NASA: Time To Do More With Less, Do Less, or Do Things Differently?

Uh, wait a second... so, he's saying that 83% of the budget is not going to be frozen... which must mean he expects that part to increase. And he thinks that when the majority of the budget goes up, he can curb the deficit by squeezing the remaining 16.6%?

If NASA has to live with a budget freeze, they should at least get the $3billion back that the administration took from NASA last year.

I hope the Direct team's program margins are as able to provide the slack they described... it's going to be needed and then some.

Obama-centric financial talk: Unlike his half-assed watered down stimulus, which did some good, this will only hurt the non-elite and the non-corporate... especially with so many states already facing major budget shortfalls because of the current pit we're in.

Obama promised to leave his mortal enemies SS and Medicare alone with this freeze (after all, he won't get around to the planned de facto dismantling of those until Conrad's "Cat Food Commission" is done gutting them) but the Federal cuts will still have an extremely disproportionate impact on already-sandbagged State systems that deal with such issues.

Which means that economically stressed families will face even more foreclosures than before (and "before" was shaping up as another nightmare to begin with) and all the associated collateral damage.

And with the Fed and the Treasury hard-pressed just to prop up the housing bubble they barely managed to get reinflated with all those trillions... this is a surefire recipe for yet another epic disaster.

Why do we have such a huge deficit???

1. Social Security is only funded by a tax on the first $102,000 of your income so the rich don't get taxed causing a huge shortage in revenue

2. The inherent inefficiency of Medicare and Medicaid which probably waste over $300 billion a year in tax payer dollars.

http://newpapyrusmagazine.blogspot.com/2001/11/how-real-public-option-could.html

3. Two foreign wars now costing more that $180 billion annually.

That's why we have a huge deficit. If we don't address those three fundamental problems then a spending freeze on other budget items is like shuffling chairs on the Titanic!

Trying to balance the budget with NASA's tiny budget which actually increases and wealth would be beyond silly!

http://thespaceadvocate.blogspot.com/2009/12/you-want-economic-impact-you-cant.html

Marcel F. Williams

Obama is delivering on campaign promises. Unfortunately, he's delivering on the other guy's promise.

MCCAIN: How about a spending freeze on everything but defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs.

-- from the transcript to the presidential debate, 9/26/2008 (http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/26/debate.mississippi.transcript/).

Uh, wait a second... so, he's saying that 83% of the budget is not going to be frozen... which must mean he expects that part to increase. And he thinks that when the majority of the budget goes up, he can curb the deficit by squeezing the remaining 16.6%?

At least it's a start, and let's face it, it's the only part of the national budget that has a dial on it.

And this is the message for NASA people and those that justify dumping $ on NASA because it represents only 1.5% of the federal budget. In reality, NASA represents 15% of the budget that has any prayer of being controlled.

Seems to me like this is a nice big target.

The Augustine Panel reported that NASA could proceed with an aggressive space program given an addional $3B.

Instead, we forego the space program and are building a $2.6B high speed train from Orlando to Tampa.

As Bill Nelson once said recently, "What Candidate Obama said and what President Obama does are two entirely different things."

NASA has been doing a lot less for more, or at least for a stable budget, for a long time.

Constellation is a prime example of government inefficiency. Orion-Ares is really exemplary for how a lot of money was wasted over many years because NASA management was promoting based not on competence and proven experience but on wishful thinking and cronyism.

NASA management is the first problem that needs to be fixed. If you don't fix it, then it really does not matter how much money they throw at the program.