With another "jobs speech" scheduled for Thursday, it is worth remembering the speech President-Elect Barack Obama gave at George Mason University the second week of 2009. Obama asserted that only government -- through a massive, $840 billion stimulus package -- could jump-start the stricken economy.
In his 2009 speech, Obama promised to "put people to work repairing crumbling roads, bridges and schools by eliminating the backlog of well-planned, worthy and needed infrastructure projects", i.e., the infamous, "shovel-ready" construction projects that he later confessed didn't really exist.
In fact, only six (6) percent of Stimulus spending went to construction projects; much of the rest redistributed wealth from the private sector to public sector unions.
For wont of $3 billion, NASA loses manned space flight capability...
In the midst of the Stimulus spending spree, President Obama shocked the NASA program with a devastating pronouncement. The Space Shuttle replacement effort, dubbed the Constellation Program, which needed $3 billion in annual funding, would be terminated.
For the first time since the initial manned flight of Project Mercury on April 18, 1961, the United States would not have the ability to put a man into space. In spite of the national security impact of the space program -- and the fact that China has actively tested anti-satellite weaponry, the President felt that $3 billion was too much to spend on a replacement for the Space Shuttle.
...though illegal aliens received $4.2 billion in tax credits
And it wasn't just the fact that the public sector unions were awash with hundreds of billions in taxpayer Stimulus cash: the waste, fraud, and abuse in other federal programs turned out to be equally outrageous.
• The IRS sent $4.2 billion in tax credits to illegal aliens
• The EPA received an increase of $2.7 billion in funding from 2010 to 2011
• Spending on the Food Stamp program has more than doubled since 2009, to $71 billion in 2011
Priorities
The President's priorities are funding his union boss supporters, growing the size of government bureaucracies, ringing up massive deficits, advancing the anti-jobs "green" agenda, and cutting back on strategic national security programs.
Now I want you to imagine what Obama's priorities will be if he were to be reelected in 2012. He would have absolutely nothing to lose in enacting an even more radical agenda: his devastating policies will go from merely stunningly bad to spectacularly worse.
And that is why he must be defeated next November.
Allowing the shuttle program to go into mothballs without having a viable replacement in place, not even keeping a single shuttle in reserve in case of a dire emergency, will be a large part of the legacy of the anti-JFK.
ReplyDeleteGreat post, keep the barrage coming. Lars
ReplyDeleteThe Shuttle has always been a money-hog, a mutant cross between a semi-truck and a school bus run by a government agency who's true goal was to farm out contracts to every single congressional district in the country.
ReplyDeleteNow despite its expensive warts, the Shuttle has had an *amazing* career, showing that it can do just about anything in low-earth orbit imaginable. But it is *old*, stressed, and has killed two crews, expensive as hell, and the only real capacity we’re losing in the short-term is repair missions like Hubble (which are cheaper to just launch a new and better replacement) and large-item return (which the Shuttle has done *twice*). The remaining Shuttles are being sent to museums, and not mothballed (which would be a similarly horribly expensive process with low expectations of success). Shutting down the system is a tough sell, but could be considered a "good" decision provided the money freed up can be used to promote a commercial launch business instead of being siphoned off to other pet projects.
Which brings us to Congress, who in their infinite wisdom decided that the replacement for the Shuttle would be the SLS, promptly dubbed the Senate Launch System, which would use Shuttle parts and infrastructure to create a replacement for the Shuttle, thereby reinventing the R101 . (SLS has been spiked, rebuilt, reintroduced, modified, and such multiple times since its introduction. If anything it is a proposal that is bigger, more expensive, more complicated and more fragile than the system it is supposed to replace. A mouse, built to government standards.)
At the current rate, Commercial space development will completely overshadow the same Government agency who so long ago was considered the absolute bleeding edge of technology. Good. Maybe I can buy a ticket to the TWA space station before I get too old.