Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

A Blow To Lawlessness And Socialism

26 Comments

…and a victory for the Constitution:

A federal judge declared the Obama administration’s health care law unconstitutional Monday, siding with Virginia’s attorney general in a dispute that both sides agree will ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

I would have been surprised (and dismayed) had it gone any other way. Let’s get it to appellate and the Supreme Court quickly, before Obama is able to stack it with more Elena Kagens who, as Jeff Sessions demonstrated, don’t seem to think that there are any limits whatsoever to the federal government’s reach into individuals’ personal decisions.

[Update a few minutes later]

Great minds…apparently Cuccinelli has requested a direct appeal to SCOTUS. This is unusual, but it may happen, given the magnitude of the decision and its impact.

[Update a couple minutes later]

More from Bryan Preston. I love this display of idiocy by Josh Marshall:

Josh Marshall, in a state of shock, says that “no one” took the constitutional argument against ObamaCare seriously. Obviously a majority of the voters did, a couple dozen state attorneys general did, and a federal judge has as well.

It’s one thing to argue that it’s constitutional. It’s another to be so willfully blind as to imagine that “no one” thought it wasn’t. This kind of delusion is one of the reasons they got “shellacked” last month.

[Update a few minutes later]

A link roundup at How Appealing.

[Update a while later]

It’s unconstitutional and unpopular. What’s not to like?

But of course, as Nancy said, we had to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. That’s the way it is with bills of thousands of pages that no one reads.

[Update a few minutes later]

Memo to Bob Gibbs, who has now gone all Orwellian on us, rebranding the “individual mandate” “individual responsibility.” Even granting for the sake of argument only that I have such a responsibility, the Constitution still doesn’t allow the federal government to compel me at gunpoint to be “responsible.” Sorry, no sale.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Time Warp

18 Comments

I just noticed that space historian Roger Launius has a blog, which I’ve added to the roll on the left. And last week, he had a very peculiar post.

It’s actually a generally not-bad history of NASA’s (and the nation’s) continued attempts to replace the Shuttle, but it contains these words:

Without a doubt, moving to a next generation human launcher will cost a significant amount of money. It always has.

…No doubt, building a new human-rated launcher will require a considerable investment. If the United States intends to fly humans into space as the twenty-first century proceeds it must be willing to foot the bill for doing so.

There are two striking omissions in the narrative. First is the complete lack of mention of commercial space or privately developed systems, even failed ones. They don’t exist at all. It might have made sense to write such a piece in the early eighties, maybe even the early nineties, when it was still unimaginable in the conventional wisdom that there would be multiple solutions to the Shuttle replacement problem, let alone private ones.

But this is 2010. And this blog post was written only two days after the successful flight of the Falcon 9 and Dragon. It’s as though it didn’t happen, and remains so unlikely to that it isn’t worthy of mention in the context of the discussion.

So what does he think is a “significant amount of money”? Or a “considerable investment”? Because any rational analysis, based on SpaceX’s costs to date, would indicate that they are less than a billion dollars away from having a “new human-rated launcher” (ignoring the archaic and useless notion of “human rating” a twenty-first-century launcher designed to the current state-of-the-art in reliability). But no, because “it always has,” it always will.

It’s amazing how myopic the conventionally wise can be.

[Update a while later]

Speaking of myopic space historians (or policy analysts or both, depending on what you think he is), I hadn’t previously seen this quote from John Logsdon cited by Jeff Foust at today’s issue of The Space Review:

Others question just how “commercial” such systems could really be. “I think one of the worst things that happened in managing this revolutionary proposal with respect to human spaceflight is to call the transportation service ‘commercial,’” John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said in a space policy forum earlier this month hosted by the Marshall Institute. “There is no obvious market” right now for crewed flights beyond NASA’s needs, he claimed, and allowing that question to dominate the policy debate “is one of the policy failures of the last year.”

Well, let’s see. Space Adventures has had several customers for the Soyuz flights, and has more who would like to fly, but the supply seems to be the choke point. Bob Bigelow has MOUs with several nations who would like to lease his facilities who clearly can afford it, but in order to use them, their “astronauts” (or whatever they want to call them) will need rides to and from. In addition, Bob has offered hundreds of millions of dollars of his own (existing) money for the capability to offer such rides. Maybe John doesn’t want to call that a market, “obvious” or otherwise, “beyond NASA’s needs,” but it sure looks like one to me.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Last Action Hero Governor

9 Comments

Thoughts on the rise, and disastrous fall, of the Governator:

One man has the right to toast to a case of schadenfreude. California Congressman Tom McClintock, running against Schwarzenegger in the 2003 recall, warned voters before the election that Arnold was a liberal wolf in conservative sheep’s clothing. McClintock predicted that a Governor Schwarzenegger would be far and away from the second coming of Governor Ronald Reagan.

McClintock’s prophecy proved to be more true than even he most likely thought possible. To the shock and dismay of sensible government advocates around the state, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s leftist metamorphosis paved the way for California’s incredible decline. Like a script from the several horrible Terminator sequels, Governor Schwarzenegger started strong only to end up on DVD shortly thereafter.

And we get stuck with the residuals.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

“An Awkward Position?”

5 Comments

There’s a very strange article over at Wired on the Dragon flight:

…the “commercialization” of space puts the U.S. military — one of the biggest space customers and a close partner with NASA — in an awkward position, according to Eric Sterner, a space expert with the Marshall Institute. “Changes in the nature of the launch industry will present policymakers with new dilemmas when it comes to ensuring military access to space.”

I’m guessing that he talked to no one for this article other than Eric Sterner, who has his own axe to grind, continuing (as far as I know) to be a Constellation fan. Which makes the piece all the more strange. More on that in a minute.

The problem stretches back to the mid-1990s, when the Air Force began pouring billions into a new rocket for carrying military satellites into orbit. The plan was to license the same rocket to commercial launch firms. But that private market never really materialized, and the Pentagon ended up assuming the full, $100-million-per-launch cost for the resulting Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle, today the military’s standard rocket.

Almost all of this paragraph is wrong. It implies that there is a single EELV, which was developed by the Air Force, and then “licensed” to unspecified “commercial launch firms,” which never materialized, and that the Air Force is now operating it themselves. It also implies that it is the sole user, and that the Pentagon uses no other rockets.

Here’s the Planet Earth version of the history. The Air Force subsidized both McDonnell Douglas (which was absorbed by Boeing during this period) and Lockheed Martin to develop new, cheaper versions of the Delta and Atlas, respectively, but both companies put considerable amounts of their own money into them as well. There is little heritage of either vehicle to their ancestral namesakes other than the Centaur upper stage. Boeing and Lockmart operated their commercial vehicles, with the Air Force as primary customer. It is true that the market didn’t turn out to be as large as initially thought, and in the early aughts, Boeing actually wanted to get out of the business because it was operating at a loss. As a solution, to keep both lines available for resiliency, both companies ended up forming a new joint venture, similar to the one they formed to operate Shuttle and station, called United Launch Alliance (a commercial company), that has consolidated production and other functions to save money while still being able to offer both vehicles to the marketplace.

It goes on:

“Some would prefer NASA to meet its [Low-Earth Orbit] human spaceflight needs with modifications to the EELV, which theoretically would increase production runs and lower the [Air Force] marginal cost,” Sterner said. But after SpaceX’s success this week, NASA might decide to base its future vehicles on Falcon, leaving the cash-strapped Air Force to maintain the EELV all by itself.

Yes, some would indeed prefer that, and have been saying it for years, ever since ESAS, when NASA decided to spend billions building its own rockets, including the Ares I for crew transportation, and the Air Force went along with it. And it’s kind of amusing to read about the “cash-strapped Air Force,” considering the size of NASA’s budget in comparison. If NASA is smart, they’ll use both Falcon and EELVs for crew transport, so they have redundancy. What the Air Force really needs is a NASA to not develop a new Shuttle-derived vehicle, which it doesn’t need, and doesn’t have the budget for, but Congress is insisting that it build anyway, for no reason other than job preservation in Alabama, Utah, Mississippi and Florida. If NASA would commit to using existing vehicles, including both EELVs and Falcons, for exploration, there would be plenty of business for everyone, and it would also open the door to more DoD use of SpaceX hardware. Sterner sort of explains this:

The military might decided to regularly use Falcon alongside EELV. “In theory, that’d be a good thing, increasing competition and giving DoD greater access to space,” Sterner said. “In practice, it may not be as easy as all that. DoD poured a lot of money into the EELV and has much more control over it than SpaceX’s Falcon 9. It may be reluctant (for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons) to make greater use of Falcon since that would mean less use of EELV, which it’s still on the hook to maintain.”

The only sense in which the Air Force is “on the hook to maintain” EELVs (not EELV) is that if ULA (which, again, is not mentioned, allowing the reader to infer that it doesn’t exist) goes under, it would have no way to get a certain class of satellites into orbit. What that means, though, is that it has to provide ULA with enough business to ensure that this doesn’t happen, and if ULA can find other customers (e.g., Bigelow) the pressure on the Air Force to continue to keep the doors open diminishes or disappears. But if we had a Space Council, whose job was to ensure that we were actually accomplishing things in space, instead of keep factories going in selected states and congressional districts, an overhaul of policy would straighten this out (though over the screams of certain members of Congress), and there would be ample business for ULA and SpaceX, as well as the smaller players and upstarts.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

And So It Begins

28 Comments

This is depressing. Kristi Noem hasn’t even taken office yet, and she’s already defending home-grown pork as “stimulus”:

Newly Elected Congresswoman Kristi Noem of South Dakota says that ethanol subsidies are important to her state and the nation.

Speaking on the Scott Hennen Show Noem says “Ethanol has been very good to South Dakota.” She said that this is not the time to repeal the subsidy “when you look at taking away that subsidy it is the wrong decision.”

She says that supporting the ethanol industry with subsidy promotes investment and continued hiring “In the long run it will get the economy back on track faster.”

Will someone please give this woman an economics lesson? And you can bet she’ll trade her vote for others’ votes to keep the subsidies coming. This is why both parties are the party of big government.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Coming Economic Storm

9 Comments

The Democrats applied exactly the wrong medicine to this recession, poisoning the economy instead.

The only good news:

The next few years are going to be grim, and those in charge do not inspire confidence. Would you entrust your welfare to Jerry Brown, Andrew Cuomo, Pat Quinn, and Barack Obama? We have to hope, however, that these men wake up, swallow their preconceptions, and without delay move decisively in the direction of balancing the budgets of California, New York, Illinois, and the United States.

I myself very much doubt that they will do so. Unless these men – our President above all – demonstrate qualities that they have never before evidenced, we are in for a truly terrible ride. There is only one silver lining; and welcome though it might be in ordinary circumstances, it is hardly worth the cost. Politically, this means that Barack Obama is likely to be remembered for having done to the Democratic Party what Herbert Hoover did to the Republicans.

As he says, a good outcome, but not worth the cost.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Class Warrior

10 Comments

Barack Obama won’t triangulate, because he can’t:

That Monday tax deal had to be the worst day of Barack Obama’s presidency. I’d be surprised if this most insouciant of presidents was able to sleep Monday after the statement he issued at the White House about the deal. That was no mere statement. It was a class warrior’s cry from the heart.

He lashed “the wealthiest Americans” three times, not to mention “the wealthiest 2% of Americans,” “tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires,” “wealthy people” and—channeling the French revolution—”the wealthiest estates.” (Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, answering the party’s casting call for the role of Madame Defarge, denounced the deal as “morally corrupt.” Keep her away from knitting needles.)

I don’t buy that all this was said as a sop to the angry left. One month into his presidency, the Obama budget message repeatedly ripped into “those at the commanding heights of our economy.” When at the White House Monday Mr. Obama suggested his next campaign will be “a conversation with the American people” about ending those rates (35%!) for “wealthy people,” I take him at his word. He won’t be at peace until this violation is erased.

…Will the nation’s new economic royalists step forward, rope in hand, to produce enough economic activity to help Mr. Obama to a second term of retribution? Maybe not. According to the National Association of Manufacturers, some 70% of manufacturing concerns in the U.S. have owners whose business is taxed at the individual rate (S corporations and the like). These are the people expected to commit capital to new hires and equipment.

But if an angry, let-me-be-clear Barack Obama just looked into the cameras and said he’s coming to get you in two years, what rational economic choice would you make? Spend the profit or gains 2011 might produce on new workers, or bury any new income in the backyard until the 2012 presidential clouds clear?

No matter how much economic bump Mr. Obama gets in 2011 from extending the Bush-era tax rates, the 2012 election will be fought over a deep national anxiety that he rightly identifies but misinterprets.

I don’t think he’ll be able to fool the people again in 2012, at least not enough to get reelected. Now they understand what he meant in his brief conversation with Joe the Plumber, and they understand what it means to elect a Marxist.

[Update a couple minutes later]

It’s too late for a “third way.”