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The author answers the question in the first sentence. It is not that we can't, the problem is that it is not cost effective to do so. Or, as the cliche goes, "

The author answers the question in the first sentence. It is not that we can't, the problem is that it is not cost effective to do so. Or, as the cliche goes, "It's all about the Benjamins". The inconvenient truth is that the US has a national debt of over $21T and a federal bureaucracy with a reputation of being unable to bring projects to completion on budget. Think of this in a more personal context: you need to plan to support yourself in your old age (retirement). Your lifestyle depends on a successful return on investment. What percentage of your savings would you invest in this? Where does this fit on your hierarchy of "needs" vs "wants"?

stupidcar 9y ago
Your analogy makes no sense. America isn't a person, doesn't have a limited working life, and isn't going to "retire". The solution to an inefficient federal bureaucracy and a large national debt isn't to cut economically irrelevant spending in those areas where the US enjoys an actual advantage over other countries. It's to improve the bureaucracy and balance spending in meaningful ways. Unfortunately, any sane attempt at improvement is blocked by "small government" Republicans, who deliberately impede evolutionary improvements in government functioning in the hope that, by forestalling them, they can hasten some future libertarian revolution, wherein it becomes politically possible to eliminate all social programmes altogether. In order to maintain their false image as being in favor of fiscal constraint, these same Republicans attack easy targets like NASA. At the same time, they protect insanely profligate projects like the F-35 fighter, which provide essentially socialist redistribution to defence contractors in their own districts. In your flawed comparison, it'd be like someone complaining about his children's spend on candy, while buying a dozen broken Ferraris every day.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > wherein it becomes politically possible to eliminate all social programmes altogether .. but not, as you pointed out, the biggest expense of all in the military. The way back to the moon is the same reason as America went to the moon in the first place: competition and colonialism. As soon as China or India look like they might go back to the moon, the space race will resume.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Social program spending is far higher than what is spent on the military. Unless you aren’t counting social security and medicare as “social programs” which would of course be silly.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      Social security includes contributory pensions, though? In particular, if you're talking about US Federal debt, some of it is owed to the Social Security Trust Fund (mentioned upthread as "national debt of over $21T"), so either social security is part of government (and the internal debt should be deducted from that total) or it isn't (and doesn't count as government spending).
- valuearb 9y ago
  Calling this a republican problem is being willfully ignorant of the problems in our government structure. We didn’t get $21B in debt cause of republicans, or democrats, but because of congress. Congress directed NASA to spend $20B to build the SLS, a super heavy launch system built by congresses favorite contractors. It won’t be reusable at all, ever launch rocket will be burned up in the atmosphere. Each launch will cost about $2B, and the first version will only put in orbit about the same amount of cargo a Falcon Heavy will for $90M. The SLS won’t ever be canceled despite its awful economics because it’s diverting billions to favorite contractors like Boeing. That’s the problem. NASA could buy launch capacity for a fraction of the cost using commercial providers, but key congressional districts get no windfall from that.
  - cryptoz 9y ago
    The problems being discussed here happen at least 2 orders of magnitude larger than you are talking about. The little NASA journey to SLS has effectively no impact on the grander US government debt or the issues causing it. The issues causing the debt are much much bigger problems that last centuries and are largely Republican-driven. They are things like overspending on War, keeping the poor population poor (war on drugs, cutting education spending, etc), that keep the population of the US unable to earn money and pay taxes, etc. The problems are large and structural and they are not with NASA or their decision making. They are with Republicans.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      Again, there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. They both are responsible for the war on drugs because it’s politicalky popular. The few Opponents are either very liberal democrats or libertarian republicans. Secondly, we are spending more on education than virtually any time on our history. Thirdly, Obama was a democrat, at times had political majorities in congress, yet he never pulled us out of Iraq or Afghanistan, because it would be politically unpopular, and cost significant democratic party funders billions on contracting revenues. Trump says he would cancel the F-35, but dame thing, same reasons. Imperial congress has a turnover rate akin to the members of the communist party in the glory days of the USSR. They are all professional politicians who get re-elected by voting for what their financial backers want.
- smitherfield 9y ago
  Actually, Republicans usually favor more NASA spending than Democrats do (e.g. Bush started funding manned Moon/Mars missions while Obama cut that program and the Space Shuttle), because most of it goes to red areas (Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, rural Florida, rural California). By contrast, Lockheed Martin made the F-35 program unkillable by selecting facilities and suppliers in all 50 states, plus several NATO allies and other prospective buyers.
mikeash 9y ago
Apollo cost around 2% of the US federal budget at its peak. In individual terms, if you earn the current US median income of ~$43,000/year, that's less than $1,000/year, or $20/week. How many people spend at least $20/week on "wants"? The overall federal budget was much smaller then, too. If we take the peak cost of $3 billion/year, adjust it for inflation (about $23 billion/year), and divide it by the current federal budget, it would be 0.6%, or the equivalent of $5/week for someone earning the US median income. How many people spend that on "wants"? And, it probably wouldn't cost nearly as much if you did it today. SpaceX projects that development of their Mars rocket would only cost $10 billion total, and it would easily be capable of lunar missions. SpaceX tends to miss their time-related goals but hit their cost-related goals, but even if they're off by a factor of 2, it's still way cheaper. Obviously we don't want to spend even that much, collectively, on doing it, otherwise we'd be doing it. But IMO the "what percentage of your savings would you invest in this?" question just shows why we should. It's utterly insignificant on the scale of national expenditures, and the results would be far better than you'd get from another squadron of F-35s or whatever.
baursak 9y ago
National debt is simply national savings. "Paying off" national debt means taking away one of the most popular, liquid, income producing asset from people and corporations. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/deficit-tax-cuts-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/deficit-tax-cuts-...
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  But it isn't savings. It is, as you said, an income-producing asset. Its primary function is not as a store of value, but as a claim against promises of future production. The national debt is mining resources needed for current operations from the future, rather than drawing down the stockpiles of those already mined from the past. Claiming that debt is wealth is mistaken at best, and fraudulent at worst. Please reexamine your premises and analysis before repeating it.
  - baursak 9y ago
    This is the view from MMT perspective. I highly recommend looking into it, e.g. this lecture is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1SMjeuyF-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1SMjeuyF-Y Treatment of debt is at around minute 54.
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      Any fan of "modern monetary theory" should look at entities like the Soviet Union, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela. No government has an infinite capacity to print fiat money, and a theory based upon that as a premise is, in my opinion, complete bunkum. I highly recommend exploring other macroeconomic theories. It is depressing how many of them amount to tricking productive firms and the labor workforce into believing a big lie of some sort, that allows some other more savvy entity to siphon value away from them. Consumption is paid for by production. Imports are paid for by exports. Debt now is paid for by production later. Savings now is paid for by production earlier. In theory, you can build an economy upon debts and repayment of prior obligations, but in practice, human beings are great at lying and making false promises.
crdoconnor 9y ago
>The inconvenient truth is that the US has a national debt of over $21T That isn't an inconvenient truth at all. The US is not dollar constrained. If you think that the US is natural resource constrained - that's another matter. Are we in danger of running out of the resources required? Clearly no. If you think the US is labor constrained - that wages are too high and we cannot afford to hire more people without causing spiraling inflation - that's another matter. However, if you believe that, you also have to believe by necessity the idea that American labor is becoming less efficient and that automation isn't eliminating any jobs - let alone lots of jobs.

stupidcar 9y ago

Your analogy makes no sense. America isn't a person, doesn't have a limited working life, and isn't going to "retire". The solution to an inefficient federal bureaucracy and a large national debt isn't to cut economically irrelevant spending in those areas where the US enjoys an actual advantage over other countries. It's to improve the bureaucracy and balance spending in meaningful ways. Unfortunately, any sane attempt at improvement is blocked by "small government" Republicans, who deliberately impede evolutionary improvements in government functioning in the hope that, by forestalling them, they can hasten some future libertarian revolution, wherein it becomes politically possible to eliminate all social programmes altogether. In order to maintain their false image as being in favor of fiscal constraint, these same Republicans attack easy targets like NASA. At the same time, they protect insanely profligate projects like the F-35 fighter, which provide essentially socialist redistribution to defence contractors in their own districts. In your flawed comparison, it'd be like someone complaining about his children's spend on candy, while buying a dozen broken Ferraris every day.

pjc50 9y ago
> wherein it becomes politically possible to eliminate all social programmes altogether .. but not, as you pointed out, the biggest expense of all in the military. The way back to the moon is the same reason as America went to the moon in the first place: competition and colonialism. As soon as China or India look like they might go back to the moon, the space race will resume.
- valuearb 9y ago
  Social program spending is far higher than what is spent on the military. Unless you aren’t counting social security and medicare as “social programs” which would of course be silly.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Social security includes contributory pensions, though? In particular, if you're talking about US Federal debt, some of it is owed to the Social Security Trust Fund (mentioned upthread as "national debt of over $21T"), so either social security is part of government (and the internal debt should be deducted from that total) or it isn't (and doesn't count as government spending).
valuearb 9y ago
Calling this a republican problem is being willfully ignorant of the problems in our government structure. We didn’t get $21B in debt cause of republicans, or democrats, but because of congress. Congress directed NASA to spend $20B to build the SLS, a super heavy launch system built by congresses favorite contractors. It won’t be reusable at all, ever launch rocket will be burned up in the atmosphere. Each launch will cost about $2B, and the first version will only put in orbit about the same amount of cargo a Falcon Heavy will for $90M. The SLS won’t ever be canceled despite its awful economics because it’s diverting billions to favorite contractors like Boeing. That’s the problem. NASA could buy launch capacity for a fraction of the cost using commercial providers, but key congressional districts get no windfall from that.
- cryptoz 9y ago
  The problems being discussed here happen at least 2 orders of magnitude larger than you are talking about. The little NASA journey to SLS has effectively no impact on the grander US government debt or the issues causing it. The issues causing the debt are much much bigger problems that last centuries and are largely Republican-driven. They are things like overspending on War, keeping the poor population poor (war on drugs, cutting education spending, etc), that keep the population of the US unable to earn money and pay taxes, etc. The problems are large and structural and they are not with NASA or their decision making. They are with Republicans.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Again, there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. They both are responsible for the war on drugs because it’s politicalky popular. The few Opponents are either very liberal democrats or libertarian republicans. Secondly, we are spending more on education than virtually any time on our history. Thirdly, Obama was a democrat, at times had political majorities in congress, yet he never pulled us out of Iraq or Afghanistan, because it would be politically unpopular, and cost significant democratic party funders billions on contracting revenues. Trump says he would cancel the F-35, but dame thing, same reasons. Imperial congress has a turnover rate akin to the members of the communist party in the glory days of the USSR. They are all professional politicians who get re-elected by voting for what their financial backers want.
smitherfield 9y ago
Actually, Republicans usually favor more NASA spending than Democrats do (e.g. Bush started funding manned Moon/Mars missions while Obama cut that program and the Space Shuttle), because most of it goes to red areas (Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, rural Florida, rural California). By contrast, Lockheed Martin made the F-35 program unkillable by selecting facilities and suppliers in all 50 states, plus several NATO allies and other prospective buyers.

mikeash 9y ago

Apollo cost around 2% of the US federal budget at its peak. In individual terms, if you earn the current US median income of ~$43,000/year, that's less than $1,000/year, or $20/week. How many people spend at least $20/week on "wants"? The overall federal budget was much smaller then, too. If we take the peak cost of $3 billion/year, adjust it for inflation (about $23 billion/year), and divide it by the current federal budget, it would be 0.6%, or the equivalent of $5/week for someone earning the US median income. How many people spend that on "wants"? And, it probably wouldn't cost nearly as much if you did it today. SpaceX projects that development of their Mars rocket would only cost $10 billion total, and it would easily be capable of lunar missions. SpaceX tends to miss their time-related goals but hit their cost-related goals, but even if they're off by a factor of 2, it's still way cheaper. Obviously we don't want to spend even that much, collectively, on doing it, otherwise we'd be doing it. But IMO the "what percentage of your savings would you invest in this?" question just shows why we should. It's utterly insignificant on the scale of national expenditures, and the results would be far better than you'd get from another squadron of F-35s or whatever.

baursak 9y ago

National debt is simply national savings. "Paying off" national debt means taking away one of the most popular, liquid, income producing asset from people and corporations. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/deficit-tax-cuts-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/deficit-tax-cuts-...

logfromblammo 9y ago
But it isn't savings. It is, as you said, an income-producing asset. Its primary function is not as a store of value, but as a claim against promises of future production. The national debt is mining resources needed for current operations from the future, rather than drawing down the stockpiles of those already mined from the past. Claiming that debt is wealth is mistaken at best, and fraudulent at worst. Please reexamine your premises and analysis before repeating it.
- baursak 9y ago
  This is the view from MMT perspective. I highly recommend looking into it, e.g. this lecture is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1SMjeuyF-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1SMjeuyF-Y Treatment of debt is at around minute 54.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    Any fan of "modern monetary theory" should look at entities like the Soviet Union, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela. No government has an infinite capacity to print fiat money, and a theory based upon that as a premise is, in my opinion, complete bunkum. I highly recommend exploring other macroeconomic theories. It is depressing how many of them amount to tricking productive firms and the labor workforce into believing a big lie of some sort, that allows some other more savvy entity to siphon value away from them. Consumption is paid for by production. Imports are paid for by exports. Debt now is paid for by production later. Savings now is paid for by production earlier. In theory, you can build an economy upon debts and repayment of prior obligations, but in practice, human beings are great at lying and making false promises.

crdoconnor 9y ago

>The inconvenient truth is that the US has a national debt of over $21T That isn't an inconvenient truth at all. The US is not dollar constrained. If you think that the US is natural resource constrained - that's another matter. Are we in danger of running out of the resources required? Clearly no. If you think the US is labor constrained - that wages are too high and we cannot afford to hire more people without causing spiraling inflation - that's another matter. However, if you believe that, you also have to believe by necessity the idea that American labor is becoming less efficient and that automation isn't eliminating any jobs - let alone lots of jobs.