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Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future

latimes.com

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Re: Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future

#321

Post by jeremyjh »

xedrac wrote: post #309
jeremyjh wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you call it when people are rounded up and sent to a gulag in El Salvador without due process? What do you call it when monies appropriated by Congress that literally kept starving people alive in other parts of the world, are unilaterally rescinded by an executive with no legal power to do so? The richest man in the world caused the deaths of some of the poorest in the world, and fulfilled not one of the ben…

What do you call it when people flood into a country without due process?

What do you call it when people supporting an authoritarian deflect to their pet issue because they think it owns the libs?

You don't get to ignore due process just because crimes are alleged. That's the whole fucking point of due process - to ascertain exactly what has happened and not just take some thug's word for it when they want to boost their arrest numbers.

Re: Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future

#322

Post by [deleted] »

leptons wrote: post #314
Loughla wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old. They're old. Gerontocracy means old people. Dems, republicans, both are old. The average age for republicans and democrats in the house is 57 or so. The average in the senate is 62(r) and 65(d). While 57 isn't ancient, it's also not young enough to give a shit about 2070. 62 and 65 year olds certainly don't care about a date so far in the future that their kids will be dead.

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future

#323

Post by sfpotter »

Whoppertime wrote: post #290
sfpotter wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Let's just not give a giant handout to the wealthy.

How is a tax cut a handout to the wealthy? The wealthy still have to earn the money. If the Doctors top tax rate goes from 35% to 30%, and his combined State Local and fee burden goes from 50% to 45%, he still has to perform surgeries to get the money. It's not a handout. he's keeping more of what he earned.

The wealthy use a progressively more and more marginal amount of their income for necessities. Consequently, their income gets pumped into assets, which produce still more wealth for them. There are different ways of taxing people. You can tax their income, you can tax their capital gains, you can tax their wealth, you can tax inheritance, etc... It is basically understood at this point that if wealth is relatively untaxed, wealth inequality grows. If wealth inequality is large, society destabilizes.

The example of a doctor isn't really meaningful in isolation. It is also pretty reductive to think only in terms of simple percentages and how much of "what they have earned" they keep. Different parts of the world have a different cost of living. If you live in the states and make $200K per year, you are capable of living a comfortable life anywhere in the country. If you make $400K, how much more comfortable? What about $800K? If the doctor is making $800K and their tax rate drops by half, then what? There is a sense of how much is reasonable for someone to contribute back to society, and if the amount they contribute drops significantly so that they are perceived as not contributing enough, then it is fair to regard that tax cut as a handout.

Re: Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future

#324

Post by duxup »

Whoppertime wrote: post #283
duxup wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cutting enough to do what? Address deficit spending? Trump and the GOP do not care about that at all, they're looking at increasing the deficit dramatically. The GOP has done an amazing job selling people on topics like the deficit, trade, big tech and doing the opposite and people still fall for it.

Would you be willing to put your money where your mouth is on this issue? Bet that the deficit will go up more over the next 4 years compared to the last 4 years? On January 20, 2021, when President Biden took office, the U.S. national debt stood at approximately $27.8 trillion By January 20, 2025, as he exited office, the debt had risen to about $36.1–36.2 trillion. Are you willing to bet that Donald Trump will wrac…

Would it matter? I don't put much into "you should bet me / someone" as having any meaning. Let alone on whatever terms they randomly pick.

I don't bet people about anything ...

Re: Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future

#325

Post by tstactplsignore »

Whoppertime wrote: post #311
tstactplsignore wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tiny portion of government spending though. You could completely eliminate the NASA budget entirely and it'd make absolutely no difference on the federal government's bottom line. The NASA budget, the NIH budget, the NSF budget, the USAID budget, the EPA budget, the NOAA budget - all of these unbelievably useful with high ROI agencies combined do not amount to more than the margin of error in the US governm…

"all of these unbelievably useful with high ROI agencies" Unbelievably useful to whom? A lot of people seemed to have problems with what institutions like USAID were doing. I can think of the CIA during Iran Contra as a very useful comparison. Funding the Contras and getting around Congressional obstruction was very useful to Ronald Reagan. The CIA facilitating Cocaine trafficking into the United States by groups sup…

Useful to whom?

Well first and foremost to these people:

https://pepfar.impactcounter.com/ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/children-die-after-usaid-... https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2025/tracking-anticipat... https://www.npr.org/2025/05/28/nx-s1-5413322/aid-groups-say-... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01191-z

Re: Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future

#326

Post by labster »

baggy_trough wrote: post #303
Braxton1980 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

We live in an absurd reality. Or do you want to explain to me why Elon can threaten to disassemble the Crew Dragon just to get back at Donald, while somehow we consider women to be too irrational to lead?

Also: all it takes for evil men to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

Re: Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future

#327

Post by Ajedi32 »

neaden wrote: post #132
Ajedi32 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal of cutting government spending is ultimately to reduce the amount of resources drained out of the economy through taxes/inflation. Balancing the budget is useful insofar as it reduces the resources that will need to be drained out of the economy in the future to pay interest on our growing debt (currently 11% of all Federal spending).

Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. The money used for NASA goes right back into the economy, since they use it to buy things. Even money to pay down debt isn't removed from the economy since the majority of that debt is held by US citizens who use that money to buy things.

> Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. The money used for NASA goes right back into the economy, since they use it to buy things.

That's not remotely how this works. By this logic, wars are actually free since the money spent goes to defense contractors who use it to buy things and hire employees. We can have an unlimited military budget with no negative repercussions!

As the sibling commenter pointed out, you're engaging in a classic economic fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

To help you avoid this in the future, remember that "the real economy is not money, it is goods & services". Any government spending necessarily takes goods and services out of the real economy and allocates them towards things the government wants done. Some of those things might have a positive ROI, but with government spending there's absolutely no guarantee of that since they're getting those resources through taxes, not through voluntary economic transactions.

Re: Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future

#328

Post by trust_bt_verify »

Whoppertime wrote: post #252
superconduct123 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/elon-musk-threatened-decom...

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/24/nx-s1-5087892/nasa-starliner-...

So private contractors are unreliable for a variety of reasons? We should get all of this private bloat out of the government.

Re: Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future

#330

Post by neaden »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #327
neaden wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. The money used for NASA goes right back into the economy, since they use it to buy things. Even money to pay down debt isn't removed from the economy since the majority of that debt is held by US citizens who use that money to buy things.

> Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. The money used for NASA goes right back into the economy, since they use it to buy things. That's not remotely how this works. By this logic, wars are actually free since the money spent goes to defense contractors who use it to buy things and hire employees. We can have an unlimited military budget with no negative repercussions! As the sibling commenter pointed out, you…

The broken windows parable is about causing destruction and then repairing it, which thankfully isn't what NASA is doing. If you read your Wikipedia link you would see that this was never meant to apply to all government spending. To help you avoid this in the future, read the links before you try to correct people.
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