Will today's candidates support the moon program from the 60s?

[question everything]

I watched the last segment of the PBS program. The Rev. Abernathy and followers were present in Cape Kennedy when Apollo 11 was launched. And he was, of course, very articulate in praising the NASA engineers and the brave astronauts and wished them well, but... he asked them to remember their brothers and sisters back on earth who still lived in poverty, who still suffered injustice.

There were several signs questioning the priorities of the government the cost of the space program compared to other needs.

So... where would today's candidate stand?

(Of course, Nixon could not wait to dismantle the program).

It is not exercise, really. Many candidates offer freebies to all segments of the population and I wonder whether all these wishful thinking may stand in the way of a new grand scale program like, yes, the space program.

[jberryhill]

1. Freebies?

That’s an interesting word.

Can you be specific about these “freebies”?

[question everything]

2. Medicare for all, free healthcare for all

college tuition for all, $1000 a month for every man woman and child.

With no way of paying for these programs. There are only that many Bezos and others who can be squeezed to pay for them.

And, of course, reversing JFK famous comment: ask not what you country... etc.

[shanny]

4. How do we ever manage to pay

More than a trillion $$$ a year for our excellent military adventures?

That's the question we should be asking.

[Recursion]

8. Defense spending is down to less than $600 billion

Zeroing that out for the entire year pays for about 3 months of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

[shanny]

13. this is disingenuous

First of all, leave Social Security out of it as it is separately funded and not a budget item. Medicare and Medicaid each ran to about 580-600B this year--call it 1.2 trillion.

"Defense spending is down to less than $600 billion"...shall we examine that premise?

Base budget is 576 billion--true as far as it goes
that leaves out 174 billion in "Overseas Contingency Ops" like say, Afghanistan, ISIS and wherever else we are "defending" ourselves

so that brings it up to 750 billion

now add in the budget for the Veterans Administration (200 billion), "defense" spending at
the Dept of Homeland Security,
the Dept. of Energy,
the Justice Dept,
the State Department,
the CIA (independent agency and not part of the DoD),
and so on.
I'm sure there's a bunch of agencies I don't haven't thought or never heard of.

[Recursion]

14. OCO for FY'19 is $68 billion

For FY'18 it was 78. The days of OCO in the hundreds of billions are long, long gone.

[shanny]

15. https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-military-budget-components-challenges-growth-3306320

[Turin_C3PO]

5. So wanting citizens to

not go into bankruptcy from medical bills is wanting “freebies”? Fuck that, if we can fund our bloated military and wars, we can fund healthcare. Whether it’s through a public buy-in or Medicare for All, I don’t care. By the way, you should know calling the programs you mentioned “freebies” is a common right wing smear against liberal policy ideas.

[wasupaloopa]

9. I wait for the bill for these and wonder who will pick up the tab.

Military spending and other countries do it memes are cop outs.

Anyone of us can get on a stage and call for anyone of these programs. It doesn’t take running for President to think them up. The hard part is in explaining the how of implementation.

[Turin_C3PO]

10. The fact is, taxes are going to have to be increased across the board.

I’m talking significantly higher progressive taxes for most incomes (no tax under a certain income, as it is now), elimination of all tax loopholes, increased capital gains tax, and a wealth tax.

I don’t mind all of that but that’s what it’ll take for all the programs we want to be implemented.

[Voltaire2]

11. None of that is free.

[CentralMass]

3. I'm watching him speak in that episode right now on the west coast.

My two two cents. We no longer have the collective will to do great things including ending poverty.

[wasupaloopa]

6. The space program was very needed research. It was not in a zero some game with

other government programs.

[Sherman A1]

12. Precisely

I completely agree

[Recursion]

7. Manned space flight was and is a jingoistic waste of money

It was a dick-measuring contests with the Soviets and it was completely pointless. It held back actual space exploration by decades to insist that a human be on board. We should have poured all that money into remote exploration; we'd probably have weather blimps on Jupiter now if we had done that.

[question everything]

17. Americans were always anti science. Still are

The "dick measuring contest" encouraged many of my generation to study science and technology. There were many grants available. All the technology that we take for granted, medical devices, telemetry, "smart phones" developed as a result of the space study.

And more

https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-earth/space-tech.html

[Recursion]

18. And *even more* tech would have been developed by doing unmanned exploration

Take the astronauts out of the situation and it's a much better use of money and talent.

[MineralMan]

16. JFK's Space Initiative was brilliant in its time.

The idea of sending people to the moon, at a time when we were in a technology race with the USSR, caught the imagination of Americans. At the time, technology was just on the verge of exploding into an economic and scientific revolution.

I volunteered on JFK's campaign as a 15-year-old high school sophomore. It was very exciting, and everyone was looking forward to technology becoming the driving force of both our economy and our national spirit. I went off to college in 1963, and signed up for computer programming classes as an Electronics Engineering major. I wheedled a dozen of the new integrated circuit logic chips from Texas instruments as a freshman and created a simple tic-tac-toe game using them in my Freshman project class. TI's chief engineer in that department gave a talk at Cal Poly SLO, which I attended, and I talked to him after the speech about the promise of these new chips in the development of faster, cheaper computers. So, he sent me some chips to play with.

Everything was exciting about JFK's presidency. Sadly, that same year, he was assassinated, dashing the hopes of many, but the technological explosion was unstoppable. So, we made it to the moon, as the peak accomplishment of what he started.

Would our current candidates have taken that step? Who can say? Right now, climate change is the challenge, and it's a more difficult challenge than all of the technology that was struggling to be born back in the 1960s. That should be the focus, but it's not like those exciting, transformational challenges of the early 1960s. It's not romantic or dreamy. Instead, it's a challenge to save the planet.

It's not a sexy challenge like going to space was.