GOP Fiscal Policy
1) Start an enormously expensive internationally unpopular war financed through massive borrowing from foreigners.
2) ???
3) Profit!
I can only assume that the entire White House has had its money in Swiss Francs the past four years. I damn well should have.
posted by Anonymous at 6:38 PM
7 Comments:
HAHAHA... SUPER AWESOME!
Damn, I love that. Another point for you guys!
Gotta check my notes, number 2 is "something something ownership society something."
That's something we don't hear about from the govs.
Another thing is this missile defense plan. Do you guys know anything about that? I heard it has cost like over 100 billion dollars...
Check out what Slate http://slate.msn.com/?id=2073642
and PBS http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/missile/technology/budget.html
have to say on the subject. I gather it's tricky allocating costs and, of course, it ain't finished yet, but the Center for Defense Information says it has already cost $100 billion, the Congressional Budget Office puts the total cost at just under $200 billion. The Congressional Research Institute tries to take a more nuanced view and says we've already spent $80.
But look on the bright side: in the December 2004 test of the system, we successfully launched a fake missile from Alaska and the interceptor successfully stayed on the ground in the Marshall Islands after it successfully received information that the rocket's thrust vector control was not within the parameters set by the booster's manufacture. But, the Missile Defense Agency pointed out that it probably would have worked if it actually had taken off. http://www.acq.osd.mil/mda/mdalink/html/mdalink.html
As the guy from MIT said on NRR when asked if this system could ever work -
"Not unless the Pentagon has some secret laws of physics we don't know about."
My question is why don't we simply launch counter-nukes at any incoming missles? Obviously a small nuclear blast somewhere over the pacific is better than a big nuclear blast somewhere on the west coast (i.e. My back yard)?
Why have a system that tries to directly shoot an incoming missle? As they say, "close only counts in horseshoes, hand-genades and nuclear weapons."
Curious, I went out and researched my own question (i.e. Why not Nukes to shoot down nukes)
Turns out we had a system to do just that back in the 50s. Turns out it doesn't work very well.
Either:
You set off the nuke in the atmosphere. In this case the cure may be as bad as the disease where population centers are concerned. And even then it doesn't destroy this missle, just knocks it off course.
Or:
You set the nuke off in space, but it's not terribly effective. Apparently without an atmosphere to transmit a shockwave, heated gas, etc. things can survive being as close as 100 feet away from a small nuclear explosion.
Well, I'm off to research 'nuclear explosion powered x-ray lasers'...
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