Lunar Base Foe Romney Endorsed By Lunar Base Supporters

MarkWhittington writes "Mitt Romney has infamously suggested that the idea of lunar colonies is 'zany' and has ridiculed Newt Gingrich's idea of building a lunar base by 2020. However Romney has been endorsed by a group of aerospace heavyweights, including Apollo moonwalker Gene Cernan and former NASA administrator Mike Griffin, many of whom have previously supported the idea of lunar bases."

Deficits deficits deficits

[Beelzebud]

Funny how "Deficits don't matter" (Dick Cheney) once the Republicans want to do something.

Funding

[Jeremi]

Will we be raising taxes to pay for all of this cool space stuff, or just putting it on the credit card as usual?

Re:I despise Newt...

[Beelzebud]

A lunar base would be great, but don't kid yourself into thinking Newt thought of it. Notice he only said this in Florida, where NASA is located...

Re:Deficits deficits deficits

[Beelzebud]

Now, just to be clear on this: When Dick Cheney said that, they had already ballooned the deficit by trillions of dollars. He wasn't talking about "small deficits".

Re:It's just more Romney pandering.

[jensend]

A moon base may not be all that wacky an idea, but building it within 8 years is ridiculous. Ambitious schedules for the Constellation program would barely have had manned launches by then, and we've let that project rot for two years now. I don't think we could have a base finished by 2020 even if we were spending 5x NASA's current budget on the project. We'd have to be spending completely ridiculous sums to even have a chance at making it happen that fast.

No kick-backs? Green industry mean anything?

[SuperKendall]

Most of the Green companies Obama forced the government to invest in (Solyndra was known to be a huge risk and beyond saving at the time of investment) are collapsing now. All of them were huge donors to Obama.

The stimulus funds largely went to big Democratic donors. Obama is about systematically funneling government funds to Democratic groups. If you haven't been paying attention the deficit has ballooned in the last few years as the robbery accelerates to unprecedented levels (yes both parities do this but remember the Democrats had full control over the nozzle for two years).

Re:*Cricket cricket*

[RajivSLK]

Your tax reasoning is flawed and so is CNNs. 80% of ALL Americans paid 13.3% in FICA taxes alone (yes the employer portion is a tax too -- hiding it on the employer side doesn't make it zero). Why do you guys never count FICA? It's a tax that the working poor pay. I continually hear reports like "50% of americans pay no income taxes at all!". As a Canadian I think "How can this be?" and then I realize that you guys are just bad at accounting / math.

Government deficit and debt is a red herring

[Nicolai Haehnle]

To anybody who reads the parent: yes, those debt numbers sound impressive. However, ultimately they are just the necessary counter-part to giving the private sector the monetary assets that it desires. This was understood a long time ago, see e.g. here [cnchost.com]. More recently, Modern Monetary Theory economists have been pushing the same point. If you haven't yet, I recommend you set aside some time to read introductory explanations e.g. here [pragcap.com] and here [blogspot.com] and here [moslereconomics.com].

The bottom line is this: targeting a specific size of the budget is bad policy. The budget will be whatever it has to be to match the behaviour of the private sector. Artificial austerity, as is being proposed these days, is coercion of the private sector to go against its natural behaviour, even when that natural behaviour is benign. In other words, austerity actually means an oppressive and draconian government. Deal with it. [wikipedia.org]