[JerryLove]

Originally Posted by Jerry Love Post 41

You have 1000 starving people in front of you right now. You can feed them from unreplaceable winter stores: but that means that 2000 will die this winter. Which do you do?

Originally Posted by normajean777

A clear example? You just added details after the fact. I assumed that we had the food for 1000 people just sitting there at no additional expense,

What are you talking about?

Either way its irrelevant to NASA and space exploration.

It established a principle upon which I might justify blue-sky spending: future gain.

You have not, however, been consistant as to whether you accept "future gain" as a valid reason to do something. In particular: you choose to feed 1000 now even though it brought certain death to 2000 later in the year.

Quizzically: you've based your entire anti-deficit position on the exact same principle (future gain) that you've rejected.

Deficit spending gives 1000 people jobs now, with the risk that at some point in the future the consequence of that spending will be negative. It seems *extremely* similar to my "feed 1000 people" question; except that you've given completely the opposite answer.

You need a military to protect yourself. (We need your military to protect us as well, ours sucks).

What? We should spend 700 billion on the military in the off-chance that somewhere later someone invades? You are back into "suffer now to gain in the future"; which is an argument you reject out-of-hand for NASA.

Just a smaller military. I don't know if I can repeat that cuts need to be made everywhere enough times. You seem to ignore that every time. Both the near term and the long term are important. If I don't feed myself this month, I don't have to worry about feeding myself next month, because I will be dead.

So will the USA be dead if we don't end NASA? Is that your assertion?

In your example, you may have personally think that the 2000 are more important (though since its such a silly example anyway, they may all be 90 year old seniors who are on the way out anyway), but in the real world example of NASA, we are not talking about a guaranteed number of lives either way, but we are talking about a guaranteed number of dollars that could be saved in the short term, for the benefit of the long term.

Actually: you falsely presuppose that saving money on NASA now is a long term benefit.

It might be. It might not be. You take the long-term benefits of cutting spending as absolute, while assuming the long term gains of spending are uncertain. This is hypocritical.

Similarly: you ignore the short-term pains of cutting NASA (job loss), and (again) simply assume this will have no long-term consequences.

Your entire position seems rife with (often inconsistant) assumptions and "gut feelings" about what is or is not appropriate.

When I have no money in my bank account, I cut back my other expenses so I can pay for my food and shelter. Or make more money.

Hence the job interview example.

No amount of cutting will make money appear where it wasn't. You'll either spend in deficit for future gain, or you will go extinct.

The government however does not know this, and has lived on other people's money for decades, just getting greedier and greedier in the past decade.

But why NASA?

I really have no clue why you are advocating for the government to keep mindlessly spending trillions of dollars. Please tell us. Maybe you have a secret contract that they pay you billions, as long you advocate for them to continue letting you do so.

The reason you have no clue why I have done that is that I have not done that.

I'll agree with this portion. But this is no ordinary deficit spending. This is an extraordinary one, that is a significant portion of the economy, and has grown the government to an extreme reach over the national economy (and thus the world's economy). So Jerry, if not this, and not anything else, how do we bring spending to a reasonable level?

It's still lower than WWII. Perhaps tackling a depression and fighting two simultanious wars; combined with uncontrolled medical costs and changing demographics are to blame? (rather than NASA)

Perhaps what we need to do is focus on lowering medical costs, restoring 1999's level taxes, ending our overseas wars, investing in infrastructure and technology, and keeping the economy moving forward; rather than cut a department that's cheper now than it was when we were in surplus. Perhaps that will get us out of debt.

Oh! You know what invests in technology and provides lots of jobs to keep the economy moving? NASA!

[normajean777]

I think I'm done. This is going nowhere. You still don't even know why we're talking about NASA in the NASA thread...

[adamwagg]

Seeing the last shuttle ride just touched down I thought I would link to this article on this topic - sums up some thoughts in this thread nicely.

Last shuttle means time to think big on space exploration