Again, I have no problems with examining federal spendings. I do have a problem with the knee-jerk reaction of singling out defense spending.

As for "too-high welfare spendings", you are hardly qualified to make that statement unless you've examined the spending itself. There is case after case after case of corruption and downright inefficiency DOCUMENTED in our public welfare programs. Before we start randomly cutting spending in areas simply because people from certain political views don't like them, we should first examine where that money would be going, how it would be spent, and dollar-for-dollar how efficient those programs are. There's no point in throwing billions at something when millions will do.

Lawsuit nightmare for one.

And two NASA is a dinosaur. The tech advances are coming from the private sector at speeds several times faster than NASA could dream of.

GPS was designed to give a commander the ability to quickly check he was in rough position on the battlefield and help roughly aim bombs. Private tech developments refined that into a revolution for Air navigation, Road navigation (Saving god knows how many barrels of oil) etc...

The tech that will allow 100+M people to colonize space per year will never come from NASA. No matter how much money you dump in. They are coming from the labs that are trying to solve earth problems which have applications far beyond powering a town or shielding a CPU from radiation or storing lots of energy in a car.

Social programs do work, they prevent the whole country from looking like the LA riots after the Rodney King acquital. Welfare just pays off the impending implosion of the nations poor. If they don't get some government cheese they will just burn down the cities all over the country.

The military doesn't work. They haven't won a war since World War 2 and even then they were only on the winning side and didn't take on German all by itself. Of course in America you would think we were the only country in World War 2 fighting the Japanese and German's and that it all went down yesterday. Korea was a draw, Vietnam was a beatdown, the failed Iranian hostage rescue, the Somalia disaster (untrained starved illiterate Africans beat down American Specil Ops and drug their corpses through the streets on national TV). Iraq has been a total screwup. Afghanistan is a waste of time.

Let's face it, the military is very expensive and just screws up everything it's tasked with completely. The American military is like Al Bundy from married with children, they just sit on the couch talking about their "touchdown pass" way back in WW2. If you really want something to fail and just embarass America, just call up the US military.

They need to stop calling it the defense department, that's dishonest. It's really the offense department. We haven't fought a war for defense since World Wat 2.

Let me ask proponents of NASA getting tons of money this..

Where was NASA when the nation was warming up to the idea of electric cars in the 90s but needed a new battery? Why sending up a PR shuttle mission of course!

Matter of fact one of the few worthwhile shuttle missions pre 107 was the SRTM mission where we get the heightmap data from to this day.

NASA is only good for gathering raw public domain data. Landsat, SRTM, ISS, probes, etc... The only time they make something is when some mission requires it and then it takes years to get off the ground because unlike the 60s NASA cant just accept that a probe failed.

Do I believe that NASA is a worthwhile investment? Why yes! But not as much as the decades before. They simply arent the tech leaders they used to be.

The right wing always blames the welfare recipients for all the nations ills. It doesn't matter what the issue, the right always has the nations poor to blame and shake their fists at.

The real problem is the military. We can't go on spending the way we do on defense. Now that the petro dollars is going out the window (the real reason we invaded Iraq, Saddam was going to sell oil in Euros) we won't be able to afford 10+ aircraft carrier fleets and all the other multimillion dollars toys.

If we don't stop these pointless wars we can't win anyway we will go bankrupt the same as Russia. We just can't keep doing it anymore. Other nations are bailing on the US and they won't continue to fund our mindless consumption, why should they? The world doesn't need the US like is used to.

Of course we can keep doing it.

It is called tech advancement.

Solar tech is getting better every few months.

I won't even bother with the rest of what subchaser12 wrote until he clears up the inaccuracies, including this glaring one: Hmm, I wonder why Kosovo is building a statue of Bill Clinton and naming a street after President Bush...

This is because your puny ass country can't take care of itself anymore and we have to help you do it. Once we could rely on you to catch our back.

-S

Kosovo has turned out to be a nightmare of corruption and organised crime for the EU. More than half of the eu aid money directed to Koso9vo has just disappeared. To hell with Kosovo, it was the wrong side we allied with from the beginning on. as one NATO general said: "We bobmed the wrong side". We should have bombed the Albanian camp and the UCK instead. Now they have made a milita commander and mafia boss their president of Kosovo. Great going there. and it seems we repeat very much the same mistake by assisting Georgia now.

The argument wasn't about the social rebuilding of a nation. It was about the effectiveness of the US military.

Quite frankly, the US military was extraodinarily effective in its war in Iraq as well, at least when the objectives were military in nature. I don't fault the military for its failures in the rebuilding process, as "rebuilding" is hardly what any military is designed to do.

Just so you know what you are dealing with, SB may sound leftists, but if you analyze his posts, that is just what it seems. He is definitely heavy on the German Nationalist agenda, but what is quite off is that a lot of his rhetoric sounds suspiciously like that out of Germany era 1933.

The short answer is, no matter how much good the US does, it will always be labeled as bad, so dont' waste too much time on it. The US is not liked by many in this forum.

Just my 2 cents.

-S

How did you come from NASA to Kosovo to Skybird being zeh very evil?
:damn:

I'm wondering what happened too.

PD

Seriously, the Ares program does not sound like the optimum solution to me.
Traditionally, Americans tend to revolutionary development instead of evolutionary development.
The russians still use basically the same rocket that brought Gagarin into Space, with 50 years of improvements.
The US in the meantime developed at least 4 seperate launch systems.
Now with tighter budgets, NASA suddenly jumped on the evolutionary bandwagon.
I'm not the proverbial rocket scientist, but constructing a Saturn like launcher rocket out of the components of the Space shuttle sounds like turning a Mini Cooper into an SUV.
You can do it, but you will have to redesign basically everything in order to do it right.
Even the russians, with all their proven Protons, did not try to redesign Proton as the launcher of Buran but instead developed the whole new Energija booster.
I think the US might be much better off with designing just a brand new booster rocket optimized for the mission with all the advantages of modern age designs and materials, not kitbash something out of 1970s technology.
Problem is, "off the shelf" solutions sell better, but mostly turn out to be more expensive in the end.

That is becasue you think nothing is wrong if such insane ammounts of money get wasted for the military, and maybe consider the cause to be beyond doubt. Outside america, you won't many people agreeing with you, not even amongst those who are closer to you than anyone else: the europeans. A budget in excess of 600 billion is a first class candiate to be checked for why it is so high. even more so in the face of your high state debts, your very ill state finances, and the corrupt system of mutual lobbying between military, politics and the defence industry. Your defence budget is as high as that of the next 17 or 18 spenders alltogether, and is higher than it ever was during all the cold war with the Soviet union trying to deliver an arms race to you - and you ask why one wants to examine defence spendings first...? Whom do you want to distract with your scpeticism here - me, or yourself?

I said you have the most inferior social wellfare system of all civilised nations in the West, and I stick to that. Maybe it is money lost to corrpution and lobbying, nevertheless your wellfare standards are worst of all Western nations. you also pay twice as much for health, but your health caring standards is not better than ours, and certainly not twice as good than ours over here. I wonder if the massive lobbying of the industry has somethign to do with it. But when one points at that direction, and suggest better monitoring of procedures and structures, immediately the yellingregarding "no state-run economy!", "defend liberalism!" and "free business!" is to be heared. The spendings for a corrput industry will not be questioned. cutting the spendings for directly adressing social programs and direct access to ther situation of the weak - that is what it usually runs down to. Always kick towards the bottom of the food chain.

You country is by numbers effectively bankrupt, which also makes you extremely vulnerable. Your debts are insane, and you live on tick and by the good will of all others. Check your stupidly high defence budgets first. 651 billions (plus black budgets...) just for war and military toys and weapons simply is beyond all reason and logic - it is megalomania, and a sign for very strong militarism.

For comparison: during the Reagan era, the defence budget saw it's highest cold war value ever: 471billion in year-2006-worth dollars. the mean spending over the four decades of the cold war, was around 298.5 billion (in 2006-dollars).

and do not even think about trying the old argument of defence spendings expressed as percentages of the GDP, and that by that the defence budget is falling. Said Cristopher Hellman, working for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation : "Comparing (the defense budget) to GDP is a measure of the program's burden on the U.S. economy. Spending levels are a (measure of a) program's burden on the American taxpayer. It's a fallacious argument. Tying our level of spending to defense to the number of cheeseburgers consumed by Americans is not a good way to measure our strategic requirement. What if gross domestic product decreases?
If you are going to decide what is an appropriate defense budget based GDP, what happens if the economy tanks? Are you going to cut it in half? They only want to tie it to GDP when GDP is going up, not when it's going down. The GDP argument is the last refuge of scoundrels."

Point proven.

-S

I should also point out here that our inferior social welfare programs are the result of us believing in the individual, not the government. You have no people helping people over there. The state will do that for you so why should you care? It is no wonder the strength of Europe is failing. You no longer care for the person next door. Its not your problem.

And our militarism has kept peace in Europe since 1945. Best money we ever spent. Sadly now, I think a good war over there to shake things up may be in your best interest.

Unlike Germany GDP is a good indicator because it also shows the measure of the individual as a producer of wealth as opposed to the taker of wealth which is found in German society.

-S

Your argument can be summed up in, "you spend A LOT therefore it's bad".

Not once did I say that I'm flat-out against a reduction in military spending. I'm saying that we need to look far closer at what money goes where, and not try to take the easy way out and just say, "hey, the military gets a lot of money. Let's take it from them".I think that's extremely arguable but it's also beyond my point so I'll stay within my scope.

My point is, simply put, not to throw good money after bad. There is nothing to be gained from a reduction in military spending if that reduction is to pay for wasteful spending in another sector. I'll say it again - there's no point in just throwing money at a problem intending on the money alone to fix it.

As for whether or not our military is too large, I'd love to debate that sometime. Subman1, while clearly being a bit inflammatory, wasn't too far off of the mark when he alluded to other nations relying on our military. NATO alone requires the US military resources to be quite extensive. Add to that the fact that the ability for the US to project power worldwide is far more costly than it would be for most European nations, from a geographical standpoint.

I reported this but as usual the admins could care less when Subman litters topics with flamebait.

Yes a good war to kill lots of innocents eh Subman? Why don't you go join the armed forces right now so you can get your share of lead? Or DU since you seem to think it is harmless.