The Buckets by Greg Cravens for January 27, 2015

Yes, money goes round and round – but perhaps time and resources could be better deployed.

This time, I think all the families of those physicists and engineers, and fabricators and folks who toiled away at their degrees are pleased that the money went where it did.

Whenever someone complains about the (relatively tiny!) amount of money going to NASA, I am going to stuff a printout of this up their right nostril.

Agreed Frank.

If it wasn’t for the research done for NASA I bet we would not have Kevlar for vests, pens that write upside down, or even Tang.

Hey, Grandpa’s a Tea Partier!

That’s because it is stupid, Gramps! And no, not all Tea Partiers think the way Gramps does, mwbarr. Most of them feel as I do, that we reap immeasurable benefits, personally, socially, even politically, from spending on the space program. After all, we probably wouldn’t even be having this pleasant discussion without benefits from space programs of days past. Consider that your cell phone has more computing power than the computer than landed men on the moon, since, back in the day, they said a four-banger calculator had more computing power than the LM computer.

Hey! We made ComicstripoftheDay (dotCom) today! Lots of quality deconstruction of comic strips on that blog. Check ’em out.

Ask a silly question and get a silly answer.xxx

Here is a little-remarked and underappreciated bit of economic truth: Government is the biggest job creator of all. That is not a leftist statement at all. It is a basic fact of economics. Think about it. What one entity is literally everywhere in any country? Every nickel government spends creates jobs, and not only for government employees. If government buys anything (weapons, equipment and machinery, planes, plows, ships, furniture, computers, paper, pens) someone has to produce and deliver it. If government wants to build anything (roads, airports, bridges and tunnels, police and fire stations, courts, jails, military bases), someone has to design it, build it, and someone has to produce those building materials. Any service that you want (and likely expect) government to provide must obviously be provided by some person either as a direct government employee or as an employee of a private contractor. Even regulation creates jobs. Pollution controls have to be researched, developed, designed, built, installed, and operated. Safety systems for travel, telecommunications, computers, energy, industrial processes, mining, and networks of all kinds likewise. All those people then spend that money in turn on goods and services. Then the people to whom they paid it, spend it, and so on. Economists call this the “multiplier effect.” It is most effective at the federal level.

Liverlips has somehow failed to learn that government is the biggest wealth destroyer of all. Most of the comments here (esp. his/hers) commit the famous economic “Fallacy of the Broken Window”. (You can look it up. It’s the first chapter in Henry Hazlitt’s classic “Economics in One Lesson”.)

Applied to space, it means that you are looking at the visible consequences of having government spend money on X while ignoring all the things Y that could have been done if the owners of that money had been free to spend it as they saw fit. (That touches on the more fundamental moral argument about which much more should be said, but it’s too late in the day now.)

One problem is that the government just fires up the printing presses when it wants to spend. Sooner or later the real world will hit us.

There is the trickle down effect. Smartphones and computers dinna just sprout full grown. Or at least “Tang”. ;)

Suggested reading for both Bob and pschearer: Paul Samuelson’s Economics. It’s better than Mr. Hazlitt. At the time I got my BA in economics, it was the most widely-used textbook in US colleges and universities. Not just the most widely used economics textbook, but the most widely used textbook in any subject. Mr. Samuelson was a Nobel Prize-winner at MIT. At that time (mid-70’s) the book was in its 9th edition. Mr. Hazlitt was a journalist who wrote on economics for the WSJ, the NY Times, and others. He is widely read and venerated by laissez-faire, pure free market devotees. My degree, I believe, qualifies and entitles me to give voice to the truths above. This is not some wild-eyed, leftist theory. It is classical, capitalist economics.Bob: the federal government has multiple ways of increasing the money supply. Printing money is only one of them. Time and space constraints preclude a primer here, but if it were as simple as “firing up the printing presses” we would have rampant, catastrophic inflation a la Venezuela or Zimbabwe, where the local currency becomes essentially worthless and no one wants it. That is clearly not happening in the USA. The “multiplier effect” to which I referred ONLY applies to government spending, not to the spending of individuals, because of the ability of government to increase the money supply. Money originates with government and flows to individuals in the manner I described. They, of course, are free to do with it whatever they choose; spend it, invest it, or save it. Bear in mind, most exchanges of money, including those involving government, are not directly between individuals unless they occur in what we commonly call the “black market.” They involve some sort of larger economic entity; a business or organization of some sort. Since most people work for one of these entities, they ultimately are paid in money by that entity, and thus derive the ability to buy, invest, or save as they choose. The matter of spending money on X rather than Y is called by economists “opportunity cost.” It would also apply if the money were spent on Y rather than X. ALL spending decisions, by any participant in an economy, reflect choices made by the purchaser and opportunity costs of the choices not taken. That is the nature of economic activity. Governments make these choices every day, just as we all do. Their choices are made by our elected representatives in Congress, legislatures, and city and town boards. Our choices are intended to benefit us. Governments choice are intended, at least theoretically, to benefit society.Regardless of all the minutiae, the essential truth remains: Government is the largest job creator of all. That is not an ideological or, to an economist, controversial statement. It is simply a fact.

Thank the space program for: Computers, innovations in cars, mechanical assistance for the handicapped, cell phones, immeasurable advances in battery technology and even advances in medicine. Conservatives who think otherwise should not use such devices and services and we’d never have to hear from them on the internet EVER again!!! Many would not even be alive…