Lil Abner's dream job is now reality.

[Richard Krauss]

Read it and sleep:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/crossingborders/2013/09/18/nasa-will-pa...

[I. J. Parker]

Not surprising.  There's too much pork everywhere when it comes to funding.  Let's face it, it's other people's money.

What we really need is journalists making spending idiocies their first priority. In a country as deeply in debt as this one is, we need to establish oversight not by the government, but by the public.  

[Dana King]

Did you read the whole article? This is actually a pretty inexpensive way to test something that may well be critical in an extended flight situation.

[I. J. Parker]

No, didn't read it. Not at all interested in funding NASA when we don't have money to send our kids to universities and the country teeters at default on moneys they shouldn't keep borrowing in order to fund everybody's pet project.

[Stephen Seitz]

It's a legitimate study: to determine how muscles atrophy and the effect on bone density. Sending someone to Mars would take months. 

I've had it up to my eyeballs with people griping about government spending. We just got through a patch where the government hardly spent a dime and look at the results. Bill Clinton proved we could have a fully funded government and a solid economy. When something is done about corporate welfare and contractor fraud, then maybe we can look at other things.

[Dana King]

I agree. We live in a country where people will spend five and six figures for a baseball card, and want to build floating islands offshore. The money is there. The balance of who has to pay it has shifted over the past 30 years. it's past due for a correction. I'm not advocating a return to the >90% highest marginal rate. (Though the American economy was the envy of the world in those days, so it probably didn't stifle business all that much.) The issue is primarily how loopholes that were intended to grant relief at the highest levels have remained, which the rate has dropped.

[I. J. Parker]

Apparently there are billions of dollars worth of pork in the debt ceiling agreement. Gotta pay the Republicans for keeping the government running.

[Jed Power]

I think all three opinions are correct.  There is no solution though because our empire is crumbling.

The only unknowns are where we are located on the decline and at what speed the deterioration is occurring.

We are all citizens of the empire; none of us can be objective. 

[Andrew Drummond]

Economically, the UK has been in decline for far longer than the US.  But even in one of our most debt laden moments, we were able to introduce and support free health care.  When the National Health Service was introduced, between 1946 and 1948, it was vehemently opposed by the right and they have chipped away at the NHS ever since.  The point I am trying to make, is that whatever the size of the cake, it is how you slice and divide it that matters.