Budget
lborkowski | August 13, 2012Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s selection of Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) as his running mate this past weekend has provided plenty of fodder for discussions about the role of the US government. Unlike Romney, who has often declined to provide specifics about policies he’d pursue as president, Ryan has been very clear about what he thinks the government should do. As chair of the House Budget Committee, Ryan authored the “Path to Prosperity” budget proposal that the House passed earlier this year.
The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza describe Ryan's evolution as a…
lborkowski | May 21, 2012by Kim Krisberg
"We will pay for this by taking money from one of the slush funds in the president's health care law."
That's an April quote from U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, on how Republicans plan to offset the cost of stopping scheduled hikes in student loan interest rates. And the "slush fund" in question? The Prevention and Public Health Fund, the historic $15 billion investment in prevention authorized via the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
The April move by House Republicans wasn't the first attempt to raid the fund. Several tries have been made to repeal the fund entirely or…
lborkowski | June 2, 2011In Germany, 17 people have died and more than 1,500 sickened by a particularly virulent strain of E. coli. Der Spiegel explains that this rare E. coli serotype, O104:H4, is especially virulent; after infection by as few as 100 bacteria, many patients develop hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can result in kidney failure and even death. Cucumbers imported from Spain were initially blamed, although it turns out that the cucumbers' strain of E. coli is not the one implicated in the outbreak. Investigators are racing to identify the source of the infections while hospitals care for those who've…
lborkowski | February 24, 2011We're hearing a lot of rhetoric about the need to slash government spending, so it's a good time to remind everyone that there's no such thing as a free lunch - and if you think you're getting a free lunch, it might be loaded with pathogens.
Maryn McKenna, writing at Superbug about a New England Journal of Medicine study, has an illustrative example: the Great Tomato Scare of 2008. Between May and August of 2008, 1,499 people (and probably many more) fell ill from the Saintpaul strain of Salmonella, and two people died. The Food and Drug Administration initially thought tomatoes were to…
jstemwedel | July 6, 2010I saw a story in the San Jose Mercury News that I thought raised an interesting question about sick leave, one worth discussing here.
As it turns out, all the details of the specific case reported in the article sort of obscure the general question that it initially raised for me. But since I'm still interested in discussing the more general problem, here's a poll to tweak your intuitions.
In cash-strapped community college system, an administrator collecting paid sick leave is ...online survey
The question that the headline and first two paragraphs of the article raised for me was about…
sb admin | June 30, 2010Karen Starko writes: When the "financial crisis" started and the news media started throwing around numbers in the trillions and projected fixes in the billions, I realized I just didn't get it. So I got a little yellow post-it, labeled it "understanding trillions," and started a list of examples. And when I learned that the US GDP in 2006 was 13T and the derivative market, estimated in June 2007, was valued at 500T, I quickly got a sense of the potential drain of the derivative market (in which money is spent on items without real value...my definition, please correct me if I am wrong). I…
kstarko | June 30, 2010Karen Starko writes: When the "financial crisis" started and the news media started throwing around numbers in the trillions and projected fixes in the billions, I realized I just didn't get it. So I got a little yellow post-it, labeled it "understanding trillions," and started a list of examples. And when I learned that the US GDP in 2006 was 13T and the derivative market, estimated in June 2007, was valued at 500T, I quickly got a sense of the potential drain of the derivative market (in which money is spent on items without real value...my definition, please correct me if I am wrong). I…
sb admin | June 29, 2010Liz Borkowski writes: Mark Pendergrast wrote yesterday about how politics plays into the work of the EIS, and it's something that I kept noticing as I read Inside the Outbreaks. As he points out, my post last week highlighted the solution to the Reye's Syndrome puzzle - which was solved by Karen Starko, who's also one of the Book Club bloggers! - but didn't get into the larger issue: there can be a big difference between solving the puzzle and solving the problem. In yesterday's post, Mark writes:
Although Karen's and subsequent CDC studies clearly demonstrated that giving children aspirin…
jstemwedel | June 25, 2010The funding situation in the California State University system being what it is (scary-bad), departments at my fair university are also scrambling to adjust to a shift in the logic governing resource distribution. It used to be that resources followed enrollments -- that the more students you could pack into your classes, the more money your department would be given to educate students.
Now, in the era of enrollment caps (because the state can't put up its share of the cost for as many students as it used to), it's looking like resources will be driven by how many majors a department can…
stoat | June 22, 2010Some fairly random thoughts on the budget.
* VAT up to 20%: excellent. Calculating 17.5% was always so tedious. Score: +1.
* Child benefit and public sector pay will be frozen - for no clear reason we (as in, our family) get child benefit, which seems silly. The Economist wanted to means test it, but that would be dull and employ yet more bean counters. Still, it might at least ensure that only those who need it bother to apply. Score: -1. Public sector pay: well, tough. I got no pay rise in 2008 and I didn't see anyone sympathising. Score: +1.
* Personal income tax allowance: To be increased…
sastyk | May 13, 2010I was out of town when Zuska posted this piece about trying to feed a family on a food stamp budget, and I've been meaning to respond to her suggestion that I might have something to add for a while. The article she builds on is one in which chefs try and come up with food stamp budget menus that are also healthy and appealing. Zuska comments on the difficulty of this, and challenges me to come up with something too:
A few problems with any of these solutions: as noted in the article, cooking from fresh ingredients takes more time than buying processed food, so although you get more, and…
jstemwedel | April 20, 2010I think I've mentioned once or twice that the California State University system (of which my fair campus is a part) has been experiencing a bit of a budget crisis.
Well, while there may be glimmers of hope for a recovery in the rest of the economy, we seem to be on the cusp of things getting much, much worse.
In the coming academic year, we won't be using furloughs to try to save money. Instead, beyond employing laying of lots of lecturers (who, because they are classified as "temporary" employees, despite the fact that many of them have taught here for decades, aren't counted as being laid…
razib | February 14, 2010A few weeks ago I remarked on the relatively high current defense spending for the United States. In hindsight I think this was somewhat unfair, the proportion of the budget that the United States spends on defense is rather small in a world-historical context. I was reminded of this by a datum in The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China (highly recommended by the way), even this exceedingly civilian dynasty allocated ~80% of its budgetary outlays toward military expenses. Historical surveys of the Roman Empire also infer that most of the expenditure was directed toward…
sastyk | February 10, 2010Increasingly, the cost of staying wired is eating up a huge part of people's budgets accordinging to The Times:
It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on…
razib | February 1, 2010I got the following chart from Wikipedia, and it suggests that on a per capita inflation-adjusted basis we're spending more on defense today than we were during the Reagan build-up, or Vietnam! Is this for real?
awild | February 1, 2010A first glance at Obama's proposed 2011 budget, and I feel relief. Given earlier rumors of a freeze on discretionary spending I had feared the worst, but it seems our government is investing heavily in science as way out of the current economic mess. The National Science Foundation (NSF) may see an 8% increase- great news for biologists! NSF is the primary source of support in this country for basic science, including myrmecology.
Incidentally, the New York Times' graphics department deserves a raise. Their simple interactive summaries of complex issues are absolutely brilliant- the…
catdynamics | February 1, 2010NASA 2011 budget is out, and with it the new 5 year plan.
It is drastic, bit more so than I expected.
Short version: Constellation is dead, Dead, DEAD!
Ares I, Ares V and Orion are shut down. ~ $10 billion thrown away, again, with nothing to show for it, again.
More money,
I'll backfill the details and provide links later:
basically NASA will fund a serious launcher technology development program for future heavy launch, but for now they are taking the Space Cadets up on their offer - human and cargo LEO launch services will be bid out, with first bids already out - so if the technology…
jstemwedel | January 25, 2010(As before, I'm still not sure whether, in the metaphor, the factory is building monkeys or staffed by monkeys. Perhaps, really, we're in the business of making educated monkeys, and the problem is that our administration views this as akin to making widgets. Anyway, the point is: Explosions! Chaos! Shrieking! Brachiating along the pieces of wreckage!)
We had our beginning-of-the-semester faculty meeting today, and I have to conclude that our department is in an abusive relationship with the university (and system) administration.
Why I'm convinced of this is the simple fact that we have…
bioephemera | April 15, 2009
This chart shows where your federal tax dollars go, based on Feb 2008 budget numbers (note: this shows discretionary budget, or appropriations, only - go here for more details, or look at the inset in the lower right corner to see where the other two-thirds of the budget are).
Visit wallstats.com for a giant version.
sheril | March 3, 2009I LOVE all things space--arguably more than the next girl. For years I wanted to be an astrobiologist. Infinite possibilities and the ultimate opportunity to explore the unknown. And it's no secret to readers that I adore Carl Sagan and Cosmos, which fostered a love and appreciation of science in so many of us.
All I'm saying is, just perhaps--for the time being--we might be better off spending the kind of figures currently invested in large scale BIG 'what if?' projects on more proximate concerns. No doubt the mission of Kepler is really cool, but why rush to search for planets like…