Quote from: Bradford C. WalkerI want permanent orbital colonies.  I wanna go to Side 3, dammit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGo748GqS9g&feature=related

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Elliot WilenI love space but I wouldn't spend nickle on a manned mission to Mars

Neither will Obama.  He's not interested in manned spaceflight.  

Once you stop funding such a a thing, it's damned difficult to justify re-spending it.

Space.  The worthless frontier.  These are the voyages of the starship Obama.  His mission - to explore no new worlds.  To seek out no new life and no new civilizations.  To boldly stay where mankind has stayed before.

Quote from: ThornhammerSpace.  The worthless frontier.  These are the voyages of the starship Obama.  His mission - to explore no new worlds.  To seek out no new life and no new civilizations.  To boldly stay where mankind has stayed before.

But you gotta admit, that's change. And we can hope that it doesn't come about I suppose.

Because after all, why piss money away in outer space to give life-long employment to a handful of eggheads when you can use it to buy votes in south Chicago?

Quote from: WerekoalaBecause after all, why piss money away in outer space to give life-long employment to a handful of eggheads when you can use it to buy votes in south Chicago?

I just had an interesting idea for an occult RPG adventure about a politician hiring a necromancer on election day so that the dead still in the voting books could vote for them as zombies.

(Yeah, in the real world, they just have someone sign for them and record the vote, but that's no fun.)

Quote from: ThornhammerNeither will Obama.  He's not interested in manned spaceflight.

Name a president (or candidate) who's been genuinely interested in manned spaceflight since, oh, Nixon.  Maybe Reagan?  And I think he was probably more interested in the potential military side-benefits of an actively funded space program.

!i!

Quote from: Ian AbsentiaAnd I think he was probably more interested in the potential military side-benefits of an actively funded space program.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-2KpgBRc3o

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Ian AbsentiaName a president (or candidate) who's been genuinely interested in manned spaceflight since, oh, Nixon.

You can find plenty of interest in both Bush administrations, both trying to direct NASA toward a set of specific goals, which is why NASA is abandoning the Shuttles and looking toward Mars.  The goal was to give NASA objectives it could achieve and build on.

Quote from: ThornhammerNeither will Obama.  He's not interested in manned spaceflight.  

Once you stop funding such a a thing, it's damned difficult to justify re-spending it.

Space.  The worthless frontier.  These are the voyages of the starship Obama.  His mission - to explore no new worlds.  To seek out no new life and no new civilizations.  To boldly stay where mankind has stayed before.

Please do try to read what was written.

Manned spaceflight isn't the sum total of space exploration.

That said, if a mission to Mars can really be carried out at a cost which is effective relative to unmanned exploration, in terms of scientific knowledge gained per dollar--even roughly so--I would certainly favor it.

I think it's a ridiculous point on which to base voting in the coming election; however if you do, your priorities are probably so different from mine on terrestrial issues that it doesn't really matter anyway.

Quote from: Elliot WilenI love space but I wouldn't spend nickle on a manned mission to Mars given the enormous hole McCain's party has dug for us here on earth.

Larry Niven's commentary from a 2000 interview at Space.com:

   We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built. We'd have most of what we predicted of the conquest of space, if we hadn't ignored parasite control. The wealth (as in flying cars) predicted by Heinlein and his followers (including myself) was another matter. It all went to welfare programs.

Vast numbers of people are microscopically better off for that, except that we all have less to aspire to.

Here is where the predictions failed: We didn't take Cargo Cult mentality into account [that being] "if somebody has something I don't, he must have stolen it."

We didn't understand how good we could get at communication -- when you have something that someone else doesn't, the whole damn planet knows it.

By the way, I do agree that the Republican's have made a mess of the Federal budget since 2000 (which is a reason why many conservatives are unhappy with Bush and the Republican congress), but that has little to do with tax cuts (which not only did little to change the tax revenue collected but also shifted a larger percentage of the tax burden to the more wealthy taxpayers) and are due to spending which has increased far beyond anything that even the Iraq war might be used to justify.  

I think it's important to point out that John McCain has a different set of priorities than George W. Bush and the reason why he opposed Bush's tax cuts is because the Republicans made no effort to cut spending along with it.  So I don't expect McCain to keep digging that hole, though there is only so much a President can do to control a Congress (regardless of the party in control) that feels they have to service constituents who, like hungry baby birds, chirp incessantly for more Federal money.

QuoteA newspaper burns in the sand, and the headlines say ‘Man destroys Man!’
Extra! Extra! Read all the bad news on the war for peace that everybody would lose
The rise and fall, the last great empire, the sound of the whole world caught on fire
The ruthless struggle, the desperate gamble
The game that left the whole world in shambles
The cheats, the lies, the alibis
And the foolish attempt to conquer the skies
Lost in space, and what is it worth, huh?
The president just forgot about Earth

From Beat Street Breakdown by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five

Quote from: John Morrow(which not only did little to change the tax revenue collected

You toss that out as if it's an uncontroversial statement of fact. Here's a summary of people who disagree with that. You can trot out your sources (I suspect it'll be few outside the Pres, the VP, the editorial page of the WSJ, and the Heritage Foundation, but surprise me) and then whoever wants to read up can do so without polluting the forum with extensive quotes.

Quote from: Elliot WilenYou toss that out as if it's an uncontroversial statement of fact. Here's a summary of people who disagree with that. You can trot out your sources (I suspect it'll be few outside the Pres, the VP, the editorial page of the WSJ, and the Heritage Foundation, but surprise me) and then whoever wants to read up can do so without polluting the forum with extensive quotes.

Please note that I claimed that "did little to change the tax revenue collected".  I worded it that way for a reason.  I did not claim that the tax cuts generated higher revenue nor did I claim that they never generated lower revenue.  My claim was that the differences were little.

Rather than link to another page full of selected quotes by an advocate or advocacy group of a particular position or not, I did my own analysis of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) numbers to do comparisons of revenue with 1998 (reported in 1999) (in the middle of the Clinton boom) and in 2000 (reported in 2001) (just before the downturn) with the tax receipts since, through Bush's 2003 tax cuts and, to be fair, looked at the numbers both adjusted for inflation and against the growth in the GDP.  If you don't like my sources for Inflation and GDP, feel free to offer your own.  Each year's CBO report starts with the actual revenue numbers from the year before, both in dollars and as a percentage of GDP, so I looked at both.  The Excel spreadsheet I'm referring to is attached.

There was clearly a point during the economic downturn when revenue was lower by all measures that I consider relevant, specifically from 2002-2004, before the Bush tax cuts and during their first year.  If you want to dwell on that, you are welcome to but I'd prefer to look at the numbers after the recovery, which the tax cuts were designed to stimulate.

The first thing that I want to point out is that if you take the 1998 receipts from 1999 and project them forward to 2005-2007, the receipts in 2005 exceeds the inflation-adjusted 1998 receipts by 92 billion, in 2006 by 278 billion, and in 2007 by 319 billion.  The receipts in 2006 also exceeds the projection made in 1999 by 14 billion and the receipts in 2007 exceed the projection made in 1999 by 68 billion.  

If we do the same comparison with the 2001 projections, the receipts in 2006 exceed the inflation-adjusted 2000 receipts by 36 billion and in 2007 by 130 billion.  The receipts do fall substantially short of the projections made in 2001 by about 250 billion in 2007 to over 415 billion in 2005.  Of course in 2001, the projections were clearly quite rosy.

The point, though is that tax receipts are more than keeping pace with inflation and are even in line with projections made nearly a decade earlier, upon which Congress was supposed to budget, but the budget is growing faster than inflation and projections.  

Next, I took at look at GDP, since the Bush tax cuts mean that a lower percentage of the GDP are collected as tax revenue.  If you look at it from that perspective, then the tax receipts lag behind the GDP somewhere in the 80%-90% range.  That is, tax receipts are 80%-90% of what they'd be if they kept perfect track with the GDP (that's not 80%-90% of the GDP but 80%-90% of the percentage increase in the GDP applied to the tax receipts).  But given that the tax cuts are designed to stimulate GDP growth, higher tax rates could lead to a lower GDP, thus reducing the receipts in real dollars and in dollars adjusted for inflation (provided inflation remained stable, too). Many of the economists on the page you liked to acknowledge that tax cuts cost growth but claim that the growth does not fully offset the cuts.  The number 1/3rd seems to get tossed around a bit so let's assume that the real difference here is somewhere in the 7%-15% range.

So, yes, I think my original point stands, that the Bush tax cuts don't make that much of a difference in the tax revenues collected and that the major problem is increases in spending, not that the government is not collecting enough money.  Tax receipts are keeping pace with and exceeding inflation, even despite Bush's tax cuts.  Feel free to use the attached spreadsheet and sources to make any sort of counter case you'd like to make.

Oh snap!  A zip file!  Morrow escalates!

John, it might be a good idea to start a new thread about this, but first I have a quick question. I've been looking at your spreadsheet and your sources, and I'm puzzled about line 13, showing the 1999 CBO total revenue projections as a percentage of GDP. The numbers in that line show a steady decline from 19.6% to 17.4% between 1998 and 2008. However Table 3 in the sources cited for lines 2 and 13 show revenues as a percentage of GDP at slightly above 20%--peaking at 20.7% in the 1999 forecast before declining slightly into the 20.2% projections for 2001 onward. It looks like you've put the numbers for projected outlays (as percentage of GDP) on that line.

Quote from: Elliot WilenJohn, it might be a good idea to start a new thread about this, but first I have a quick question. I've been looking at your spreadsheet and your sources, and I'm puzzled about line 13, showing the 1999 CBO total revenue projections as a percentage of GDP. The numbers in that line show a steady decline from 19.6% to 17.4% between 1998 and 2008. However Table 3 in the sources cited for lines 2 and 13 show revenues as a percentage of GDP at slightly above 20%--peaking at 20.7% in the 1999 forecast before declining slightly into the 20.2% projections for 2001 onward. It looks like you've put the numbers for projected outlays (as percentage of GDP) on that line.

It's possible I made a mistake.  I'll check it when I get home.  I included the GDP to be fair (it supports your point more than mine) because two key things you can expect the receipts to grow with are inflation and GDP.