Budget ignorance

Some call it a deficit; I call it stupidity. While our government spends time cutting back on vital items such as Social Security, it wastes money like a spoiled rich kid with a credit card. Am I protesting the multi-billions of dollars being spent on the war in Iraq? No, my problem is a little closer to home. A recent CNN news story caught my attention and I just had to follow up on it because I was struck by how completely absurd it sounded. It appears that NASA has decided it would be a useful venture to crash a probe into the moon. It’s probably old and crashing it would simply be easier than trying to recover it right? Wrong! It seems that we are crashing this probe on the moon so that we can find water.

Why would we need water on the moon? Well so that we can eventually have an outpost there of course. While I can completely understand the fact that Earth can make people want to run away sometimes (that’s why the aliens never stay) the cost of this little project is an estimated $80 million. This is only a small chunk of the entire mission’s $600 million cost, which will include a lunar orbiter. Am I the only one who finds this a tad insane? Don’t get me wrong – I love NASA and I think its Hubble project was a great scientific gain – but to say we have to cut Social Security and governmental services that people depend on to live so that we can build a fort on the moon is a little, well, nuts.

Our government sits back and watches as Enron takes people for everything they have, children go to bed hungry at night and the elderly are living in the streets because they can no longer afford their homes; yet we have $600 million to finance a trip to the moon to build an ice-side cabin. I am curious as to exactly how many people could live off of a sum like that, so to put it in terms that everyone would be shocked by if we took VCU’s approximately 29,000 students, each and every single student would get $20,689.65 or basically full tuition for the entire four years you would be here. There are people still misplaced from Hurricane Katrina who have lost everything and our government steps in and says we don’t have the money to help fund temporary housing anymore. Maybe it would be helpful if Bush explained to these families that we can get them a waterfront condo on the moon some time in the next century.

If I balanced my checkbook the way the U.S. does I would certainly be in jail since, considering our national debt, the government has bounced the equivalent of about a trillion checks. Plus my children would be starving, I would have no health insurance and my elderly grandmother whom I help care for would be left to fend for herself – but wait, that’s exactly what is happening to the American population. I’m certainly not claiming to be an expert on the art of balancing the budget, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that this NASA project is an expenditure we simply can’t afford.