However, I don’t think you are really being fair about the VSE. If Mr. Bush had dumped our European friends to leap into deep space, many would have been just as critical of him as you are for making a best effort to keep the promises. Yes, he pushed hard decisions out, but he had little political choice. (That said, one does have to ask why the Space Station treaty is so all-fired important when Mr. Bush is otherwise perfectly happy to avoid international cooperation and undercut other treaties.) Also, his Administrators at NASA have made a number of very difficult decisions — you (and even I) disagree with many of them but that doesn’t mean they were not politically difficult — to try to get the VSE going forward.

Dfens: I am not disappointed in Mr. Gingrich for failing to establish an expansionist space policy. As we’ve all been discussing, that is a tough nut — both technically and politically — to crack, and I don’t blame anyone for failing to pull it off.

I am incensed at Mr. Gingrich’s failure — after doing a lot of his early pre-election compaigning on just this issue in order to get noticed — to do one whit in office to try to establish the expansionist space policy he advocated. He ignored it in favor of devisive social issues. Whatever you think of the social issues and their importance or otherwise, Mr. Gingrich got into the national spotlight by making a promise and completely ignored it once he had power. To quote Greg, that’s spelt L-I-E.

— Donald

However, I don’t think that Bush will ever accept blame for two even larger and possibly intractible problems, namely the war in Iraq and the rest of the budget deficit. Both of these will affact space policy by sheer budget pressure, as Jeff Foust noted about Hurricane Katrina.

On the other hand, if you look closely at the VSE, you can see that it has nothing that Bush would ever have to accept blame for. He played it safe.

Anyway, it is just not true that only the President can propose a new program. Anyone can propose a new program. You can propose a new program, if you can get Congress to listen. The executive branch manages all programs, new and old, funded by Congress. In theory, it is like administering, as you say.

But in practice, the government is so complicated that execution is seven-tenths of control. That is why Congress won’t listen to your budget proposals if you are not the President, not even if you are a member of Congress. In effect, executive control has turned the tables for the overall budget, so that morally the President writes and Congress vetoes (or not). Even if everyone in Washington memorized the Constitution, it wouldn’t change the reality of control. And much of the control that Congress retains is devoted to in-district earmarking.

So the Bush tax cut really is Bush’s tax cut, just as he says it is. And the same goes for his spending plans.

Then later, though, you say that you’re disappointed in Gingrich for a lack of progress in space exploration, which is largely a function of the executive branch of government. Congress can cut the budget for or not fund a program, but they cannot propose a new program. That has to be done by the executive branch (I’m losing my mind, why did I call it administrative branch before?).

It is easy enough to get lost between the responsibilities of the 3 branches these days. We have the judicial branch creating their own laws and even new amendments to the Bill of Rights. Congress meddles in executive branch functions. The executive branch has a huge budget office that tries to tell the legislative branch how to spend the money. Maybe we need to pass an amendment that requires each civil servant to read a copy of the REAL CONSTITUTION at least once a month.

So you and Rand can argue all you please whether Clinton or Gingrich deserve blame or credit for any particular budget numbers. Using current semantics, Washington did balance all four budgets that Clinton signed in his second term.

It is also bad economics to argue that the economy was “reeling” from October 2002 to October 2003 from the stock market decline of 2000 and early 2001, and from the terrorist attacks of September 2001. People didn’t sit back and “reel” for a full two years after these events. For example, Amazon, which was a representative bubble stock, hit its minimum around September 2001. And the GDP numbers show it. By the same measure as above (per person, constant dollars), the economy already expanded from FY2002 to FY2003. So the economy didn’t reel in FY2003, only tax revenue continued to do so.

I stand by my prediction that, barring a tax rate increase, FY2006 tax revenue will be lower per capita, in constant dollars, than in FY2001, the last budget before the Bush tax cuts. I stand by it because it’s not just my prediction, it’s the CBO prediction.

You say that you aren’t Republican, but if your calculations are so fallacious and partisan, you might as well be.

The one time he tried it, Bill Clinton vetoed the budget, and then blamed him for “shutting down the government.” Unfortunately, a lot of the American people fell for it.

As to why the current Republicans won’t rein in spending, you’ll have to ask them. I’m not a Republican, and their actions make me ever less inclined to become one (not that the Democrats are particularly appealing, either).

Your recollection of Mr. Gingrich’s Congress is rather different than mine. While he wasn’t as spendthrift as most Presidents of either party, I don’t think he and his friends came close to a balanced budget or even to significantly cutting spending . . . but I could be wrong.

However, while we’re discussing Mr. Gingrich, I remember sitting in an auditorium in Atlanta when he was first trying to get elected. He talked about space and America’s place in it, and very little else. He promised to make it his first priority to do everything in his power to start the colonization (nothing less) of the Solar System. He even wrote a book on the subject (I forget the title, but it was published by S&S’ TOR imprint, probably in the late 1970s). So, where was spaceflight when he was creating his “New American Century” or whatever the hell he called it?

Like many Republicans, if he had concentrated a little less on the social agenda and actually attempted to run the country, started the colonization of the Solar System, and actually accomplished something besides dividing the nation into hostile socio-religeous camps, he might be remembered in a slightly better light.

I was young. I wanted to dream the man’s dream. I subscribed to it. I believe to this date, since once in power he rarely if ever raised the subject, it was largely his fault that it wasn’t even tried, and the spaceflight dream he signed me up for turned into post-Apollo dust.

Yes, I’m very bitter about Mr. Gingrich. It was more important to him to sow the seeds of our country’s increasingly real civil war than it was move out into space. I was lied to.

— Donald

Yes, when he signed it doesn’t matter. What matters is when he submitted it, which would have been the previous January or so, when the bubble was nearing its peak.

Which explains why it had less revenue than FY2000, as the CBO page shows.

Yes, there was less revenue in October because the economy had since tanked (while he was still president).

I picked the last year that Clinton had, and I picked the last year with published numbers for Bush.

Year choices that remain entirely arbitrary with regard to effects of tax rate cuts. A better choice would have been 2003 (when the economy was reeling from the double whammy of the bubble pop and 911, and the effects of the rate cuts hadn’t yet kicked in) and the most recent year.

I wish I could pull the revenue numbers for FY2006 from a crystal ball. I doubt that even the FY2006 budget, never mind FY2005, will reveal any rise in tax revenue per citizen, in constant dollars, counted from the beginning of the Bush tax cut.

I’ve no idea why you would doubt that. It will almost certainly be the case, barring some economic catastrophe.