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The thing you have to understand is that your initial statement has literally no foundation to it. There isn't any solid proof that program failures like this a
by popmystack 10y ago
The thing you have to understand is that your initial statement has literally no foundation to it. There isn't any solid proof that program failures like this are direct means to keeping workers employed (where it is implied that they otherwise wouldn't be). I am also not really sure how some crazy guy (I am being hyperbolic) betting hundreds of millions of dollars (some of it his own funds) somehow becomes analogous with a purposefully obtuse military industrial complex scheme to keep people employed.
There are certainly cases where the government soaks up funding, gives it to a company, for absolutely no other reason that we can tell other than to just funnel money along into their little corner of the country (and thus their constituents).
But I have a really hard time believing that is the case here.
- tanderson92 10y agoIt's hard to say with any certainty, to be sure. But I wouldn't be so skeptical -- Nixon did after all announce the Space Shuttle program in part to help secure his re-election. That too in California in a naked attempt to win SoCal. Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=kje_BAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA12&ots=CWILZB0qpW&pg=PA12#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=kje_BAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA12&ots=...
- hga 10y agoNASA was always a jobs program as well as what it ostensibly was for, it was officially tasked with industrially uplifting the South, which became an even bigger thing when LBJ became president. The area to the immediate northeast of MIT was still mostly a wasteland when I showed up in 1979 because NASA all of a sudden decided that Houston was the ideal place to put the Mission Control Center.... After Apollo, that became many times more what it was for.