I’m both glad and not surprised that some heavy hitters are beginning to say this. As I noted last year, as the commercial space program begins to show success the politics will increasingly favor it over the very expensive and not very productive NASA-built Space Launch System.
Be prepared for SLS to steadily lose political support in the coming years.
The day of reckoning looms: An audit of California’s fiscal state has found it to be $127 billion in the red.
Were California’s state government a business, it would be a candidate for insolvency with a negative net worth of $127.2 billion, according to an annual financial report issued by State Auditor Elaine Howle and the Bureau of State Audits. The report, which covers the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012, says that the state’s negative status — all of its assets minus all of its liabilities — increased that year, largely because it spent more than it received in revenue. [emphasis mine]
None of this is a surprise. California voters chose Jerry Brown and the Democrats to lead them into more debt.
Coming to America: What it feels like to have your life savings stolen by the global elite.
The collapse of household income since 2009.
A comparison of the graph in the article above with the changing federal debt (both graphs below the fold) is quite revealing. The steep drop in household income in 2009 lines up precisely with the steep rise in federal deficits beginning in 2009. I wonder if they have anything to do with each other? The article also notes the possible negative impact of Obamacare. How could they think such a thing?
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On March 21, the House accepted the continuing resolution proposed by the Senate for the year 2013. This continuing resolution will fund everything in the federal government though September of this year, and includes the cuts imposed on March 1 by sequestration.
As it always does, the journal Science did a specific analysis of the science portion of this budget bill. As usual, they looked only at the trees, not the forest, comparing the budget changes up or down for the 2012 and 2013 years only, noting how those changes will impact each agency’s programs. As usual, Science also took the side for more federal spending, assuming that in each case any cut was sure to cause significant harm to the nation’s ability to do cutting edge science.
I like to take a wider and deeper view. Below is a chart showing how the budgets for these agencies have changed since 2008. They give a much clearer perspective of the consequences of sequestration and the cuts, if any, imposed by Congress on these science agencies.
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We don’t need no stinking sequester: The Obamas have taken more than a vacation per month in 2013.
I don’t mind them taking the weekend off. It is the apparently unlimited travel expenses on the taxpayer’s dime that gall.
A Democratic voter discovers he’s actually a tea party racist.
Today was a bad day. After meeting with my tax accountant, I am now cutting a very large check to the State of California, all of which resulted from Proposition 30 and the “retroactive tax” that was levied on my 2012 income. This despite the fact that I already paid my 2012 taxes back in September.
While the law stipulates that I must surrender this money, I refuse to acknowledge this as a tax at all. This is not a tax. This is an asset seizure plain and simple. The term “retroactive tax” is a despicable euphemism. It is no different than when Hugo Chavez used the benign-sounding “nationalize” to describe his seizure of private property in Venezuela.
He then notes that he is not a tea party member or even a Republican and that he voted for Obama twice.
Wanna bet that in the next election he’ll still vote Democratic? Based on the history of the past three decades, I expect that even after this experience, he will still refuse to abandon the faction he has adopted (the Democratic Party) and change his vote.
The day of reckoning looms: Cyprus has agreed to confiscate a percentage of the savings of large depositors in order to satisfy demands from its European Union creditors..
This is only a hint of what’s coming for us here in the U.S. Like the European Union, eventually the federal government is going to go bankrupt, and when that happens it (being the politicians in charge) will then decide that the savings and pensions of private citizens will have to save them somehow.
Pigs fly! The Democrats in the Senate passed their first budget in four years yesterday.
The budget cuts practically nothing while increasing taxes by almost $1 trillion, which essentially illustrates how little the Democrats want to bring the debt under control. That four Democrats who face a tough election in 2014 voted against the budget also suggests that the Democrat’s traditional spendthrift approach might finally be becoming dangerous at the polls.
NASA has issued a clarification specifically excluding its press announcements from the suspension of all public outreach efforts due to sequestration.
I am not surprised. These budget cuts are aimed at grabbing the most publicity as possible, without harming NASA’s ability to lobby for funding. Ironically, the truth is that much of NASA’s education and outreach work can be cut, will not be missed, and so these cuts should illustrate this fact quite effectively.
The top ten horror stories caused by Obamacare.
I’ve posted many of these stories already, but seeing them all together is somewhat sobering.
NASA has suspended all spending for education and public outreach because to the sequester cuts.
The list of programs suspended are as follows:
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