Next he’s going to tell us about the glories of a gold currency.

The projected “bankruptcy” (aka 20% or so benefit cut assuming no other policy changes) date has been sliding into the future fairly consistently for three decades.  For most of that time the projected crisis has slipped 1 year into the future for each year that passes.  It actually managed to get 5 years or so closer during the recent near depression financial meltdown.

Do read about some national political issues on occasion (if you’re an American; if not, you’ve probably got some in your own country.)  As part of the two main political parties’ unwillingness to agree on a budget, they made a deal last year that if they hadn’t gotten something done by a date in the far future (tomorrow), the President would have to “sequester” an appallingly high 2-3% of Federal budget spending, implemented as across-the-board cuts in everything except a few protected areas such as Social Security and military salaries. 

It was a great deal for the Republicans, because they didn’t have to anger their right-wing base before the election by raising taxes on rich people, or their military-industrial base by cutting military spending, or old people (including Democrats and older Republicans) by cutting Social Security, and they could gamble on taking back control of the Senate during the election. 

It wasn’t a bad deal for the Democrats, because they could look like they were being responsive and responsible, and could avoid having to tell old people that Social Security is a total mess, and gamble on  keeping control of the Senate and maybe taking part of the House, and they figured that Obama could win a game of Budget Chicken against the Republicans the way Clinton stomped Gingrich at it. 

Before all the sequester and budget cut talk, the funding for nuclear physics, and then physics in general was looking pretty grim.  There are 3 major US “nuclear designated” labs, RHIC, JLab, and FRIB, (You can google these for more info).  Basically, with the realistic scenario, there’s a good chance one of the three would be shut down, likely RHIC.  Not only would a chunk of the American high energy scientists lose their jobs, but it would slow down PhD production.  It would also make it more difficult for newer PhDs to find jobs, as spots would quickly be filled by more senior members of those in the closed labs.  Funding would be reduced in all labs, projects delayed, etc.  This includes the smaller US labs, or ones with only a portion of “nuclear” funding, such as Fermilab, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, NIST. Chats with friends at these labs seem even more grim, with talks of unpaid leave for workers to make up the cost deficits.

This was before the sequester.  As only a grad student, my information is limited, but I have been trying to keep up with any science policy info I can find the past few weeks.  I’m rather pessimistic… let’s just say I’ve taken my Mandarin self-study a bit more seriously.

So yes, maybe it is overinflated.  Maybe it won’t be that bad.  But the view from the cheap seats right now looks pretty shitty.

http://web.mit.edu/facts/financial.html

On that same page, you’ll notice that revenues at MIT exceeded expenditures by nearly five times the $40 million cut number he mentioned, so why isn’t he calling for MIT to reduce profits to compensate? Further, the MIT research budget has been exploding over recent decades, fueled by federal dollars:

http://web.mit.edu/facts/financial.html

So this “cut” will amount to maintaining spending at approximately the 2011 level – hardly the stuff of “grim weeks” and “evil”, let alone individuals struggling to pay the monthly rent.

Dig a little deeper, and you’ll realize who MIT’s major funders are: agencies like, oh, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security. And what would they be researching, exactly, and does anyone think there’s probably a lot of research there we could do without? Dig again, and you look at the comment about Eric Lander being able to handle the budget cuts … and then you realize that the reason isn’t because Eric Lander is rich, it’s because Eric Lander is *connected*: he just happens to be the co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Lander

Once you’re done digging, you’ll see what this is: a vastly overinflated, bloviated tale of doom designed to politically demonize even these minor reductions in planned spending increases – cuts that don’t hold a candle to the real cuts that must happen if the U.S. government is to ever be solvent again.