Come on now. That's just silly talk. Would you rather feed the poor through your tax bill or via them coming inside your house and taking your shit directly? I am no fan of entitlements but the alternative is scary and i love my peace and comfort.
there are rumors that once Bush is done being President he will head a private company to drill for oil on Mars
They're going to come take your shit and mine sooner or later because the entitlement gravy train won't last into perpetuity. Of course by then, the "shit" they're going to get will be worth human excrement anyway unless its gold bars or foreign currency. Point taken though, I'll foot the bill for the 50" plasma and KFC food stamp dinners so we can both watch NASA programs in the comfort of our own cribs in the meantime.
He meant to say taken literally thousands and thousands of lives. Actually over 4,000 US soliders and over 750,000 innocent Iraqi civilians. Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001 the Iraq war will cost Americans between 3 trillion and 5 trillion U.S. dollars, including military spending, broader economic costs and decades of benefits and medical care for combat veterans. 3 trillion dollars. He also said it is the cause of the server deep recession the US is entering.
How much of the federal budget goes to mandatory outlays and entitlements? Over a trillion? And we still have disease and hunger and crime and debt. Taking $10-$20 billion from NASA, while not a small sum, is immaterial compared to what is already being spent on social/economic programs. Adding it to the entitlement pot isn't going to magically fix what ails us. NASA is less than 1% of total federal outlays. When the US went to the moon, that total was closer to 5%. No wonder that was the heyday of the agency, as a far greater percentage of national resources was committed to it. A fair portion of NASA's budget is also committed to Earth science. They spend a lot of time looking down as well as up. Maybe some science coming out of these programs will lead to technologies that can help with disease and materials processing and energy and agriculture, etc. Solve some of the above problems rather than continue to manage them. To use a trading analogy, I like to look at the relatively small investment in these sciences as a call option. Fixed downside, unlimited upside. Whereas I think mandatory outlays are more like a margin call... :0
This will really pay dividends in 5000 to 10000 years from now when we've f-up our planet to the point that humans have to migrate to another planet. By that time, the planet will somehow find a way to cleanse itself from the toxic residue caused by human waste, by the way of severe weather to the point we can't live in such conditions. i.e. massive flooding, ice age conditions, massive volcanic eruptions etc. that will cover the entire planet. Besides, in a million years, the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our milky way galaxy. I think, Andromeda is coming towards us at a rate of 300,000 miles/hour. So, if you give a crap about saving the human species in the wayyyyy future, then NASA is worth it. Just think about it, for every nickle the government is taking out of every paycheck you make, it's going towards saving your kid's kids' life, times it by10 years to the 10th power. It will give you something to watch as you're flying in heaven, or something for you to brew about, in hell. Finally, it will keep the braniac kids from staying off the streets.
This one photo is reason enough to let NASA continue. It's the Ultra Deep Field Hubble photo. This is an area of the sky only about a dime's diameter held at arms length. In it there's an estimated 10,000 galaxies at a distance of 13 Billion Light years away. That means it took the light travelling from those galaxies, at 186,000 miles per sec, 13 Billion years to reach us and they probably burned out long ago and don't even exist. Now, just imagine, if there's that many galaxies in just a dime's diameter of the sky, how many could there be in the entire universe. Then imagine that there are probably 50 - 300 Billion stars in each galaxy and each star has the potential to have a solar system of planets like our own. Is this not interesting enough to want to learn more about?
WASHINGTON - The White House has eliminated funding for a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope from its 2006 budget request and directed NASA to focus solely on deorbiting the popular spacecraft at the end of its life, according to government and industry sources.