No Medicare taxes. Social Security taxes on workers less than half what they are now.

1960 Federal budget, in constant 2008 dollars, one-sixth what it is now.

1960 Federal revenues, in 2008 dollars, $631 billion, or $3,500 per citizen, compared to the current $6,300 per citizen.

Defense spending as a percentage of Federal budget over 50 percent, about twice what it is now.

Health insurance coverage on Americans less than 45 percent compared to current 83 percent.

Per capita income, in constant dollars, about half what it is now (Census figures only go back to 1967)

No food stamps.

No Department of Housing and Urban Development. No Federal Departments of Transportation, Energy, Education, or Veteran’s Affairs. No EPA. No Department of Homeland Security.

I could go on like this for a while on things like standards of living, but I’ve got other things to do.

What you seem to think caused America to “thrive” is incorrect. Completely inverted, in fact.

Arf

Keep in mind the Federal deficit alone right now is well over a trillion dollars, and that Democrats are pushing for much more spending.

If you don’t have that number, you don’t have an argument.

I’ll give you a hint: the numbers were widely discussed during the debate on extending the Bush rates back at the end of 2010.

It’s not god damned socialism to raise the tax rate on millionaires a few lousy percentage points. What, in the 90s we where a fucking communist state?

Seeing the difference between paranoid rhetoric like “bringing down the rich and redistributing wealth” and what is actually being proposed, THAT is the political center. That is where Obama is, and the fact that you can’t recognize that shows you are way out on the far right fringe.

http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1194/MR1194.chap11.pdf

Georgia ranks 4th in the amount of Federal R & D dollars spent there.

Georgia assembles the C-130 and Gingrich, et al., has forced the Air Force to purchase many, many more of them for years and years than the Air Force wanted.

I don’t think he supports NASA as much as he supports pork for Georgia.

That action stands out among all his others like a diamond in a coal bucket. The man radiates leftism with everything he says and does. His entire campaign is going to be about bringing down the rich and redistributing the wealth.

I’m sorry, but anyone who points to Barack Obama and goes “centrist” isn’t paying attention.

I suspect the main reason he’s farming out the U.S. space effort to the private sector is because he has exactly zero interest in the space program.

It comes down to that concept of “what is government suppose to do?”

Could it be that our “socialist” president is in reality a man who has governed as a political and economic centrist?

Naw.

Nasa has spent over $100 billion on a 400 ton solar powered space staion with room for 6. That’s enough money to build 20 100,000 ton nuclear power aircraft carriers, or around 50 nuclear powered submarines. Nasa has spent tens of billions of dollars developing rockets that got no farther than power point presentations. Space is nowhere near as expensive as what Nasa has made it out to be.

Regardless of who exactly is to blame, the way Nasa is organized has made it impossible to carry out any sort of strategic long range goals for manned settlement of space. Funneling money to certain congressional districts is their sole reason for existing.

Apollo having “nowhere else to go” was pretty reasonable. No program will ever do everything. Most succesful programs can be used to build from and canabalized for subsequent projects. However if those in charge (and you should appreciate how gingerly I walk here and in the prior post to avoid making this a partisan slam) decree “this is over” and I don’t care if anything happens in this direction again, then it guarantees that nothing further will be done without a change of leadership. “Flags and footprints” is not a NASA failing.

But the approach was a technological dead end. Apollo, despite some interesting follow-on ideas, had nowhere else to go.

The original concepts for space exploration involved a slow progression through reusable launch systems, orbital assembly facilities, and eventually, the Moon. Built on a framework of large-scale space systems, not a one-off gigantic Moon launch vehicle which reused nothing and managed to return something to Earth the size of a tool shed.

I still have copies of the old Willy Ley books, held together with masking tape.