Plays Well With Others

Balancing the Budget …

This entire saga with the Space Shuttle Columbia exploding on re-entry to earth’s atmosphere is extremely sad. It brings me straight back to that morning in eighth grade when I was sitting in Mr. Tong’s science class watching the Space Shuttle Challenger lift off into space with the first non-astronaut and teacher to go into space. And then watch it explode into a million pieces before it even left our sight. Damaging to the NASA space program — yes.

Within mere seconds, a multi million dollar space vehicle had disintegrated right before our eyes, along with the lives of those onboard. For the next few years, there would be very few space flights, if any. The budget was scaled back and no one really wanted to see or hear from that agency for awhile.

Fast forward about fifteen years and here we are again. Except this time, those people within the Space Shuttle were coming home after taking care of business in “outer space”. They were within an hour of getting home, but never made it. The explosion scattered wreckage and body parts through three states. Another multi-million dollar spacecraft gone.

This time around, though, there are people fighting for NASA, proposing that “budget cutbacks” are to blame. Erm. And it makes me sick. This is an agency that gets millions upon millions to conduct experiments in space, while schools are still overcrowded and people are still out on the street. I’m not saying that what NASA does isn’t important at all. What I am saying is that they should be able to do the job with the money they get and not have the attitude that “if we had more money, those people would still be alive”.

Basically using the deaths of these astronauts for their own greedy cause. Every government, corporation and citizen is dealing with budget cutbacks right now. It’s a fact of life in an economy such as this. It means that people might not get raises, or companies might not spend on new equipment or governments might have to cutback spending on social programs. And then there’s NASA using a horrible accident to get more money. In fact, Bush has met with the NASA chief today to discuss increasing their budget from $3.2 billion to $3.9 billion. Ugh. This brings Bush’s budget package up to $2.2 trillion dollars — sending the deficit to $304 billion, essentially erasing the last ten years of work Clinton did to erase the deficit and creating the largest deficit in U.S. history.

So where is Bush spending all of our tax dollars? Well, major increases in U.S. Defense spending is on the books. This should fund this war of his that no one I know even wants. Thats about $15 billion for the military and $4 billion for “homeland security”. And now NASA is getting about $4 billion. And then we’ve got about $2 billion to combat AIDS in Africa and the Carribean. Erm. Why the hell are we giving money to other countries when our budget is $304 billion in the red? Not that AIDS shouldn’t be wiped out, but we CAN’T afford it. The rest of the money goes to “domestic programs”, along with $1.2 billion to RESEARCH hydrogen-powered cars. That’s sort of like paying millions for studies that basically tell you what you already now. Like, “researchers found that those with colds tend to cought or sneeze more than those who are perfectly healthy”. Shit. I’m going to start up a research company.

Programs that got funding cuts include a plan for funding “first responders” like police, firefighters and emergency medical units. Also, trimmed were the budgets for bioterrorism and borders. I guess 9/11 isn’t so important anymore now that NASA needs some money.

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