Life Imitates Art

I just wrote a piece about how the themes in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged are being used by liberals, and particularly by the Obama campaign. It can be found at Keep Americans Free! I invite you to read it, and to read Atlas Shrugged.

If you’re the Federal government, and you’re doing one thing right, kill it!

I can only see one reason for the House Appropriations Committee’s push for NASA to “downselect” the number of companies building private spacecraft: pork barrel politics.

I’ve not looked into the congresscritters who are pushing the restriction of NASA funding to one or two companies yet. I know that two of them are Florida Republicans, Bill Posey and Sandy Adams. I simply cannot fathom any other reason for Republicans in the House to make such an incredibly boneheaded decision!

Unfortunately, making boneheaded, short-sighted decisions is not just in the purview of Democrat congresscritters. Republicans seem to be just as willing and able to do so. House members are supposed to be more responsive to their electorates than Senators, decreed so by virtue of the structure laid out in the Constitution. I expect that Representatives would do what they can to make sure tax dollars going into the Federal government coffers come back to their constituents.

NOTE: OK, kids, go into the other room and watch TV or read a book. Preferably Robert A. Heinlein or L. Neil Smith, if possible. Anyway, the adults and I have to talk and I may get emotional and use colorful language.

But: after decades of harping that the space program would be in better hands if not a governmental agency, just when competitive approaches to access to orbit are beginning to bloom – they want to kill them, and return to the bad old days when NASA was the only game in town.

THIS IS COMPLETE AND UTTER STUPIDITY. IT MAKES NO SENSE ON ANY LEVEL EXCEPT A LEVEL OF SELFISHNESS THAT SHOULD NOT BE DEMONSTRATED BY ANY OF OUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES TO CONGRESS.

Mark my words, brothers and sisters: this has absolutely nothing to do with safety, “protection of government intellectual property” – whatever the Hell that means, and don’t get me started – good stewardship of our tax dollars, or any other high-handed phrases they can trot out.

It comes down to CONTROL. CONTROL OF YOUR TAX MONEY. That, folks, is really all the Federal government is about. Take the taxing power away  - or even restrict it – and the whole thing would wither and die in a fortnight. The fact remains that the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, THROUGH THE CONGRESS, CAN TAX US TO ANY EXTENT IT WISHES, AND WE ARE POWERLESS TO STOP IT. 

Do NOT give me crap about “we can fix it in the next election.” Look what this idiot has done to us in three and a half years. He flagrantly violates the Constitution and Federal law, and no one – even the Republicans in Congress – does anything about it. He browbeats the Supreme Court, threatens the Congress, and places blame for his own misguided ideas on everyone else, and we’re all supposed to be happy because he’s decided he’s for gay marriage. (Let’s not talk about how that announcement came right before a huge Hollywood fundraiser, because of course there is no connection.) And the alternative: I am not convinced Romney will be much better, sorry.

“But Stimps,” you say, “if you really believe in those crazy libertarian-leaning views of yours, why should you care? Shouldn’t those private companies be able to compete anyway with whatever company NASA might select?”

OK. Small words, short sentences. It’s not that complicated as to why that won’t work.

1. Government regulation. You can’t launch a rocket from US soil without jumping through about a million hoops first. Rockets are huge tanks of highly explosive chemicals, sheathed in metal; it’s supposed to be bad to launch one from, say, Indiana. The folks in Ohio where said failed rocket falls would be upset. So some regulation might be necessary, but – SpaceX wasn’t allowed to do their first Falcon launches from anywhere within the US, not even Florida. They had to go out to Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific. When the launch was scrubbed, they had to wait for another tanker of liquid oxygen to come from the US because they had lost too much of their supply to boiloff already. There are no sources of LOX on the Atoll, imagine that. The government put them so far away from the world that most people would have given up. Elon Musk, thank the Good Lord, is NOT most people. Still, the Federal regulations they had to go through to launch from Pad 40 at the Cape are incredible.

“But,” you say, “United Launch Alliance has to go through the same thing before they launch an Atlas or a Delta, right?”

OK…

2. There is no real competition if some companies get major favoritism from the government. United Launch Alliance is, actually, Lockheed-Martin and Boeing, dba as ULA. In 2005 SpaceX challenged them through antitrust laws as a monopoly. In 2006 the Pentagon and the Federal Trade Commission both gave ULA their blessing, of course. Case closed.

There was a big political reason for this, of course. It looked on the surface like privatization of launch services but the same people who had been doing the work for NASA now just got their paychecks from ULA instead of either the Feds or LockMart or Boeing. It is, in essence a shell company. Business as usual. And a bunch of folks working on the Florida Space Coast kept their jobs. Since this was during the wind-down of shuttle operations it was largely considered a Happy Thing. Unfortunately, SpaceX was right. ULA is the de facto only provider of orbital launch services to the US Government except for S.P. Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia, which builds and launches the Soyuz and Progress vehicles to the ISS. We’re not pushing EADS to build a man-rated Ariane 5, are we? (Oh, well, yeah, the Liberty launcher, with ATK, but I don’t know if that counts, seeing as how they are kind of on the outs with NASA right now. This is one of those endeavors I’m sure the Congressional Committee would like to be killed first. Well, maybe second, after SpaceX.)

Besides, there are really only four markets for space launches right now: commercial satellites, government (military) satellites, manned and unmanned missions to support the International Space Station, and soon, hopefully, manned and unmanned support of the Bigelow Aerospace orbital habitats.

More commercial satellite launches worldwide now go to Arianespace than to ULA – we’ve already lost that market, big time. Energia is going launch a Soyuz from the Arianespace launch site in French Guiana soon.  (Kazakstan is getting to be increasingly difficult to work in if you are a Russian, I understand.) The US government should be encouraging US companies to compete with the French and the Russians, not throw roadblocks in their way.

We can – and should – enable a competitive market for the ISS supply missions. That’s what most of the commercial companies are working toward right now, of course. They all believe – or they wouldn’t be in this game – that eventually there will be a much larger market for manned space flights. I don’t think any of them are stupid enough to believe that they can make a profit from only ISS flights, especially if there are several vendors vying for the same business.

“OK, genius,” you add, “what about Manned Exploration of Our Solar System and Beyond?”

Elon Musk is thinking about that. He’s made sure the design of the Dragon will allow it to be used in all kinds of places, like manned landings on Mars. By tying three Falcon 9 cores together to create the Falcon Heavy he will have the most powerful launcher in the world. And sorry, NASA’s SLS is still a pipe dream, folks. I’ll believe it when I see it take off from Pad 39A.

SpaceX Falcon Heavy

But SpaceX seems to be the only one thinking that far ahead. Boeing doesn’t count; the CST-100 has been built from the ground up as an ISS service vehicle. LockMart’s Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (AKA Orion) is designed to go to lunar orbit or to near-earth asteroids, so that’s a big plus for that vehicle. LockMart went ahead with development when the Orion program was officially cancelled by the Obama Administration, I think with a wink and a nod from NASA; since then they have received some NASA funding to continue construction of the test article and related stuff, like a simulator they build originally on their own dime. Lockheed-Martin is the largest defense contractor in the US; it’s not likely that any technology they create for the government is going to be shelved without them getting paid for it.

Blue Origin, Orbital Sciences, and SpaceDev/Sierra Nevada are all looking more at the sub-orbital and low earth orbit flight envelopes. I really don’t get what Blue Origin is trying to do; they are building a suborbital tourist vehicle, and then a totally separate ISS supply vehicle, and probably eventually a home-grown booster for it. But Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame is no dummy, and I figure he has a plan. He’s been very quiet about it, though – not necessarily a bad thing in a government-industrial-complex environment that is a lot like eighth grade in terms of gossip and favoritism. Orbital Sciences seems to be concentrating on the small satellite market. They’ve had some setbacks in launching their own home-grown liquid-fueled booster, which is needed to launch their Cygnus unmanned ISS supply craft. I really like the Dream Chaser lifting-body design SpaceDev is building; they are the only folks trying to orbit a truly reusable spaceplane. Their work is going slowly, thought, it seems.

Every single one of these approaches to manned orbital flight – Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, SpaceX, ATK/Astrium, Blue Origin, and SpaceDev/Sierra Nevada – have elements that sets it apart from the others. While all but SpaceDev are building “Apollo-like” conical vehicles, that decision makes sense. The research on such designs has been validated for decades and gives them all an easier path to building a successful vehicle. There are even several different approaches to emergency escape from a rocket in trouble, from a solid booster under the capsule to a ring of liquid-fueled engines to a traditional, Apollo-style escape tower.

Eventually, one or two of these companies might be the most successful and get the lion’s share of the orbital market. Even better, competition should bring the cost of lofting personnel and equipment to orbit far lower than the Shuttle could ever accomplish. Assisting what appear to be well-thought-out approaches with government grants makes sense only if the government is planning on being a major customer. If there was no ISS, and no NASA plans for further exploration, don’t fund ‘em at all. In this case it is somewhat of an “if you build it, they will come” scenario: the commercial space market will grow – I think it will explode – when there is real low-cost access to space. We should have had this kind of situation thirty years ago, but we got the Shuttle – a massive government employment program with a marginally-performing spaceship in the middle. Government restriction to one or two competitors means a major boost for those companies and a major disadvantage to all others. That’s not how a capitalistic society should work. The fact that it doesn’t work properly in so many other areas because of the meddling of government is no reason to destroy one area where it does seem to be working. It should be seen as a model for the cooperation of the government with private industry, not as a drain on resources.

One other thing: We are talking about a half-billion dollars a year here. Maybe, through the development life of the programs, four or five billion. The average cost of flying the Shuttle for just one mission: $ 450 million!

In these days of multi-trillion-dollar social programs and continual debates about defense spending, throwing a half-billion a year at something that could lead to humanity really getting off this planet someday seems pretty small. And unbelievably petty. So there has to be something else behind it.

Oh, and what’s this nonsense from former Apollo astronauts backing the House Committee? Have they lost their senses? Or were they so tied up in the government/military-industrial complex themselves in the Apollo days to not see what’s going on now? Note that Buzz Aldrin is not among this group. Buzz is out there sometimes, but he for sure gets it.

Romney as candidate and President

I wrote a piece on the Keep Americans Free blog about Romney as a Presidential candidate and as President, and why I think he will be successful at both. I invite you to read it.

Why we are not, technically, a democracy

Over on Keep Americans Free I posted an essay on the differences between a democracy and the republican form of government. I invite you to read it.

What’s the REAL unemployment rate? It’s scary.

I heard Rush Limbaugh – yes, that eeeeevil Rush Limbaugh – mention a piece by James Pethokoukis in The American that lays out what the real unemployment rate is – not 8.3, but closer to 9.5-10.4, depending on who is counted in it. Rather than going through all of that right here, just go read it. You may also want to read some of the comments. Usually, comments on a piece like this might be funny, but are usually wrongheaded and often just stupid. There are actually some very insightful comments following this post, and some even present their data or sources.

What can be done about gasoline prices? Turns out, a lot.

This article by John Merline in Investor Business Daily outlines a number of ways the price of gasoline, or at least the rapid climb in the price we’ve seen recently, could be reduced.

Some of the price increase is caused by the loss of several refineries. But most of the increases in price are due to Federal government taxes, regulations, and fines. Read the article for the full list.

My favorite: recently, according to the article, “Congress left in place a 2007 law requiring increasing amounts of ethanol (including so-called advanced biofuels) in gasoline, rising to 36 billion gallons by 2022.”

The article continues: “In any case, the law has cost refiners almost $7 million in fines this year after they failed to add 6.6 million gallons of “advanced biofuels” as required. The problem is these advanced biofuels don’t exist commercially, and nobody’s sure when they will, which means even bigger industry fines going forward as the mandated use increases.” (Italics are mine.)

I don’t use this term usually, but WTF? The Federal government is collecting fines from refiners because the advanced biofuels it has mandated don’t even exist? Am I crazy, or is this completely insane?

I’m very afraid that we as a nation are sitting at home, watching basketball on our big flat-screen TVs, while the folks in Congress run completely amuck. What has caused us to feel so disenfranchised that we do not hold these people accountable for their actions?

I suppose that is for another post, isn’t it? I’d be interested in any answers you folks out there have for my question. Come on, you have the time…at over four bucks a gallon for gas, you sure as hell ain’t goin’ anywhere!

Great caller quote from Rush’s Show

A caller to Rush Limbaugh’s show last week – Harry from Grants, New Mexico – unloaded about the ineffectiveness of the Republican leadership in the House specifically, and in the Congress in general. The cap to his very well-thought-out interchange with Rush was this:

“Great football analogy for you. We, the conservative team, had a wonderful draft this November.  We drafted some coming superstars, we drafted a few guys that are ready to play at the pro level like Marco Rubio, but the team owners — and that’s me and you and the rest of the conservatives — paid no attention whatsoever to the coaching staff.  So we got a coaching staff that has never won a game in their life.”

I didn’t hear him. I couldn’t listen on Friday, and that’s when I assume he was on. I’ll check the podcast today. This guy was very articulate and he called it. He got it exactly right. Rush responded that some people did pay attention, and talked about it, but Harry’s still right – we left the people in place who were business-as-usual Republican leaders.

In Illinois we were able to elect a Republican Senator, finally, and got Mark Kirk. Kirk’s heart is in the right place, but he’s a moderate, not a conservative. When I heard him at a town hall last spring he was in the mind set of tweaking legislation here and there to make “improvements.” The folks in the town meeting were not looking for that. They were demanding substantive change. Real change at the fundamental level in the Federal government. Career politicians don’t get that. The Tea Party candidates who were elected last November, like Joe Walsh from the northern suburbs here, certainly do get it.

Literally, the chance of a lifetime is coming up in November 2012. We all need to think hard about the choices we have to make for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.

This is how it starts…

I put a piece up on Keep Americans Free! about North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue’s recent comment about how perhaps we should postpone elections until the current economic crisis has passed. I think she’s just dumb enough to say what a lot of far leftists are thinking as the last-ditch plan. That puts us on the really greasy part of the slippery slope to totalitarianism. But she was just joking, right?

More about taxes…exciting, huh?

Yesterday I had an exchange of comments with a reader (!) who brought up the fact that we tend to talk about income taxes all the time, but never about payroll taxes as a possible point of reduction. Or at least, the Republicans do.

Maybe so. That’s because there are, for most folks, three components of taxes withheld as payroll taxes. First, some of your federal income tax is withheld, according to what you told your employer to withhold. That keeps you from having to come up with all of it on April 14. The rest is social security and Medicare.

You probably have heard at some point that politicians considered talking about social security as the “third rail” – the electrified one, like on some commuter train systems. You just didn’t mess with social security! Over the last ten years or so, it’s been brought up more and more as the Baby Boomers have aged and that huge group of people moves into retirement. They will strain the limits of the social security and medicare systems like they have never been strained before. A short discussion may be found here.

For most of you this is not news. I only say it because I thought the poster had a good point – the lion’s share of the tax discussion seems to be about income taxes, and about personal income taxes at that. That puzzled me a bit, so I did a bit more research. It didn’t take much.

This data is from 2008, but 45% of government revenue comes from individual income taxes…that’s a significant fraction. The same source (the Tax Policy Center) quoted that over the last 5 decades, the Federal government has collected from 14.4 to 20.9 percent of GDP, with an average of 18.2 percent. Individual income taxes averaged just over 8 per cent of GDP.

What the poster was correct about, and I just found in my research, is that somehow, as a percentage of GDP, our tax revenue for 2009 and 2010 was supposed to be under 15 percent. This may be an effect of the so-called “Bush tax cuts;” I’m not sure.

What none of this talks about, of course, is the additional state and local tax burdens, which vary widely. Add roughly another 10 percent of GDP for state and local taxes( various sources I read said quoted numbers like this), so people are paying, in one way or another, somewhere around 28-30 percent of GDP as taxes.

Are we overtaxed? That depends on your point of view, your income, your location, and the benefits you feel you receive from your government. I love Millennium Park in Chicago. It’s beautiful, it has a great concert pavilion with a state-of-the-art sound system, and it’s very well-maintained. It has a free concert series in the summer that is second to none. I don’t pay for it, because I don’t live in Chicago. Do all Chicagoans feel it’s a good use of their tax money? Probably some do, and some do not. Same with forest preserves in DuPage County, where I live, which are tax-supported. Schools are always a flashpoint for taxes because (a) everybody went to one and is therefore an “expert,” and (b) you can see, to a point, where your money is going. (I realize I simplify here.)

One of the problems with Federal taxation is the people who pay the most probably derive fewer direct benefits from those taxes. Sure, we all benefit from a strong military. Our Social Security payments are based, to a degree, on what we paid in. (We’ll see how long that lasts.) But watching our tax dollars – at least the 50 percent of us who pay federal income taxes – go to things we consider wasteful or politically motivated makes people frustrated and angry.

That was always the problem with Welfare. Not that people didn’t need help; but that not everyone on it needed that much help. Whatever they are calling the food stamp program today, which is huge, is another. Michelle Obama wants to lecture us about what we should feed our kids but people using Federal assistance to buy food can make unhealthy choices. Some really unhealthy choices.

It adds up. And I think the tipping point is small businesses that are taxed as part of personal income in that $ 200,000 to $ 1,000,000 zone, maybe higher. Those folks aren’t rich; they are running a business without the breaks Jeffrey Immelt can get for General Electric. They are supposed to be the backbone of American business but it seems they are never treated as such, with more regulations and more taxation. My father got out of his private engineering practice for just that reason, and went over to the “dark side” of the County Building Inspection Department. Any small businessman with three or four employees will tell you how difficult that is to maintain. I think that will be the focus of my next little piece, whenever that may be.

Did I call it? Great minds…

Yesterday I did my bit about how Team Obama has been trying to vilify the Tea Party, and that’s kind of like vilifying smoke. The Tea Party is like the Holy Roman Empire, and is neither Tea nor a Party. (As the HRE was neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire – I read that someplace once.)

Today Rush Limbaugh spent a lot of time with a similar argument, giving his kind of definition of what the Tea Party is. His was wider than mine, but you know, we both could be right, because as we both pointed out, there is no official Tea Party set of beliefs.  It’s more people who have a common sense of rightness about how the country should be run, but they may completely disagree on the details.

Being a grass roots movement it’s hard to destroy, but it’s also hard to pin down. I just think a lot of people want the government out of their lives, and to be left alone to raise their families and run their businesses.

There’s that group of people – almost half the adult population, apparently – who receive some kind of federal assistance. That includes things like student loans; they’re not all welfare moms or something. They might be of two minds here, wanted their taxes lowered but knowing that they also were in debt to the government, and without some of those taxes they couldn’t get those loans either.

So when a person like that gets into the voting booth, alone, which way do they lean? “I’m being overwhelmed by my taxes and my wife lost her job because her boss at the small business where she worked had to close,” or “I’ll vote for this guy, because I really needed those loans to get through college, and it’s only going to be far more expensive when my kids go.” I don’t write them off, but they aren’t a slam-dunk, either.

One of the things that the folks who press for lower taxes have not done particularly well is demonstrate the “trickle-down” effects of lower taxes. When you talk about lower taxes, people think personal income taxes first. Some might think about capital gains taxes, or maybe about inheritance taxes, or something else specific that might affect them. Rarely do they think about the big picture. People forget that taxes get added to taxes  – businesses have to pay property taxes, income taxes, all sorts of things that get rolled into the cost of goods and services. They have to pay higher salaries for some jobs because of the market, and those salaries are where they are because the individuals need to be able to pay their taxes, too. Everybody talks about moving business overseas because of the cost of workers’ salaries, but the cost of property, utilities, construction, and taxes all could be lower than in the US. If you lower the tax rates we can become more competitive. Perhaps salaries don’t go up – but they don’t need to, because goods and services become more affordable. It’s more likely US businesses buy from US businesses because they can price competitively. Less money flows out of the country.

I’m no economist. I know this wouldn’t happen overnight, although the changes Ronald Reagan made in the 1980s had some pretty quick positive effects, and those effects continued for two decades. It’s also been proven, time and again, that when taxes are lowered, the revenue brought in by the government actually goes up – because the economy gets going, and grows, and even at the lower rates the added GNP adds to the tax revenue. It worked for Reagan, it worked for Bush 43, and it even worked for JFK.

I think a lot of people who can’t articulate their beliefs still know, deep down, that increased taxes are a bad idea. They’ve either been around long enough to see this happen in their lifetimes, or the New Media has made the information available to everyone and more people have heard it.

There will always be people who want to be taxed more. I understand there are people who like to have other painful things done to them, too, but that doesn’t make unfair taxation reasonable for everyone. (I’m not even getting into the whole thing about how the Congress seems to be working against the will of the people a lot lately.) What baffles the media folks, and probably the political pundits as well, is that there’s practically no way to know if the Tea Party membership is 100,000 or 100 million. It’s this uncertainty that makes both parties a little crazy, and why probably even the Republican party in any of its forms doesn’t really want to embrace it. However, if the frontrunner Presidential candidates start saying nice things about the Tea Party, it’s going to be a very interesting election cycle.