My own take (I happen to be writing a very long essay on this, at over
15,000 words now) is that the existence of SLS/Orion is sufficiently
harmful, in and of itself, in terms of feeding false perceptions, that
ending funding for it would be a positive development, even if not
redirected into something useful.
On 2015-12-30 13:33, Henry Vanderbilt wrote:
Heh. That's definitely a trick question.
I'll take a stab at defining the relevant criteria for successfully
redirecting that large SLS/Orion slice of NASA funding as, something
that would spread money among the same mix of congressional districts
that comprise the current SLS/Orion coalition, moreover doing so
without radically upsetting the current web of
contractor-legislator-NASA center relationships, all while continuing
to support the current (mistaken, I think, but real) diffuse public
perception that they're making progress in cool telegenic manned space
exploration.
Practically speaking, I'd say that means that activists who focus
primarily on defunding SLS/Orion should be ready, if they actually
succeed, to see the bulk of the money simply go away from NASA's
overall budget rather than to some other project those activists may
support.
The realistic activist position (IMHO) is to vigorously attack
SLS/Orion coalition efforts to hijack additional funding (current and
future) from, and otherwise hinder, *useful* NASA programs, all while
using SLS/Orion's continued existence as a horrible example of how to
spend large amounts of public money over a protracted period for no
useful result.
My two cents worth.
Henry
On 12/30/2015 11:43 AM, William Claybaugh wrote:
Sad and sadly true....
But rather than beat a dead horse; what would you do w/ $3.8 billion per
year of space program funding that--like SLS--meets all the relevant
criteria?
Bill
On Wednesday, December 30, 2015, Rand Simberg <simberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:simberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Can we talk about how SLS doesn't stimulate the economy, it destroys
wealth? :-)
On 2015-12-30 09:51, Jonathan Goff wrote:
Hey guys,
As much as I'm a fan of economics conversations, this isn't the
Economics Reform Pizza Society mailing list... At least Bill's and
Henry's conversation about time value of money and time horizons was
somewhat rocket related.
Jon
On Dec 30, 2015 10:47 AM, "Edward Wright"
<edward.v.wright@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
If you believe wars create wealth, you should attack their
next-door
neighbor. Burn his house, kill his dog, and invite him to do the
same to you -- it will make both of you rich.
If it works for a nation's economy, it should work for your
personal
economy, too. If it doesn't work at that the level, how can it
possibly work on a national scale?
Unfortunately, such ideas are common among civilians who
have never
seen actually war. Military veterans typically know better.
Sent from my iPad
On Dec 30, 2015, at 10:53 AM, Rand Simberg
<simberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Wars do not "stimulate the economy." They destroy wealth.
On 2015-12-29 15:23, Monroe L. King Jr. wrote:
All the war we have been in since WWII are economic wars
There is no winner and it's intended to be that way.
It's about moving money around yes.
They learned that from the Korean war and have used
it to
stimulate the
economy ever since.
Money that goes into war filters out into the country.
It looks bad on the deficet of course but that works
double in
their
favor if they can keep the public believing it's
necessary
War stimulates our country's economy it's pretty simple.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [AR] Re: OT economy booster
From: "John Dom" <johndom@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, December 29, 2015 2:53 pm
To: <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Tue, 29 Dec 2015, John Dom wrote:
War is an economy booster. War makes
money, jobs ect...
Usually only if you win the war...
On Behalf Of Henry Spencer 291215:
Often not even then. The money still has to
come from
somewhere, and a
government can only extract so much from its
citizens before
things fall
apart. WW1 devastated Britain's economy, and
the beginnings of
WW2 finished
it off -- Britain was quite literally *bankrupt*
at the end of
February
1941. The Lend-Lease Agreement and some other
outside help
postponed the
problem for the rest of the war, but times were
hard in Britain
for years
afterward -- food rationing continued until 1954
-- and it
needed several
decades to fully recover.
Next came Suez and J.F. Dulles’s coup de grâce
to Eden.