The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

[unofan]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

Roll back all spending increases from the past two years. Put the $500B that is left to spend on the stimulus towards paying down the debt.

Kind of one and the same, since if we roll back spending, then the stimulus money isn't there to throw back. Also, a one-time shot of $500B towards the debt is nice, but doesn't solve the ongoing issue of the deficit.

It's also impossible to roll back spending entirely, since you can't exactly pay more retirees their S.S. with the same amount of money without cutting the per person expenditure (ie, individual benefits). And the interest on the debt can't be cut, either.

But whatever. For purposes of this post, I'll go with you and say we can do a complete rollback to the 2008 budget. That cuts about $550B. Only $750B to go.

Get rid of the Dept of Education, Dept of Health and Human Services and the Dept of Energy.

Using the 2008 budget numbers (since we've rolled back to those spending levels), that'd save about $150B - $70B from HHS, $56B from education, and $24B from Energy. Of course, I think most people would prefer to keep the Nat'l Institute of Health, the Center for Disease Control, and the Food and Drug Administration in some form, not to mention our nuclear weapons program (actually Energy's responsibility; they're on loan to the DoD).

But again, for purposes of this post, whatever. Still have $600Billion to go.

Start raising the age to receive Social Security to bring it back in line with life expectancy increases since the program was instituted.

I'm with you so far. Not sure how much it saves, but let's say that for each year the retirement age is pushed back, SS and medicare spending drops by a combined $20B. So we push it back to 70, and save $100B. Only $500B to go.

Let young people (under 35) opt out of SS. Let people between 35 and 50 start putting a portion of their SS into a private account.

Do they still pay their SS and medicare taxes? If not, then you lose me, because while future expenditures drop, so do current revenues. Not going to help currently. Still $500B to go.

Institute the Fair Tax allowing the IRS to be gutted.

I'm not going to debate the idiocy of the fair tax here; but say we simplify the current system and are still able to gut the IRS, that saves us, at most $6B, since the entire Dept. of Treasury budget for 2008 was $12B. Still $494B to go.

Cut the pay of everyone in congress in half and tie future increases to private sector GDP growth.

So $100 million divided in half is $50 million. Still $493.95B to go.

and there are plenty more ways.

Well, you got about 3/5ths of the way there. Not sure where that last $493B is going to come from.

Now, tell me how you are going to increase taxes $1.3T/yr without wrecking the economy.

I'm not saying we need to raise taxes to cover the whole amount, I'm all for spending cuts too. And presumably, as the debt gets paid off, taxes can be lowered since the $200 billion/yr (and growing) in interest will get smaller over time.

But to say that increased taxes won't be a necessary evil is naive at best and idiotic at worst. There's no way to cut $1.3trillion in spending when the entire discretionary budget is only $900Billion or so.

 

[bronconick]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

Perhaps not. My mind boggles that there might be some resource out there that is so valuable it's worth going to get it and bring it back to earth. It costs upwards of $10k per pound just to get something into orbit, so unless we're going to be bringing back solid gold, forget it.

Helium-3 if we ever figure out fusion.

 

[jmh]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

Perhaps not. My mind boggles that there might be some resource out there that is so valuable it's worth going to get it and bring it back to earth. It costs upwards of $10k per pound just to get something into orbit, so unless we're going to be bringing back solid gold, forget it.

I'm with you on the general concept of the lack of cost-effectiveness of extraterrestrial resource collection, but doesn't it cost a lot less (by weight) to get something back down? I mean, let's say you have a mining apparatus that weighs X pounds, and you get it to orbit, and that costs $10kX, and then you get it to, wherever, the asteroid belt past Mars, say, and that costs you another $NX pounds (N being the cost to get something from orbit to the asteroid belt, but presumably being less than 10k, but anyway it's besides the point). Now you've spent $(10k+N)X to get your equipment to your mining site. Once the equipment is there, and you're ferrying your resources back to earth, the cost is going to be basically proportional to NX, isn't it? I mean, if you're talking about a raw material like gold or whatever, you can basically just... drop it, can't you? I mean, not literally drop it from a station that's in orbit, but put it in some sort of vehicle that's as light as possible when empty while still being able to make a controlled descent into the ocean or wherever. Then you just ferry the empty vehicle back to orbit at a reasonably low cost.

The point being, you don't pay $10k/pound for whatever resource it is that you're bringing back, because you're not lifting that into orbit in the first place.

Plus Nick is right that He-3 could potentially have a lot more inherent usefulness than gold, if we ever get around to figuring out a way to use it to generate energy.

Edit to add: Sorry about the rambling, but every now and then I need to let the inner science geek off the leash.

 

[Handyman]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

There are some things that are needed and you just have to accept that maybe you wont make your money back but the value is still great. NASA is one of those things IMHO. I am not big on spending, its why I could never be a Democrat despite being socially liberal...but even I think that funding NASA and pushing towards further space ventures is in the best interest of the country.

I know it has lost a lot of its glamor and it seems rather static in a lot of ways but as has been said many times exploration is in our blood and space is the ultimate (final) frontier. There is so much to learn, so much to see and fact is we have no idea what we will find. I would rather dump a lot of money into NASA in the hopes of exploring beyond the moon (manned and umanned since they both have value) than a lot of the other pork crap that gets funded every year. Maybe in the pursuit of exploration we find a better fuel source or technologies that make travel more efficient...ya just never know but I would rather fund 100 of the greatest minds in the world all working together than fund Senator Joe Schmo's pork project to get a dam on Willard Creek.

As for the budget...at this point the deficit is so high they need to both tax AND cut spending...neither alone is going to get us to our goals. First cut, War in Iraq...and go from there.

 

[French Rage]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

I dont want to go on a mini rant so I'll cut this off now by saying that if we were to land on Mars, we could be the first race in the entire Universe, in all ~14 billion years to leave one planet and step foot on another.

Well, that we know of.

 

[SPIN CONTROL]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

As for the budget...at this point the deficit is so high they need to both tax AND cut spending...neither alone is going to get us to our goals. First cut, War in Iraq...and go from there.

That is a start. But if we are really serious about deficit reduction the big elephant in the room is the $680+ billion we are slated to spend on national defense this year.

 

[LynahFan]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

I'm with you on the general concept of the lack of cost-effectiveness of extraterrestrial resource collection, but doesn't it cost a lot less (by weight) to get something back down?

(snip)

The point being, you don't pay $10k/pound for whatever resource it is that you're bringing back, because you're not lifting that into orbit in the first place.

I only mentioned $10k per pound to orbit because that's a rough benchmark that I'm familiar with. We have no idea what the costs would actually be to get to Mars and back (to say nothing of the asteroid belt), because we've never done it. I'm sure we've studied it, but until we actually do it....

You also have to consider whether you're dividing the costs by the total vehicle weight or the cargo weight. To get 500 pounds of payload back from Mars, you'd have to lift many thousands of pounds of gear off of the earth's surface, so the cost per pound of payload is probably at least a factor of 10 higher, not lower. The cost isn't there due to the weight of the payload - the cost is there due to going in the first place.

Regarding lunar mining of H-3: good luck. Even on the moon, H-3 is so scarce that you're talking about requiring an enormous mining and processing operation, every nut and bolt of which costs you at least $10k per pound in travel costs. A smallish bullldozer weighs 20,000 pounds, so that's $200M just to get it there. Also, we don't have a vehicle capable of lifting 20,000 pounds at a time, so it will have to be assembled on site, etc. It's easy to imagine that being a $1B bulldozer before all is said and done. Now add drilling rigs, dump trucks, rock crushing machinery, plus god-knows-what physics stuff for collecting and filtering the H-3 once it is released. Total equipment weight is easily in the 10s of millions of pounds - call it 10 million. That's $100B in transportation costs - probably double that since $10k per pound is just to get to orbit.

The ISS has cost upwards of $30B, and that weighs less than a million pounds, is in low-earth orbit, and hasn't done anything nearly as ambitious as mining and processing tons of rock. Setting up a useful mining operation on the moon will run easily into the trillions of dollars, so H-3 had better be worth millions of dollars per pound to even consider it.

 

[Handyman]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

So NASA is required to make money on its projects to deserve funding but the rest of the crap in the Budget has no such restrictions? Is that what you are saying? Because honestly if breaking even is the benchmark it should be rather easy to slash the budget at this point.

 

[LynahFan]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

So NASA is required to make money on its projects to deserve funding but the rest of the crap in the Budget has no such restrictions? Is that what you are saying? Because honestly if breaking even is the benchmark it should be rather easy to slash the budget at this point.

Not at all - but if we're talking about ADDING a massive project to the federal budget at this point, then yes, I do think it should be deficit neutral.

There are many worthwhile things that NASA does that are not money makers, but manned spaceflight and extraterrestrial mining operations are not on the list.

 

[kdilks]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

Maybe in the pursuit of exploration we find a better fuel source or technologies that make travel more efficient...ya just never know but I would rather fund 100 of the greatest minds in the world all working together than fund Senator Joe Schmo's pork project to get a dam on Willard Creek.

I can't see how space exploration would feasibly lead to a better fuel source. Those 100 greatest minds could be put to much better use.

 

[LynahFan]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

I can't see how space exploration would feasibly lead to a better fuel source. Those 100 greatest minds could be put to much better use.

Exactly. It's not like they need to be "tricked" into developing a better fuel source. If that's the end purpose, just give them grants to develop a better fuel source in the first place!

 

[dxmnkd316]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

If we're going to have any hopes of conquering space we need to develop nuclear fusion quite a bit further than it already has been. It needs to be portable (a la nuclear subs) before we can ever hope to explore the solar system with manned missions.

 

[unh_hockey]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

Exactly. It's not like they need to be "tricked" into developing a better fuel source. If that's the end purpose, just give them grants to develop a better fuel source in the first place!

I am guessing like this

http://www07.grants.gov/search/sear...wBt2Xynw02N!-1299818899?oppId=50809&mode=VIEW

There is plenty of money out there for these causes. Big oil is jumping onto the 4th generation biofuels just as new companies emerge ( only about 100 in existence). I don't expect new fuel sources to be competitive with petrol in our lifetimes, but when priorities shift and we need to produce our fuel domestically...enough resources will be allocated to make it happen.

Of course if it happens sooner , I certainly won't complain!

 

[Kepler]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

If the end game is to foster understanding, I think we could cut out the middle man of space exploration and just buy some plane tickets to go visit the people we want to understand better.

The people who visit other countries are not the problem.

And if you cast doubt on interstellar chocolate again, may the Lord Theobroma (PBUH) smite thee.

 

[Red Cloud]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

So NASA is required to make money on its projects to deserve funding but the rest of the crap in the Budget has no such restrictions? Is that what you are saying? Because honestly if breaking even is the benchmark it should be rather easy to slash the budget at this point.

Wow. Handy with a salient point, I'm impressed.

 

[Bob Gray]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

That is a start. But if we are really serious about deficit reduction the big elephant in the room is the $680+ billion we are slated to spend on national defense this year.

That's just one of number of elephants crowding the room, including Social Security and Medicare. It's amazing that our federal government can spend 50 percent (roughly) more than it takes in and continue to function (at least for awhile).

 

[Bob Gray]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

The people who buy plane tickets and visit each other are not the problem.

But if we all buy plane tickets and visit each other, we destroy the environment with all that jet fuel we burn.

So I guess we're either ignorant bumpkins or wreckers of the environment!

 

[Kepler]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

But if we all buy plane tickets and visit each other, we destroy the environment with all that jet fuel we burn.

So I guess we're either ignorant bumpkins or wreckers of the environment!

Again, why can't we both?

 

[LynahFan]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

The people who visit other countries are not the problem.

Exactly. That's why I'm suggesting we should get on the phone to British Airways et al so that more of us visit other countries!

 

[jmh]

Re: The 2011 Budget of the United State - Alice, you're not going to the moon!

Again, why can't we both?

Ignorant bumpkins and wreckers of the environment? Seems like something we could handle if we put our minds to it.