One Small Step For Education, One Giant Leap For Obamakind
Jan 3, 2009 Political
When Barry Obama was running for the office of president he was loud and proud about his plans to delay some of the space exploration programs in order to divert money to education. Keep in mind that money is NOT the problem in our educational system. We continually throw money at education and things never get better. But Obama is beholden to the teacher’s union so he clearly said that we could not afford to spend all this money in space and have men walking on the moon when we have children who can’t read. A November 2007 article reports it this way:
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama released a new $18 billion education plan yesterday that he proposes to pay for by delaying the NASA Constellation program (to return humans to the moon) five years.
“We’re not going to have the engineers and the scientists to continue space exploration if we don’t have kids who are able to read, write and compute,” Obama said. Wired.com
But now that Obama has won, space exploration and putting a man on the moon is a matter of urgency because of China’s increased space presence. According to Bloomberg, Obama is anxious to speed up the mission to the moon because the Chinese have been building a military presence there:
President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between the U.S.’s civilian and military space programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China.
Assuming that Obama is not going to cut out the 18 billion dollars he promised to education (once again, money is not the problem) where will he get the money for the increased tempo he will demand of NASA and the Pentagon?
Obama is already on track to sign a one TRILLION dollar stimulus package and he will spend TRILLIONS more on his pet programs and as payback to those who supported him. Where will we get the money. For all the talk about balancing budgets and being the responsible party, they are planning to spend like there is no tomorrow.
As an aside, how much is a TRILLION? If you earned $1000 a second it would take you just over 31 years to earn a trillion dollars. A stack of $100 dollar bills totaling 1 TRILLION dollars would be 789 miles high which is about 144 Mount Everests stacked on top of each other. A box that holds a case of copier paper will hold about $72,000 one-dollar bills. It would take 1.4 billion boxes to hold a trillion dollars. One more, a trillion seconds ago was 32,000 years ago (source).
We are talking huge sums of money and since he has now decided to do the space thing and his education plan we will be adding more debt on top of the huge debt load Congress and politicians of all stripes are burdening us with each and every day.
I know we are screwed no matter what but I thought it was worth while to point out how quickly Obama changed his mind about spending money to send men to the moon.
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Tags: education, moon mission, nasa, Obama, trillion