You seem to have a skewed vision of what is preventing companies from expanding as well. It’s not taxes. It’s the salaries of those at the top of the company. Any job cuts you see are often used to keep corporate salaries and bonuses as high as they were.

Supporting a government policy because it will “create jobs” is a fallacious argument. If the government really was trying to create jobs, they could do an equally good (well, equally bad) job by paying people to repeatedly dig and fill holes. Since government gets all of its resources from taxing other people, it can’t create anything that they couldn’t have created already. If you’re going to argue that we should have NASA, you should argue not that it creates jobs (as on the net balance it doesn’t), but rather that the use it’ll put the money to is better than the use that the people taxed would put their money to.

Forgot to write something about this. It seems like this is not “double counting,” more just putting ideas out there that people can get their heads around. All time budget is hard to grasp. Sending people to the moon, not so much.

What’s annoying is the inclusion of NASA’s all time budget. Why is that group singled out? It’s the only government agency listed. It feeds into the idea that NASA is a huge outlay of the government each year. The other projects are projects, with a beginning, middle, and end.

The banks have done a horrible job with their bailout money so far. Instead of going to loans, most of the money they got was used to buy other banks and to pay dividends to stockholders. They weren’t as regulated as they should be so the money did not get to the areas they needed. Even if its hard to get full calculation of how much this is going to cost, there is still a lot of waste that equals years of NASA’s budget. Even if it received 1 billion of the money, it would be a fantastic addition.

Interesting, they have all of NASA in one slice BUT they also have the Moonshot as another… did they take that out of original NASA portion or are they doublecounting??

But other than provide a place to keep money and get loans from, they don’t do much, essentially just moving money around. This crisis was caused by too much bad debt and too many exotic, overvalued investments. This isn’t going to help anyone but the fatcats on Wall Street

You know what would be more fun than just stacking it up? We could wrap all that money around the earth in a geostationary orbit (22,240 miles above sea level, about 165,000 miles around) and still have enough left over to take every human being on the planet out for a REALLY fancy dinner!

Now the very same people who grew rich from deregulation want the rest of us to cover their losses after the bubble burst. A government intervention? I thought that smacked of socialism.

Quiet Desperation: So where did the guvmint get the money to make such great purcases? It surely did not have any in savings. How are they loaning non-existant money–no matter what the bargain purchases are?

This makes as much sense to me as one of the original premises of the S&L debacle that risky mortgage debts could be sold as “assets.”

OF course they are getting beaten-down securities cheap, but most were worthless to begin with–they had a value “on paper” and nowhere else. Ten times zero is still zero.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/01/news/economy/tully_vat.fortune/index.htm

You somehow imagined your particular passion was immune ? Be careful what you wish for – you just might get it.

But Pluto isn’t a planet anymore, right? So NASA has already visited every planet in the solar system.

“If this is true than so have you and everybody else.”

I totally agree, but if I make a long series of terrible decisions I don’t expect the government to bail me out (not that I wouldn’t cash the check if they insisted )

“Using your logic, the government should be giving away money to every single tax payer.”

We do that as well (stimulus packages), and many economists think it is a good thing.

If this is true than so have you and everybody else.

“to imply that they deserve this because they’ve payed taxes in the past is a little insane.”

I’m not saying that they deserve it, but it is crazy to say that “our” money is being used to bail them out when they have payed so much year in and year out. Simply looking at one side of the equation makes no sense.