Henry Vanderbilt has the latest on the space-policy battle in DC:
NASA Exploration Funding: The Battle Continues
“No man’s life and property are safe while the legislature is in session.”
– widely attributed to Mark TwainThis is a follow up to our last two Updates, both of them urgent political alerts in the continuing battle over fundamental reform of NASA’s human space exploration program. The good news is, with your help, the last round was a standoff. But the fight is far from over. It’s once again time to get active, if we don’t want to see these reforms sunk without a trace. And this time, we actually have a couple of weeks warning.
State of Play
The House NASA Authorization bill, HR.5781 was up for full House consideration, but was pulled back at the last second when it became clear there was considerable lack of consensus on major provisions. (To every one of you who called your Representative, thanks!) The Senate NASA Authorization, S.3729, meanwhile has been approved by the full Senate. Both House and Senate are now on recess till the week of September 13th.
The Senate version is not great, but is livable, with $3.9 billion overall Exploration funding split as follows: $1.6 billion for NASA development of a new in-line Shuttle-derived heavy-lift launcher, $1.1 billion for continuation of the Orion capsule, and $1.1 billion for the rest of Exploration. That last $1.1 billion includes reduced but still substantial funding for the Commercial Crew, Commercial Cargo, and other new space technology/exploration precursors we support. (S.3729 also fully funds Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research, under another account.) Close to a billion dollars of NASA exploration funding directed toward useful things is hugely better than we would have hoped for coming into this year.
The House version is extremely bad. HR. 5781 is essentially a blueprint for the destruction of NASA human space exploration in the name of saving it.
– Out of a total $4.5 billion Exploration funding, it devotes $4.2 billion to development of a new in-house NASA heavy booster (to be based on existing Ares work) plus a government-owned Station transportation system based on the Orion capsule.
– It makes drastic cuts in funding for developing US Commercial Crew and Cargo to Station capabilities, to a small fraction of NASA’s request.
– It imposes “poison pill” requirements on potential US commercial crew services that neither NASA nor existing Russian crew service providers have to meet.
– It zeroes Exploration Technology and Robotic Precursor Missions funding.The gutting of Commercial Crew and Cargo budgets, and the Commercial Crew poison pills, will leave us spending hundreds of millions annually for non-US Station transport services for the foreseeable future, and will leave us with no backup should those non-US services have technical or political problems.
The new House-mandated NASA heavy booster and Station-transport Orion get less funding than, but a similar schedule to, what the Augustine Commission already found unworkable for the old Ares/Orion. The issue of what Station-Orion would fly on (2015 operational goal) while waiting for the new heavy lifter (2020 goal) is not even addressed, never mind funded. The odds are extremely poor that these projects would ever amount to anything beyond never-fly jobs programs. Even if the new vehicles do eventually fly, NASA would still have no deep space missions to fly on them, due to this bill’s effective starvation of all other Exploration precursor work.
Pursuing the path implicit in HR.5781 would reduce our nation’s international commercial space competitiveness, would damage our national space technology base, and would destroy NASA’s chances of moving out beyond low orbit in any meaningful way for decades to come.
What’s Next
Our understanding is that they’ll try to pass HR.5781 again right after Congress returns from this recess. There will be three opportunities to fix it: In negotiated modifications before it’s reintroduced to the House, by amendment on the House floor, or by negotiations in the House-Senate conference committee that will reconcile the two versions. The process may move very quickly once Congress is back. We need to prepare the ground now.
Recommended Action:
Contact your Representative and both your Senators, and ask them to support the Senate version of the NASA Authorization bill, because the House version is unacceptably bad. Get as many of your friends as you can to do it too. Numbers count. We need to make as many of our Representatives and Senators as possible aware of our concerns in the next few weeks, before deals start being made on the final NASA Authorization bill. Start doing it now, don’t wait till the last second. (We may ask you to do it again at the last second – a little repetition does no harm.)
Contact Info for Representative and Senators: If you know their names, you can call the US Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask for their DC office. If you don’t know who your Representative is, go to http://www.house.gov/zip/ZIP2Rep.html and enter your home zipcode. (You may need the 9-digit version.) For Senators listed by state, go to http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
Once through to their office, let the person who answers know you’re calling about the NASA Authorization bill. They may switch you to another staffer (or that staffer’s voicemail) or they may take the call themselves. (If you’re calling after-hours or they’re getting a lot of calls, you may go directly to a voicemail.)
Regardless, tell them you want (Representative/Senator TheirName) to support the Senate version of the NASA Authorization, because the House version has major problems.
Briefly give one or two reasons you support the Senate version…
– it provides adequate funding for NASA Commercial Crew and Cargo
– it supports US rather than foreign crew and cargo service providers
– it provides some funding for new NASA exploration technology
– it enhances our national technological competitiveness
– it partially addresses the NASA problems pointed out by the Augustine Commission and begins to restore NASA’s ability to usefully explore
– it supports the President’s NASA policy
…then a reason why you oppose the House version – see the bullet points in the HR.5781 paragraph above. Then answer questions (if any) as best you can, and politely sign off.OK, that’s the basic version. Some of you may want to get more involved in this effort than making a few quick phone calls. Letters and faxes are great! (Emails much less so; you know how much spam you get – now imagine the amount a Congressman gets. Better to phone than to email.) Keep letters to one page, state your basic point (Dear Representative/Senator TheirName, I am writing to request that you support the Senate NASA Authorization, since the House version is very, very bad…) in the first sentence of the first paragraph, then go into a paragraph or two of supporting detail, then politely wrap up. Faxes may be slightly better than paper mails in that they arrive faster and more reliably – if you are going to paper-mail a letter, do it early so it has time to get through the security checks.
And for you real self-starters out there, your Representative and Senators are on recess, and will probably spend some time back at home with the voters in the next few weeks.
– You can show up at a “town hall” and get in line for the microphone with your request ready (“I’m worried about the future of NASA. I’m here to ask that you support the Senate version of this year’s NASA Authorization bill, because the House version has serious problems”) plus an example or two to give if you get the time.
– You can call their local office and try to set up an appointment to meet your legislator (or an appropriate staffer) and spend a few minutes making the case in person. If you do, we strongly recommend you study up on the details, do the whole well-groomed businesslike and courteous thing, practice making your case in less than the allotted time, and unless they keep you longer with questions, depart on-time gracefully.
– You can come up with some other way entirely to let them know what you, their constituent, want. We haven’t come close to covering all the conventional effective methods here. Just remember though, if you’re thinking of getting creative – keep it legal, keep it safe, make VERY sure it gets the point across unmistakably clearly – we’ve seen way too many political messages delivered so cleverly that nobody else can tell what the message is – and make SURE it doesn’t make us all look like flakes (way too easy when we’re talking space) or annoy people counterproductively. (Simple parameters, yeah, we know…) Then let us know how you did it!There’s one other very effective way you can help out, if you can be in Washington DC for a few days around the start of the week of September 13th: Some of our DC colleagues are very likely to be organizing citizen lobbyist visits on Capitol Hill early that week. We plan to support their efforts. More on that as soon as we know more.
What it comes down to is, if we care about US space commercial and technical competitiveness, if we want to see NASA with some hope of going new and interesting places anytime soon, we need to keep at this, and we need to get more organized about it. To that end, if you do make a call, send a letter, or otherwise deliver the message, afterwards please email us at space.access@space-access.org, with “contact” in the email title, and describe briefly who you contacted, how you contacted them, and what (if any) response you got? (If you don’t want to go onto our mailing list for Updates, be sure to mention that.) Thanks!
Now go get ’em.
Posted here, because it doesn’t seem to be up at the web site yet, at least not with a permalink.
[Late afternoon update]
Here‘s the link.
It’s up at http://www.space-access.org/updates/sau117.html (in the ‘back issues’ list).
I wonder if the Senate/House versions are some variant of good cop/bad cop. If it is, it’s working pretty well.
The bait and switch has seemed to keep happening for a few decades now, yet the private sector never seems to learn. Looking at NASA’s actions as opposed to words, has NASA constructive support of the actual private sector (not NASAlized aerospace companies) increased or decreased over the decades? What is the actual resultant trend? At the budgetary level, has NASA become more or less pro commercial space?
How about cutting the losses on NASA and switching the lobbying effort from government to the private investment industry? Starting by lobbying private investment that NASA was no commercial threat and that private investment was the only viable funding option for commercial space development (not NASA funding). I suspect if this had been done decades ago we would have had CATS by now. Doing so now might also indirectly send a very strong message to government to stop wasting taxpayer money on NASA pork (lobby to remove the NASA is the future of space fig leaf).
So perhaps everyone should instead be calling their local VC fund today to lobby them for support of commercial space, explaining that NASA provided no such significant usable support and that they had the entire industry to themselves!
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that the “everyone” who’d actually join in this petition effort doesn’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the “jobs” lobby on the Hill. We may very well entire a regime where choices narrow to either waiting for the private sector to discover a clear business reason to pursue manned space or stirring up genuine, peer competition overseas. NASA may have to fail spectacularly before government discovers its proper role in this area.
Short answer, nobody’s been able to identify a compelling enough wellspring of demand for much improved access to space. Even the effort to total cost of the order to launch lifecycle enters a weird regime when you consider that your asking price of $50 million for 10 to 32 tons to LEO is currently achieved by international competitors using highly subsidized platforms. And last I checked, the satellite launch industry isn’t exactly overburdened by a backlog of orders.
Government’s natural role in any sort of exploration is in honestly surveying and titling the wealth of territory; it’s a thankless, profitless task for which it is generally well suited.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that the “everyone” who’d actually join in this petition effort doesn’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the “jobs” lobby on the Hill. We may very well entire a regime where choices narrow to either waiting for the private sector to discover a clear business reason to pursue manned space or stirring up genuine, peer competition overseas. NASA may have to fail spectacularly before government discovers its proper role in this area.
The space jobs lobby isn’t that big either. I imagine the real lobby with real influence is the lobby that can kick back money to the decision makers.
As an aside, Presley, you were wanting evidence of “income hoarding”? Here it is. Government is taxing the private world for this NASA funding, that is, taking their income and hoarding the income for particular special interests.
Having suffered through your incredible obtuseness before, I’ll take the effort to anticipate some of your complaints. The key one is that if government returns the taxes to the economy, how can it be considered hoarding? Simply put, because they handle the income, someone else does the hoarding. It’s being taken from productive members of society and being transferred to and hoarded by members that specialize in siphoning government funds.
Let’s use an analogy. Suppose I fear that the world will completely collapse so I buy huge amounts of food, centuries worth. That’s considered hoarding since there’s no way I can possibly use that much food in any near future period of time (unless the worst happens to happen). Now, suppose I don’t live in a place that either is large enough or “secure” enough to store that kind of food, so I move it up to my cousin’s place in the countryside. Then we’re to the state of analogy where current income hoarding is at. From my viewpoint, I took food from the economy and I returned it to the economy. But there still is hoarding in your terms. It just ends up that the hoarded goods don’t remain in my possession.
In a similar fashion, government doesn’t end up with the hoarded NASA-touched income. That instead ends up with the NASA supply chain who does the actual hoarding.
There it is in terms you can understand.
Noting the recent pledges of many billionaires to leave large proportions of their wealth to charity – what better charity than space R&D? It is the ultimate in teaching a man to fish.
New Space is probably using perhaps $100m-$200m a year at the moment and achieving rather a lot. Double or triple that and I suspect CATS would occur in the next 5-10 years, and much else besides. A few billion of private funding, appropriately distributed, should be sufficient. Finding such private funding (in a NASA vacuum) does not seem totally beyond the realm of feasibility.
A $100m might nowadays be sufficient to develop a CATS vehicle, perhaps something along Masten or XCOR lines. Although a number of such vehicles would need to be developed for a competitive environment to ensue.
No need to multiply variables beyond necessity in order to arrive at a conspiracy of corruption. The delegations from Utah and 23 other states certainly have vary degrees of ballot box motivation to pull for ATK, and–if we’re going to dig up our previous arguments–they can certainly put forward as convincing a forecast as you for their actions (it’s all handwaving anyway). No matter how you slice it, restructuring the American approach manned space dislocates employees in the existing, albeit distorted market. And while commercial space offers nothing like the near fraudulent hype of the allegedly emerging “green industry,” it offers even less concrete promises of prosperity within voters’ actual lifetimes.
There you go again.
Certainly. If we redefine hoarding to include the last party that transacted with the actual hoarder, then you’re absolutely right. Of course, since consumption and investment are down in the aggregate, you’ve just roped the private sector into your silly little word games.
Here we actually agree, though I doubt you even know why. Yes, our current tax regime transfers wealth from the most to the least productive members of society, on the theory that such transfer increases circulation across the board and consequently improves the multiplier for job creation. Problem is that no model in use now or in the conceivable future fixes a multiplier that isn’t either flat out wrong half of the time. Whether this is because job creation effects are subsumed by larger order phenomena or something else is besides the point; our forecasts emerge from “science” that is structurally unsound. From where I stand, if you can’t reasonably predict your way out of a mess, prudence calls for inaction. Leave the markets be to do what they will with their own revenue.
Of course, none of this actually has to do with hoarding, whether or not the government hoards (which it certainly doesn’t), or your cartoonish attempts to divorce your pet theory of economics from any need to support it with evidence.
Trust me, the fastest route to misunderstanding is taking it upon yourself to redefine the English language.
Here we actually agree, though I doubt you even know why.
You’ve already indicated that you doubt a lot of things. Given that you repeatedly ignore evidence even after calling for it, why should we care?
Yes, our current tax regime transfers wealth from the most to the least productive members of society, on the theory that such transfer increases circulation across the board and consequently improves the multiplier for job creation. Problem is that no model in use now or in the conceivable future fixes a multiplier that isn’t either flat out wrong half of the time.
Huh, models don’t fix reality. If an observed effect isn’t following your model, then the model is wrong. And we move on to models that better reflect reality. In particular, if the theory “such transfer increases circulation across the board and consequently improves the multiplier for job creation” is shown to be wrong, then we would be foolish or dishonest to only consider models that depend on that theory being true. Fortunately, my “model” of the US economy doesn’t rely on government spending having a high multiply. And somehow that model seems to work better for it.
our forecasts emerge from “science” that is structurally unsound
I’d take this seriously, if everyone was having this forecasting problem. Instead, the forecasts are only bad for certain groups, such as those supporting a bit of public policy. I’ll admit however that con artists tend to put out very structurally unsound science, but it’s not due to lack of understanding.
From where I stand, if you can’t reasonably predict your way out of a mess, prudence calls for inaction
Or at the least, the “you” above shouldn’t be steering the economy. But we need to keep in mind that many predictions are not intended to accurately reflect the future but rather to influence the policies and revenue streams of today. There probably are a number of good prognosticators out there, but they don’t necessarily have an incentive to publicly release their predictions.
Let me point out that certain groups, such as the Berkshire Fund have a long history of making good enough economic predictions.
Also, let me point out that I’ve made a few correct economic predictions over the past decade or so, including the dotcom and real estate bubbles, no federal government “on budget” surplus in the early 2000’s, Japan’s economy would continue to malinger this decade, and that the recent US government spending would not generate significant economic growth. Ultimately, I still see copious evidence that my understanding of economics and the interaction of federal government spending with the US economy is good enough for this discussion. Finally,
If we redefine hoarding to include the last party that transacted with the actual hoarder, then you’re absolutely right.
Wait a minute. We established that hoarding (as you define it) occurred as the consequence of government spending. It doesn’t matter who the actual hoarders are. We have cause and effect. There’s no grounds for your disagreement. We don’t need to “redefine” anything.
That’s a serious charge, son. Care to point out a single time I’ve ignored evidence?
No shit, Sherlock. I just made that exact point.
You don’t have a model. You have an untestable mess of qualitative assertions. Win or lose, you’re not even in the running.
Of course, it’s all due to deliberate conspiracy to make you poor and stupid, right? Give me a break.
I’m sorry, exactly how does the long run performance of any specific firm establish any econometric model? Are we just to surmise from no evidence at all that world class poker players have similarly occult tools at their disposal? Have you considered competing explanations for BRK beating the indices average twice over? Ones that require less arcane assumptions? For example, BRK might simply have a advantage in attracting experienced talent. And have you considered how this complicated this new “theory” of yours must be to account for the insurmountable philosophical gulf between Warren Buffet (or George Soros, for that matter) and yourself?
Setting aside whether or not anyone should believe you (given the lack of documentation for these predictions), so what? A handful of trials resulting in only heads coming up on a coin flip does not tell us anything about whether or not the coin is fixed.
No we didn’t.
What cause and effect? We haven’t even established a correlation.
You apparently do, in order to accuse the government of hoarding when it fact she’s running a deficit.
That’s a serious charge, son. Care to point out a single time I’ve ignored evidence?
This thread for example. I demonstrated an example in your terms of government spending which results in income hoarding.
No shit, Sherlock. I just made that exact point.
Fine, you agree that models don’t fix reality.
You don’t have a model. You have an untestable mess of qualitative assertions. Win or lose, you’re not even in the running.
I can make falsifiable predictions using that “untestable mess of qualitative assertions”, that’s what a model is after all. For example, I’ll predict that the US economy won’t grow over the next two years unless government spending is greatly reduced below a deficit of a trillion a year. That’s falsifiable.
Of course, it’s all due to deliberate conspiracy to make you poor and stupid, right?
You have a talent for fallacies. When you have a real argument here, you’ll get a real answer.
I’m sorry, exactly how does the long run performance of any specific firm establish any econometric model?
It’s evidence. Whatever models that Berkshire uses has been demonstrated to work. And as a result, it’s counterexample to your claim that we can’t construct models to predict the economy.
Setting aside whether or not anyone should believe you (given the lack of documentation for these predictions), so what? A handful of trials resulting in only heads coming up on a coin flip does not tell us anything about whether or not the coin is fixed.
Yes, they do and this is yet another example of you ignoring evidence. Perhaps you ought to read up on Bayesian statistics first. Even say, four flips gives you enough data to make crude guesses about the degree of fairness of the coin. And a thousand flips gives you a lot of data.
No we didn’t.
Well, guess you’ll have to rationally argue why that’s not true rather than say it’s not true.
What cause and effect? We haven’t even established a correlation.
Did the government collect taxes? Yes. Did the government spend those taxes via NASA on aerospace companies to protect jobs? Yes. Did the money go to buy things that the private world would have bought anyway? No, they went to things like Shuttle maintenance, ISS construction, or building an expensive new rocket when there are already two US entries in that category. Hence, we have a solid chain of events from taxation to income hoarding. Cause and effect clearly established.
You apparently do, in order to accuse the government of hoarding when it fact she’s running a deficit.
Your model is broken. Deficit is future income.
Setting aside whether or not anyone should believe you (given the lack of documentation for these predictions), so what?
It’s worth noting here that while some of my predictions are lost forever (for example, when economy.com got rid of its forums and raised its subscription costs by a factor of five), I do have a track record. That’s a link to the Foresight Exchange, a reputation-based betting market. You’ll need to unselect “omit closed claims” in order to see the full, humongous record and it covers many thousands of trades I’ve made over this time frame. I’ve been a trader there since 1996 and have a 14 year record of trades which you can evaluate. I’m currently solidly in second place on that market.
To put that into a little more context, I started with 2,000 “credibills” (doled out over time) as does the rest of the thousands of people who played, and ended up growing that to the point that I have more wealth than all but one person *and* more than double all but seven people.
It was there that I made a one my most aggressive predictions via trading in a claim called “BB2002” that the US would not balance it’s “on budget” part of federal spending through FY 2002. Those winnings are perhaps a fifth of the growth in my original funds. It’s worth noting here that the only growth of funds in this market is via new players (or old players getting new accounts). That makes it nearly zero-sum and more difficult in some ways than real money markets like the stock market.
Again, we can label a consistent, long term string of predictions as something other than what it is. Maybe I had an “advantage in attracting experienced talent”? Yea, that must be it.
Which I addressed squarely, hence the tangent about your redefinition of hoarding. Care to try again?
One, this is a new assertion on your part. Two, if I’m to read this as generously as possible, you’re making a crude but nevertheless quantitative prediction. Three, if I choose not to, then you’re prediction is untestable due to the wiggle room afforded by “greatly.”
Hey, if it’s not due to a lack of understanding, then it must be deliberate. No?
It’s evidence.
By that reasoning, the existence of flatulence is evidence of anthropogenic climate change.
You haven’t even shown that said models *exist*. Instead, we’re to believe that BRK managed to keep said these alleged models secret for over four decades. Same goes for similarly performing competitors as well. As a matter of fact, you might as well point to any whose accumulated a great deal of wealth throughout history and argue they figured out–and managed to suppress their discovery of–macroeconomic forecasting.
Certainly. With four trials you’d find that four heads falls within 2 standard deviations of a fair coin (3 within one). And if you can pawn that off as even crude evidence of whether or not a coin is fixed, then you’re first calling is to sell bridges in Brooklyn.
It’s just plain wrong. We never established anything of the sort. And please, will you stop asking me to prove negatives?
What you did do was point out that government redirects revenue back in the economy where it may be hoarded by other concerns. I pointed out that consumption and investment are down across the board–regardless of the transaction prior to savings, then noted you haven’t even shown a correlation, let causation, between redistribution of wealth and the propensity to hoard.
I’m still not seeing the step to income hoarding. Seems to me you’d have to establish that the monies paid for services rendered were hoarded after the final transaction between government account and contractor/civil servant/whatever.
You certainly do. Otherwise, it makes no sense to talk about an entity hoarding when it is running a deficit through spending.
That doesn’t even begin to make sense.
Good for you. I’m pretty mean in a game of hold’em myself. I don’t presume to have a testable model to explain my intuition.
Okay, I’ll bite. Please express this model of yours in a way that’s repeatable for anyone else who applies it.
In a more honest day, we would’ve called it luck. We certainly wouldn’t have pretentiously made it out to be the product of some science that for some reason we can’t disseminate beyond ourselves.
My last point on this wildly off-topic tangent. I’m not crapping on economic forecasting just for the well of it. But taking past and current crops of models seriously is a grave mistake. There are some talented people out there with a sharp eye for opportunity, but the notion that they rely on method over intuition makes for dangerous behavior amongst the far less gifted and productive. In good times, it drives exuberance as sideliners grasp for any aggregate “explanation” for market success. In bad times, it produces people like Elizabeth Warren–perennial critics turned Che Guevaras. The latter currently rules the roost, deploying their so-called “science” to burn entrepreneurs and investors on a pyre of public outrage.
There’s no law that says investor confidence must rest on the illusion of mathematical elegance, if you can as much about econometrics–macro or micro–with a straight face, to market behavior. Just a handful of central bankers and a salesman with a product to hock.
Please express this model of yours in a way that’s repeatable for anyone else who applies it.
There are a few core assumptions:
1) Making decisions for someone else tends to be less efficient to a combination of lack of consequences for the decision-maker (he’s not the subject of the decision) and conflicts of interest (particularly where the decision-maker can benefit from choices that harm someone else).
2) The US government has a monopoly on various forms of power. This allows them to extract resources from others through a variety of means that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. The assumption here is that any such means is equivalent to a tax. For example, taxes, monopoly premium from rent-seeking, and inflation (monopoly control of the local fiat currency) are all equivalent.
3) Private resources tend to increase exponentially. Even when they aren’t directly invested, they tend to be spent in ways that encourage investment.
4) Some economic truisms: money is borrowed against future income, participants in a free market always trade in a way that benefits all participants (though costs and benefits via externalities can be transferred to non-participants), and tragedy of the commons is the consequence of public goods with no penalty for overconsumption.
5) A less efficient economy (all else being equal) grows slower than a more efficient economy.
6) There are tasks that only the US government will be entrusted with (such as national defense, insurer of last resort, supreme arbiter for contract disputes) even if these could be done more effectively by the private world.
Here’s a few predictions:
A) Government action results in less efficient distribution of resources. Hence, the more of the economy that is government controlled or funded, the slower the economy will grow.
B) Government action is required in order to have transactions that a participant didn’t agree to (say you are coerced to make a purchase that is bad for you and which you haven’t contractually agreed to). They also are required for any limitation of our choices beyond cash flow depletion, prior contractual agreements, or externalities.
C) Unregulated government created public goods require an enlargement of government power in order to fight the tragedy of the commons effect.
D) And here’s the prediction relevant to the discussion in this thread. Due to conflicts of interest and the lack of consequence for spending decisions, governments will tend to spend on things that benefit the decision makers. Given that the dominant form of taxation these days is via income, this means that income will be transferred from those who produce (the income being compensation for their services) to those who can provide better benefit to the government decision makers. In other words, income will be distributed in a way that weights more to those who take in income or hoard it rather than to those who would invest that income or spend it on others who eventually would invest it. Government doesn’t directly hoard income, but it directs through its actions income to income hoarders.
E) The more that a government spends, the more the US economy becomes a “political economy”, that is, businesses become more oriented to using political means (such as bribery or PR) to increase their share of public funds.