Tag: budget

My rant Thursday against politicians on the John Batchelor Show

10:43 pm

On my Thursday appearance last week on the John Batchelor Show John and I devoted the entire segment to talking about the sad state of NASA and how the partisan bickering in Congress is not only failing to deal with those problems, that bickering is intentionally disinterested in actually fixing them. As I say,

What both those parties in Congress and in the administration are really doing is faking a goal for the purpose of justifying pork to their districts, because none of the proposals they’re making — both the asteroids or the moon — are going to happen.

I intend to elaborate in writing on this subject in the next day or so. In the meantime, here is the audio of that appearance [mp3] for you all to download and enjoy.

Note that I specifically talked about the following stories during this appearance:

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Aerospace defense contractors Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon all show better than expected profits despite sequestration.

8:56 am

Chicken Little report: Aerospace defense contractors Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon all show better than expected profits despite sequestration.

It seems that each of these companies, finding their profits from defense pork to be relatively flat or dropping slightly, worked harder to sell their other products to other customers, and were generally successful. What a concept!

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Obama’s nominee to manage contracting and budget at the Energy Department had serious problems doing the same job while she was at NASA.

9:42 am

The merry-go-round: Obama’s nominee to manage contracting and budget at the Energy Department had serious problems doing the same job while she was at NASA.

A Washington Times review of NASA inspector general reports finds the space agency struggled to achieve austerity under Ms. Robinson’s financial leadership, as cost overruns grew sixfold from $50 million in 2009 to $315 million in 2012. … Audits conducted during Ms. Robinson’s tenure as CFO uncovered that NASA spent an average of $66 per person per day for light refreshments at conferences, shelled out $1.5 million to develop a video game to replicate astronauts’ experiences and reimbursed employees $1.4 million for tuition dating to 2006 for degrees unrelated to their NASA jobs.

But no matter. Her resume lists all these important past jobs, so she must be qualified!

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The developmental engineering successes of the new commercially-built private spaceships, Dragon, CST-100, and Dream Chaser, appears to be winning over Congress.

9:12 am

The developmental engineering successes of the new commercially-built private spaceships, Dragon, CST-100, and Dream Chaser, appears to be winning over Congress.

The article linked above is mostly about Boeing’s effort with its CST-100 spaceship, but within it was this significant paragraph:

Last week, the House Appropriations committees approved $500 million and Senate appropriators $775 million for commercial crew development as part of NASA’s 2014 budget. The first figure is well below the Obama administration’s $821 million request, a figure NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has characterized as essential to meet the 2017 objective. Nonetheless, agency and company managers believe legislators are losing their skepticism over a program that has so far committed $1.4 billion to competing vehicle designs from SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, Boeing and others. [emphasis mine]

Congress is still insisting that NASA spend far more for the Space Launch System (SLS), but they do appear to be increasingly less interested in cutting the new commercial crew program. Eventually, a light will go off in their dim brains and they will realize how much more cost effective this program is compared to SLS. I expect this to happen sometime in the next three years, It is then that SLS will die.

Note that I don’t have any problems at all with the above cuts to the commercial program. It is far better to keep these private efforts on a short leash, thereby forcing the companies to stay lean and mean, than to give them a blank check (as has been done in the past and with SLS) and thus allow them to become fat and lazy.

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The defense industry has found that the cuts from sequestration have been far less painful than their lobbying had claimed.

12:06 am

Surprise, surprise! The defense industry has found that the cuts from sequestration have been far less painful than their lobbying had claimed.

Contractors seem pleasantly surprised that the automatic spending cuts are not hurting nearly as much as the industry’s lobbying arm warned they would in the months leading up to the sequester that took effect in March. [For example,] Lockheed Martin had predicted that sequestration would wipe out $825 million in revenue this year, but it no longer expects such a big hit. In fact, the company said, profit will be higher than initially projected. [emphasis mine]

The article specifically mentions the doomsday lobbying effort of the Aerospace Industries Association, As I noted back in December 2012, that lobbying was a lie. There is so much fat in the government that sequestration could have been three times bigger and it wouldn’t have done these contractors any serious harm. The inconsequential nature of those cuts now is illustrating the reality of this truth.

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The plundering of NASA

3:30 pm

From one of my readers: The Plundering of NASA: an Expose, How pork barrel politics harm American spaceflight leadership. You can buy the ebook edition here, and the print edition here.

I just finished reading it. Boozer’s introduction and opening two chapters provide one of the best detailed summaries explaining clearly why the United States today cannot launch its own astronauts into space, and why we are threatened with the possibility that we won’t be able to do it for years to come. And while his perspective is mostly from an engineering perspective, he also gives some of the political background behind this situation.

His later chapters are not as effectively written, but the opening is still worth it.

I will give a hint about his thesis: it involves comparing the Space Launch System (SLS) with private commercial space. And SLS does not fare well.

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Under pressure from her fellow legislators, a Maryland congresswoman has withdrawn her proposal to close the Marshall Space Flight Center.

8:45 am

Business as usual: Under pressure from her fellow legislators, a Maryland congresswoman has withdrawn her proposal to close the Marshall Space Flight Center.

As I wrote yesterday, this is government, and our legislators don’t represent us, they represent the small number of employees at these specific government facilities. Gotta protect that pork!

This also illustrates quite nicely why NASA can’t build anything cheaply, which means it can’t build anything at all. The agency is saddled with too much expensive fat which it is not allowed to trim.

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Congresswoman Mary Edwards (D-Maryland) has proposed merging two NASA centers to save money.

9:13 am

Congresswoman Mary Edwards (D-Maryland) is proposing a merger of two NASA centers to save money.

The amendment would establish a Center Realignment and Closure Commission that would be given six months to evaluate “[c]onsolidating all rocket development and test activities of the Marshall Space Flight Center and Stennis Space Center in one location” and recommend a location promising the greatest cost savings. The commission would also be asked to look at “[r]elocating all operations of the Marshall Space Flight Center to both the Stennis Space Center and Johnson Space Center.”

Now this is interesting. The Marshall Space Flight Center has been looking for a reason to exist for decades, since the end of the Apollo program. Any smart private company would have shut it down long ago to save money.

But then, this is government. The article, hostile to the idea of eliminating any government facility, describes quite succinctly why NASA can’t build anything cheaply and why nothing in government ever shrinks. Our legislators don’t represent us, they represent the small number of employees at these specific government facilities.

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The Washington Post admits that most of the Democratic claims that sequestration would cause disaster were either outright lies or a gross exaggeration.

10:43 am

The Washington Post admits that most of the Democratic claims that sequestration would cause disaster were either outright lies or a gross exaggeration.

I said it then that they were lying about the consequence of sequestration. I say now that they will be lying again when the the next sequestration cuts arrive in October.

I suspect you could cut the federal budget by at least one third, bringing the numbers back to what they were about ten years ago, and not notice any loss of service.

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NASA’s Space Launch System, costing billions per year, will only make its second manned flight in 2025.

8:50 am

The competition cools off! NASA’s Space Launch System, costing billions per year, will only make its second manned flight in 2025.

SLS is to make its maiden flight in 2017, when it will carry an empty Orion crew capsule to near-Moon space and back. Another flight would follow in 2021 and, depending on factors both technical and political, could see a crew of astronauts travel to a captured asteroid NASA wants to redirect to a high lunar orbit using a yet-to-be-built robotic spacecraft.

Notionally, SLS would next fly in 2025, giving the rocket a launch rate of once every four years. NASA has been spending about $1.8 billion a year on SLS development, including construction of a rocket test stand in Mississippi, and associated launch infrastructure at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Add in the cost of the rocket’s companion crew capsule, the Lockheed Martin-built Orion, and the tab rises to nearly $3 billion a year. [emphasis mine]

At that launch rate, the NASA’s space effort is slower than China’s, which has a pace that I consider extremely tortoise-like.

But don’t worry, buckos! NASA will be keeping the seats warm in its thousands of government facilities, employing thousands of government workers doing little or nothing.

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Detroit announces that it will default on its debt today.

10:01 am

Coming soon to a blue state near you! Detroit announces that it will default on its debt today.

The City currently faces approximately $17 billion in total liabilities. Detroit is insolvent and cannot meet its financial obligations without a significant restructuring.

It is important to note that Detroit has been run exclusively by Democrats for about a half century. Thus, this bankruptcy is an entirely partisan event, supported by voters who blindly insisted on one-party rule, and never questioned the incompetence or corruption of that Democratic Party.

And please, don’t argue with me by mentioning examples where Republicans screwed up. They have their own lock on stupidity, corruption, and failure. The point here, however, is to recognize that the failure in Detroit, as well as all of the recent other cities that have gone bankrupt, is because of decades of liberal Democratic rule, where money got funneled to unionized city employees at the expense of the taxpayers, with no regard to cost or affordability.

And if you doubt me, read this history of Detroit’s last fifty years.

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A new report from Social Security has raised its predicted unfunded liabilities over the next 75 years by one trillion dollars.

2:23 pm

The day of reckoning looms: A new report from Social Security has raised its predicted unfunded liabilities over the next 75 years by one trillion dollars, for a total of $9.6 trillion.

According to the report, “Through the end of 2087, the combined funds [OASI and DI] have a present-value unfunded obligation of $9.6 trillion.” That is “$1.0 trillion more than the measured level of $8.6 trillion a year ago,” states the report, in reference to the data available for 2011. That $9.6 trillion shortfall equals approximately $83,894 per household based on the Census Bureau’s latest estimate that there are 114,430,000 households in the country.

The report also looks farther into the future and saw the shortfall rise to $23 trillion.

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After warning repeatedly last year that the sequester would damage the economy, NBC now says “Nevermind.”

5:26 pm

Doing the work of the Democratic Party: After warning repeatedly last year that the sequester would damage the economy, NBC now says “Nevermind.”

It wasn’t just NBC. I can’t count the number of news sources and politicians that screamed “We’re all gonna die!” because sequestration was going to cut the federal budget a mere few percent. I said it then and I say it now: They were lying.

That news organizations participated in this lie however was particularly shameful. It didn’t take much research or thought to realize that these were lies. For NBC and other mainstream news organizations to not do that research tells us a great deal about how unreliable they are.

And by the way, remember the long lines threatened at the airports due to sequestration? We had those for about one day, and then things returned to normal. More evidence that it was all lying crap coming from this administration, forced upon travelers to make some dishonest political points, which were further aided and abetted by a lapdog press.

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The journal Science struggles to find the harm done from NIH’s 5% cuts from sequestration.

9:35 pm

The journal Science struggles to find the harm done to NIH from sequestration’s 5% cut.

Given that sequestration lopped off a staggering $1.55 billion from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) budget this year, it shouldn’t be hard to find examples of how the cut is harming research labs. Although sequestration “has already dealt a devastating blow,” said NIH Director Francis Collins at a Senate hearing last week, it turns out it’s not that easy to spell out the damage.

First of all, this cut was hardly “staggering.” All it did was bring NIH’s budget down to $29.15 billion, which is almost exactly the budget the agency had in 2008. Somehow, NIH managed quite well with this amount of money in 2008, and in fact probably wasted quite a bit of cash even then.

Second, this fact — that the cut wasn’t really that “devastating” — might explain why Science can’t find any obvious damage to any program. In its budget articles the journal routinely makes it a point to lobby for more money for scientists. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised when it tries to spin any cut — or even a small reduction in the rate of growth — as a disaster. The fact that Science still has trouble making that spin seem believable in this case is solid evidence that sequestration was a good idea, and that there was a great deal of fat that could be trimmed from the budget.

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New estimates of the 2013 federal deficit show it will be the lowest deficit since 2008.

9:40 am

Good news? New estimates of the 2013 federal deficit show it will be the lowest deficit since 2008.

The CBO claims that much of the reduction comes from new revenue, but I suspect that the real cause was sequestration, which actually forced real cuts in federal programs for the first time since Obama took office.

I put a question mark on the “good news” above in that the deficit will still be higher than $600 billion, and that spending is still out of control. This drop is merely the tiniest glimmer of hope in a black storm of disaster.

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America the fallen: Twenty-four signs that our once proud cities are turning into poverty-stricken hellholes.

10:18 pm

The day of reckoning looms: America the fallen: Twenty-four signs that our once proud cities are turning into poverty-stricken hellholes.

It is important to note that every single one of the cities cited in this article has been under Democratic Party rule for decades. While the decline is not entirely their fault, their tax-and-spend policies combined with a passion for heavy regulation certainly share much of the blame.

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Since 2010 total government spending per household has exceeded what each household earns per year.

12:55 pm

The day of reckoning looms: Since 2010 total government spending per household has exceeded what each household earns per year.

In other words, even if the federal, state, and city governments took 100 percent of your income in taxes, they still wouldn’t get enough money to pay their expenses. And since government spending has continued to rise since 2010 amid a stagnant economy, this situation has worsened, not improved. Worse, in 2012 the public voted in favor of accelerating this situation by voting for more Democrats in the Senate, while keeping a spendthrift Democratic President in power.

We are going bankrupt. It is only a matter of time.

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The words of NASA’s chief: “NASA is not going to the Moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime.”

12:17 pm

The words of NASA’s chief: “NASA is not going to the Moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime.”

He’s right. Instead, others will do it. And the ones who do it from the United States, privately financed for profit, will do it quickly, efficiently, and often, three things NASA has not been able to do at all since the 1960s.

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NASA has indicated that the first manned launch using a commercial space carrier has slipped by a year.

9:26 am

NASA has now indicated that the first manned launch using a commercial space carrier has slipped by a year.

The reasons are as yet unclear, though it is suspected that the main cause is the decision by the Obama administration to cut the funds of this program under sequestration. As Clark Lindsey notes, however, there is no reason that some of these private companies won’t go forward and fly other passengers on their spaceships, ahead of the NASA flights. Specifically, SpaceX and its Dragon capsule should easily be ready to go well ahead of 2017, and will likely be earning enough cash from its commercial launches to pay for development even if the NASA subsidies get delayed.

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The coming Obamacare chaos

10:13 am

The coming Obamacare chaos.

The article is a very detailed summary of the many problems caused by Obamacare, from increased unemployment to loss of healthcare insurance to higher premiums to higher debt. Everyone should read it. However, the most important question is laid out in the very first paragraph:

The biggest political problem faced by so-called “liberals” and so-called “progressives” in President Obama’s second term is how to prevent voters from holding them politically responsible as the public comes to realize how badly they were lied to during the first Obama term to win passage of Obamacare.

It is going to be the number one priority of all Democratic politicians and their allies in the mainstream press to somehow find a way to blame Republicans for Obamacare. The question will be whether they will succeed.

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An audit of California’s fiscal state has found it to be $127 billion in the red.

9:54 am

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.

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The collapse of household income since 2009.

3:03 pm

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?
» Read more

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Science and sequestration in context

11:00 am

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.
» Read more

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