt a mite bigger than our National Debt.
Note, of course, that I ignored US "intragovernmental debt". Frankly, when the government writes itself an IOU and deposits said IOU in a vault, I don't consider that "debt". Any more than I would consider it debt if I wrote myself an IOU and left it in my safe-deposit box.
"and growing fast" - won't argue with that. Too damn fast to suit me. I hope that Canada can keep on paying its Debt down. I doubt it will, but I hope so. Be nice if ONE government showed some restraint.