{"id":2956,"date":"2012-08-27T20:10:30","date_gmt":"2012-08-28T01:10:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2956"},"modified":"2012-08-27T21:20:30","modified_gmt":"2012-08-28T02:20:30","slug":"from-moon-shots-to-national-lunacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2956","title":{"rendered":"From Moon Shots to National Lunacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the Republican convention underway, I gave some thought to an economist’s kind of question — i.e., how much money is spent each year on politics; how much of our national economic wealth goes into “electioneering”. I did a quick search and got a couple of ballpark answers. One article<\/a> cites a study of national political costs in the 2008 and 2012 election years; for all elections, from the local school board all the way up to the White House, the predicted total cost of campaigning for votes in 2012 is $9.84 billion, versus $6.98 billion in 2008. <\/p>\n

Hmm, a 41% jump, well in excess of the net inflation rate and net GDP growth rate for that period. Another study<\/a> concluded that the nationwide cost of election politics in the Congressional mid-term election years was $4 billion in 2010 versus $2.85 billion in 2006. Which was also a 40% jump over 4 years. Wow, politics is definitely a growth industry, even in the midst of a “great recession”!<\/p>\n

And this doesn’t count the cost of another form of political influence, the more indirect technique of political lobbying. I’m sure that if you piled on all the money spent by corporations, unions and other big interest groups (e.g. trial lawyers) for “access” to our leaders on the state and national level, you could pile another billion or two on to these totals. <\/p>\n

Oh wait, here’s a web site<\/a> for that! In 2006, the nationwide total spent on lobbying was $2.62 billion. Then it reaches $3.3 billion in 2008, hits $3.55 billion in 2010, and looks good for at least another $3.3 billion in 2012. (It could be that corporations have shifted funds away from lobbying and into election PAC’s following the Citizens United<\/a> Supreme Court decision in 2010).<\/p>\n

OK, so at least in presidential election years, our nation spends around $13 billion dollars to select, elect and “communicate with” our political leaders. That’s about $42 per man-woman-child here in the US, or about $93 per taxpayer or voter (voters tend to be taxpayers and taxpayers tend to be voters). <\/p>\n

By comparison, the budget of NASA is now about $17.8 billion. Unfortunately, NASA’s estimated budget is capped at around $17.7 billion over the next few years. If political and lobbying expenditures continue their approximate 6% annual growth rate, politics will catch up with national spending on space exploration in another 5 years or so. <\/p>\n

Recently, NASA gave us techies and explorers-at-heart a little thrill by successfully landing the “Opportunity” science lab on Mars (in spite of my initial pessimism on it!). Meanwhile, the political world is giving us more and more advertising and “messaging”, and such wondrous spectacles as the big conventions and debates (which have both reached such a low level of integrity and substance as to remind me of the gladiator games in the ancient Roman colosseums). So, enjoy the fewer and fewer headlines and awesome pictures and stories from our dwindling space explorers, and brace yourself for more and more non-stop campaign nonsense on your TV, web sites, radio, newspapers, and where ever you turn. Might as well make the best of your $42 (or looking at it from another perspective, your $93 if you are currently part of our economy’s productive soldier-ants).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the Republican convention underway, I gave some thought to an economist’s kind of question — i.e., how much money is spent each year on politics; how much of our national economic wealth goes into “electioneering”. I did a quick search and got a couple of ballpark answers. One article cites a study of national […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,21,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2956"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2956"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2959,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2956\/revisions\/2959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}