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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 b

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.

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.