My plan was to never use this blog to do anything political, but this is one that I simply cannot leave go, and I really need to vent the frustrations out with this statement... Oui!We're in a recession with people losing their jobs and homes and our country just spent 79 million on a rocket to shoot a hole in the moon?!
Our country spent 79 million dollars creating jobs. Keep in mind what it costs to do that, and the amount of resources needed, the facilities, etc. To explain how the 79 million dollar project created many jobs:
You need to purchase things like equipment, raw materials, facilities, etc to reach the goal. You also need to pay salaries to the administration that is running it, the "Shop Floor" workers, the maintenance guys, the trainers, etc.
Out of that "paid" money, you are now enabling many companies to now keep their staffs employed and paid. All of those staffs, and the NASA staff are now enabled to go and umm... how do I say this, pay for necessary human services... (Hair Cuts, Dr's appts, Dentist appts, etc.)... they are then also enabled to go to concerts, restaurants, ball-games, dances, ferry rides, amusement parks... All of the lower-rung "SERVICE" based business.
Now, when you understand that underlying the entire economy are service-based businesses (since a good part of the traditional manufacturing is overseas), you'd understand why the 79 million dollars, pending 78.9 million of it wasn't lining the politicians pockets, was a decent investment.
To put another spin on this... Most of the current recession has been more of a correction in the market for bad decisions over the past years... From what I've learned in the past, no point in time up until recently (past 10-20 years) has there ever been so many foolish mistakes in the US economy... think about how easy it was (no more than 2 years ago) for an 18 year old to get a credit card. I can recall getting 3-10 offers a month. Every month as well, I got "checks" with my credit card statement that allowed me to "Access my credit line"
No-one ever told the 18-year old that he'd be paying 22-30% interest, and if he only paid the monthly minimum of $10, he'll never get it paid off, but keep racking it up even if he NEVER charged another item on the card again?!?!?! This has been discussed on many news programs enough that anyone that has a pulse can reference a report on it by now?!
The funny thing with this is that most of the time, again and again, everyone wants to blame the public school system and/or the government... that someone didn't police the credit agencies. That the credit agencies were allowed to offer sub-prime loans for housing, etc.
In reality, it's up to the individual to READ THE FUCKING FINE PRINT on the application! I feel like it's quite ridiculous that at 26/27, I know so many people of my own age that are in debt (outside of student loans) to the point that they can't dig themselves out to save their lives.
To go a bit more globally on that subject, us Americans should take a queue from the Irish... they don't purchase anything until after they can pay cold, hard cash for it... it's just not part of their culture, and us Americans need to learn how to adopt that part of their culture. We have so much to learn.
Credit is such a sham, and it causes drops in the economy that everyone wants to blame the damn government for, instead of themselves.
one other spin... watch the movie "The Aviator" when he goes to court and is asked about the failed projects. Very insightful view, and also quite applicable to this subject!
