Putting $829 billion into perspective

October 08, 2009

Grant Ellis
Forgetting inherent inaccuracies and the usual political nonsense, it's reported here that the CBO figures 10 years of the Baucus health care bill (ObamaCare) will cost $829 billion.

In an effort to put $829 billion in perspective, I thought a comparison to NASA's budget might do the trick. Conveniently located here I found every annual NASA budget going back to 1958.

Bottom line: From 1958-2009, NASA has been budgeted $433 billion dollars which equates to $824 billion dollars in constant 2007 (inflation adjusted) dollars.

How's that for perspective? In 51 years, NASA has spent $5 billion less (in 2007 dollars) than the forecasted 10-year cost of ObamaCare (in, I presume, 2009 dollars). Call it a wash.

One other statistic I found interesting: according to the referenced budget schedule, the 1958 budget of $89 million equates to $488 million in 2007 dollars. Think about that. In 49 years, our money has lost almost 82% of its original value. Looking at this in another way, if you hired on with NASA in 1958 at a salary of $8,900 per year and received a raise of 3.54% every year thereafter by 2007 you would be making $48,800 and your purchasing power would not have increased at all. That is what an inflationary monetary policy does. It provides the illusion of wealth while robbing you blind.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/10/putting_829_billion_into_persp.html at October 08, 2009 - 10:28:41 AM EDT

EPA: The Blob That Ate America

Alan Caruba

No single government agency has grown so big and fast as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – and no single agency threatens constitutionally guaranteed property rights and nationwide economic growth than the EPA.

It is the Blob that ate America.

Signed into law by Richard M. Nixon in 1970, the EPA has so consistently twisted the truth about the environment that its announcements must be dissected like a cadaver to find any verifiable facts.

This agency of the government is so brazen that it is currently trying to bully Congress, the seat of government, into passing the horrid Cap-and-Trade bill so that it might then regulate stationary sources that emit more than 25,000 tons of greenhouse gases per year.

In its endless quest for more and more power over all aspects our lives, the EPA wants to rewrite the 1970 Clean Air Act to include so-called greenhouse gases. That is why its Senate sponsors have obligingly renamed it a “Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act."

It is based entirely on the global warming hoax.

The EPA has been the spear point for the global warming hoax, the creation of many worldwide and domestic environmental groups that continue to lie, saying it is caused by humans. There is, however, NO global warming. The Earth has been into a cooling cycle for the past decade. The current cooling is predicted to last for decades to come.

The platform for the global warming hoax has been provided by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The EPA is justifying its latest power grab claiming that the regulation of greenhouse gases will avoid a global warming that is NOT happening.

The EPA has such a disdain for real science that it wants to declare greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2), as “pollutants” when in fact CO2 has nothing to do with either warming or cooling.

The simple truth is that water vapor constitutes 95 percent of all so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and CO2 represents an infinitesimal 3.616 percent. Man-made CO2, whether generated by industry or just a backyard barbeque, is an even more miniscule 0.117 percent. CO2 molecules in the atmosphere are so diffuse as to render this gas unable to cause any climate change.

The EPA proposal reflects the effort of environmental organizations such as Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club to thwart the construction of any new plants to generate electricity. This is especially true of coal-fired plants that currently provide half of all the electricity used daily. Costly technology to capture and clean emissions is already in place wherever coal or other fuels are utilized.

All industrial activity is the ultimate target. What the nation’s industrial and manufacturing sector really generates are jobs, profits, stock dividends, and tax revenue.

The climate/energy bill has no basis in scientific fact. Despite a Supreme Court decision, CO2 can in no way be defined as a “pollutant.” CO2 is vital to all vegetation from backyard gardens to wheat fields to forests. Humans and other mammals exhale it. Vegetation absorbs and uses it. More CO2 would, in fact, mean more robust harvests and greater forest growth worldwide.

Simply put, the Clean Air Act was never intended to include greenhouse gases and that is the EPA’s dilemma as it seeks to do what it clearly was never intended to do.

The very idea that humans have any control over the climate is so absurd as to render the forthcoming UN climate conference little more than a gathering of liars and idiots.

The only good news is that Obama’s environmental czar, Carol Browner, now says that the cap-and-trade or pollution control act will not likely come to a vote until December. Then or ever, it would strangle economic growth in America at the same time such growth is taking place in the world’s emerging powers such as China and India.

While the rest of the world is encouraging industry to provide the jobs and revenue needed for their population, the United States President and Congress would hand the Greenhouse Gun to an EPA eager to pull the trigger on our own growth.

© Alan Caruba, October 2009

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. A business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.