we would already be on the moon. 1% of your taxes goes to the

space program. Americans need to do more then eat fried chicken

and watch American Idol if we want to be a world leader again or

China and Korea will be the next world leader.

Sorry! But it looks like Jeff Foust and Charles Miller picked up the ball and ran with it for a Space Review article:

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1106/1

Thanks for increase in accuracy. I looked for the OMB source for a few minutes, but I (admittedly) got lazy, and used what I could find easily. Thanks for the NASA New Start index URL.

BTW, why didn’t you save me some time, and do the same calculation for the Bush Administration???

– Al

Oil prices serve as an overall inflationary pressure, which affects the constant-dollar figures.

And one last point that Nemo left out. When bush took office we had a balanced budget and a surplus! Before the Iraq war oil was $25 a barrel now its $101. Nemo how do your numbers account for that?

Oboma supports will point out he opposed the war. Ok, what would he have done faced with post 911 and Afghanistan at that time?

To borrow one of Oboma’s lines. The bus is now in the ditch how are you going to get us out? By gutting our human space flight program? I would like to know.

Has anybody checked out http://www.nextenergynews.com ? They highlight a lot of next generation energy sources that NASA technology and funding has brought to the commercial market. This is technology we can take advantage of now. Her proposed plans would take advantage of these technologies.

Hillary will do more for space policy than Oboma. Our next president will still have to do battle with congress and the senate to get the money. How successful has each candidate been at getting their bills passed? If the democrats take back the white house. Do you think the republicans are going to go away? Washington is not unified it is a snake pit and a Jimmy Carter style president will not prevail in today’s political atmosphere.

For one, they should be using different years as basis for comparison. Fiscal Year 1993 started on October 1, 1992, and is therefore the last Bush-41 budget, not the first Clinton budget. The Clinton budgets were FY1994-2001, inclusive.

anonymous.space’s point that Clinton’s NASA budgets did have some year-to-year increases is true but not relevant. What is relevant is that the years with cuts tended to have larger cuts than the years with increases, leaving NASA worse off at the end of Clinton’s administration than at the start, even when inflation is not taken into account.

Al is probably making a mistake by using Wikipedia as a source of budget numbers. The real numbers are readily available here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/hist.html

There is also the issue of which inflation index to use to measure the actual loss of NASA’s buying power. The OMB uses the GDP (Chained) Price Index, which does not reflect the particular “market basket” of goods and services purchased by NASA. A better index is the NASA New Start Index, which is available here:

http://cost.jsc.nasa.gov/inflation/nasa/inflateNASA.html

Based on that, my numbers are as follows:

FY Current $M Constant 2008 $M
1993 $14,305 $20,005 Last Bush-41 budget
1994 $13,695 $18,576 First Clinton budget
1995 $13,378 $17,686
1996 $13,881 $17,904
1997 $14,360 $18,266
1998 $14,194 $17,862
1999 $13,636 $16,820
2000 $13,428 $16,034
2001 $14,095 $16,293 Last Clinton budget
Bottom line is that Clinton cumulatively cut NASA’s budget 1.47% in current-year dollars and 18.56% in constant-year dollars. On a year-to-year basis he cut NASA’s budget five times and increased it three times. All three increases occurred after the Republicans took control of Congress. Two of the three increases (FY97 and 01) occurred during presidential election years.

I like it too, but credit goes to “The Fact Checker”, Michael Dobbs, of the Washington Post at
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/09/about_the_fact_checker.html#pinocchio

– Al

“about 100,000 in the Houston area work for NASA’s Johnson Space Center or related industries”

is pure bunk. The entire, nationwide NASA civil servant and contractor workforce is something under 60,000 individuals. There’s no way 100,000 individuals work directly or indirectly at JSC alone.

“Their individual positions on the Iraq war, the character issues (e.g., experience versus judgement, likeability, fighter vs. uniter, etc.), their perceived chance of winning against McCain, their perceived positions on economic policy (the actual positions being nearly identical), the color of their skin or their gender, will play a much larger role in who Clear Lake area citizens vote for.”

One relevant data point to support this kind of argument… just the number of Katrina evacuees that relocated to Houston, some 150,000, far exceeds any remotely possible figure for the total NASA workforce in Houston. And that population is going to be much more highly motivated to vote based on their parochial issues than the NASA workforce on NASA human space flight budgets.

FWIW…

Oh, I like the term “Pinocchios”. Can I use that?

“ANON: 1) The NASA topline budget was not declining throughout the Clinton years. There were years during the Clinton Administration when the proposed and/or passed NASA budgets were higher than the prior years’ proposed and/or passed NASA budgets.

NASA’s top line budget was
1992 13.961 Billion
2000 13.600 Billion”

Both statements are correct. The NASA topline was lower at the end of the Clinton Administration than at the beginning (your point). But the NASA topline budget did have year-over-year increases during those years (which was the point I was trying, but apparently failed, to make).

For example, according to that same Wikipedia data, NASA’s budget experienced year-to-year increases going from 1992 to 1993, 1995 to 1996, 1996 to 1997, and 1998 to 1999. Most of those increases are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And those are just the Congressionally passed budgets. The original White House budget requests were even higher in some cases.

My point is to just provide some countervailing details to broadly brushed statements like “stagnant or declining NASA budgets”. Like any Presidency, there is a lot to criticize in the Clinton Administration when it comes to NASA decisions and oversight, but the reality is that the NASA budget bounced around a lot, including up, during the Clinton years, and funded a lot of civil space initiatives and achievements, the biggest of which was getting ISS off the drawing boards.

Topline budgets are built program by program. As much as we might like to score political points by looking at the topline trends, budget decisions are not made that way. To really examine a budget under a particular Presidency, we have to look at the details — what Congress actually passed versus what the President proposed; what programs were coming to the end of their life (costs ramping down) during those years; the number, content, and costs of new program initiatives and activities that were started during those years; and what was actually achieved during those years (among other things).

For example, the NASA budget has enjoyed modest but steady increases through the Bush II years (according to the same Wikipedia data). But such a simplistic analysis belies substantial to crippling problems like the fact that those budgets did not meet the original budgetary commitments in the VSE, that the ESAS plan for Shuttle replacement vehicles never fit within that VSE budget, that the VSE schedule for a Shuttle replacement has not been met, that decisions to start VSE human lunar elements have been pushed into the next Administration and put into political jeopardy, and that many valuable activities elsewhere in the agency have been deferred or terminated.

Hope that makes my thinking a little more clear. My 2 cents… FWIW…