Update: Senator Harry Reid laments the loss of the “Cowboy Poetry Festival” due to federal budget cuts. Seems that there is indeed some fat to be cut from the proposed $3.7 trillion budget.
The National Weather Service Employees Organization needs your help to protect against the draconian budget cuts suggested by the House for the rest of FY11. From the Member News website:
(March 7, 2011) The Senate Appropriations Committee has released a proposed alternative to HR 1 that would make a $110 million reduction to NOAA operations for the remainder of the fiscal year, rather than the $454 reduction approved by the House. Of the $110 million cut, $104 million was from earmarks that are no longer funded. This effectively only cuts the NOAA ORF budget by $6 million.
The Senate Appropriations Committee justified the higher funding levels for NOAA stating in their March 4 press release, “The House cuts an additional $340 million which would threaten critical weather forecasts and warnings.”
The sample form letter to Boehner and Cantor follows:
Dear Mr. Speaker (for Speaker John Boehner) OR
Dear Mr. Cantor (for Rep. Eric Cantor)
I am writing to ask you to support the Senate’s proposal for NOAA’s budget. This proposal will help NOAA and the National Weather Service continue the mission of saving lives and property.
The Senate’s proposal includes responsible funding levels in stark contrast to the draconian cuts included in HR1. HR1 would have resulted in the following impacts on the National Weather Service:
- Reduced staffing at Weather Forecast Offices and River Forecast Centers would result in incomplete forecast production which could prove disastrous in a significant weather event. Even in the best of cases, it will still mean incomplete forecast production at WFOs that have major product workloads for aviation, marine, tropical and public services.
- This is going to have a negative impact on the economy and on almost every aspect of our daily lives. There will be a large scale economic impact on aviation, agriculture, and the cost shipping food and other products.
- Service backup of 24 Weather Forecasting Offices has never been tested and runs a very significant risk of a missed tornado, flood or severe weather warning. It is risking lives at the onset of both tornadoes and hurricane season. This is also doubling the area of responsibility for operations and adds the risk of degraded service delivery.
- The National Hurricane Center is not immune to these cuts as furloughs and staffing cuts will add strain to the program. The Hurricane Hunter Jet, which provides lifesaving data and helps determine a hurricane’s path, could also be eliminated.
- Information that is vital for weather modeling and accurate tornado watches and warnings will be reduced and in some cases lost. Reduced upper air observations currently made twice a day could be reduced to once every other day. Buoy and surface weather observations, the backbone of most of the weather and warning systems, may be temporarily or permanently discontinued.
Recent advances in aviation weather forecasting have resulted in as much as a 50 percent reduction in weather related flight delays. The Senate’s proposal for funding will help progressive programs such as these continue and may, in turn, prove beneficial to strengthening the economy.
For the safety of our citizens, the protection of property, and the large scale economic impact on aviation, agriculture, and commerce, I am asking you to vote in support the Senate’s proposal for NOAA’s budget.
Sincerely,
——-
Bill Hopkins, the NWS Employees Organization vice president predicts lives will be affected and lost because of the budget cuts. From KSAT12 ABC in San Antonio:
Bill Hopkins, vice president of the NWS Employees Organization, said the public may be in real danger a House bill is passed that would slash The National Weather Service’s budget by $126 million.”It could potentially lead to a loss of lives, not necessarily in San Antonio, but it could in other parts of the county,” Hopkins said.Local NWS offices would likely deal with rolling closures and furloughs, leaving the Corpus Christi NWS office to take over issuing warnings for the San Antonio area.”Not only will they be watching your area, but they will also be watching their area, and there will be no increase in personnel to do this,” Hopkins said.The national NWS office said President Obama has opposed to such harsh cuts. Hopkins said the cuts would significantly affect those along the Gulf Coast.”The National Hurricane Center would be reduced to 32 hours a week,” Hopkins said.There would also be far fewer hurricane hunter flights, which are often vital parts of hurricane forecasts.According to Hopkins, large amounts of weather data would be lost.”Can you imagine flying into an airport and they lose all their surface data? There’s really drastic impacts in this cut,” Hopkins said.
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Wendell L. Malone says:
March 8, 2011 at 2:02 pm
Anyone who thinks that the NWS needs to take a budget cut hit as is being proposed, needs to take a closer look at what these dedicated and hard working meteorologists and staff are doing for their local communities.
This proposal is just stupid! If anything these offices need more money not less. They are already stretched to the limit, especially during times of severe weather, such as the high wind event currently fanning the flames in one of nearby communities.
They don’t need to loose their jobs because our government is too inept and stupid to do the right thing. Its not their fault that the budget is in such a mess, so why the hell are they being punished for doing such an extremely important job?
*****
Wendell, the US government is just plain broke — it can’t be made more simple than that. Now is the time for taxpayer-funded operations to either slim down or disband, just like in private industry, or far worse consequences will occur. Nothing is exempt when 40% of your funds have to be borrowed, on top of the already massive government debt.
Accountability has to apply to everyone, not just private industry.
Good thing I’m sitting down, because I am in agreement with R Gates’ statement above. [The exception being that I don’t expect the dollar to be jettisoned as the world’s reserve currency for quite a while, the reason being that most other currencies are in even worse shape. And China is riding high now, but I think it is headed for a hard landing].
There’s an old saying: If something can’t happen, it won’t happen. Obvious, and it applies to the present situation. We are piling up debt at a fantastic rate. In the first 4 days of March, $81 billion was added to the national debt. We won’t be able to pay more than a small fraction of our financial obligations. There will be an implosion first.
Obama is responsible for $trillions in new debt. If he simply rescinded his profligate overspending since being elected, we would be back at previous levels – which were already bad. The media howled because Bush added $200 billion to the deficit in his last year [mostly to ward off a run on banks, which would have led to a replay of the 1930’s Depression]. Obama has added over $200 billion in the past month alone. And the media turns a blind eye.
And for what? How is the country any better off with all this excessive spending? I am convinced that Obama is folowing an unspoken agenda to deliberately ruin the country through his insane fiscal policies.
R. Gates says:
March 9, 2011 at 7:20 am
the U.S. dollar is backed by nothing, and will no longer consider it the world currency…and when this happens, those of us who live in the U.S. and have most of our assets in U.S. dollars will see our standard of living decline– this is assured.
The first thing we agree on R.
How Many Will Die If the Budget Is Not Cut?
Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that if their budget is cut, some people will die. Even so, that is only part of the equation. We must also ask, if the budget is not cut, how many people will die?
If the national debt increases to the point that government borrowing gobbles up available money forcing interest rates and prices up, how many more people will lose their jobs, their health insurance, and be unable to afford the things they need? That has consequences too, and those consequences would reasonably include loss of lives.
If such simple things as an increase in energy costs results in people not keeping their houses warm enough in the winter or cool enough in the summer, and if that leads to more deaths (which we know it does), then how many more deaths will take place if the national budget doesn’t return to responsible levels?
Hell no. To the extent that speculatory bubbles burst and high risk speculation is bad is as far as I can agree. If other countries are stupid enough to join the party they’re gambling too. We are not going to prop up the market or go to socialism just so the rest of the world is saved. The swine that play this high stakes game of economy busting are everywhere not just in the USA (ever heard of Soros?). I want to address the first statement there about the Great Depression in particular. Note that this isn’t necessarily addressed to you Curiousgeorge unless you believe all this nonsense. I’ve seen that twisted wiki that promotes this garbage, one of the most anti-American hit pieces they have.
First of all that depression mostly took place in the 1930’s, the stock market crash was at the END of 1929. To describe this thing as the Great Depression of 1929 instead of the more accurate Stock Market Crash of 1929 and Great Depression of the 1930’s is FDR propaganda. It lets Roosevelt off the hook as the biggest failure as president with respect to economic matters, because from his inauguration in March 1933 all the way until early 1942 was almost 9 years, more than two full presidential terms of unheard of malaise and unemployment. The ramp-up for WWII began in 1942 (for the USA of course) and steadily dragged us out of the Depression. This early re-write of history began as soon FDR was elected, he assigned staff to spin things against the outgoing Hoover who reportedly was upset by this ‘betrayal’ when he heard of it (FDR was a nasty little man). This effort was successful because FDR remains higher ranked than Hoover even though simple math shows this: Great Depression: Hoover = 3.5 years, Roosevelt = 9 years. If FDR hadn’t rammed through Social Security there would have been no 3rd term, and he would never have received his popularity from being CiC during WWII and he would be ranked somewhere below Millard Fillmore.
Perhaps we should remember there were events before 1929, which that wiki literally ignores (this wiki has more truth in it). They’re practically blaming the USA crash and depression for everything from worldwide starvation to Hitler’s rise! Reality:It was World War I (9 million dead), the Bolshevik revolution and Communist atrocities and famines (12-15 million dead), 1918 Spanish Flu (30-60 million dead), post World War I partitioning of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, and the enormous debts from ALL of these events that stressed Europe and the world at large. In total, something like 75 million people died from those WWI and related events in the 15 years from 1914-1929 (2 billion world population), now imagine if 225 million died in a 15 year period today, you think it would have some influence on economics? Governments rose and fell, revolutions came and went, dictators arose and stayed, all of this WITHOUT the USA’s help (it was one of our most isolationist periods). The totality of these catastrophes left the world vulnerable to a future stock market collapse. To disappear these facts and hypothesize that the so-called Great Depression of 1929 caused the worldwide crises is yet another hit job on us greedy capitalist Americans. Don’t fall for it, it’s Communist (and Wikipedia) propaganda plain and simple. Their talking point is that Freedom, Capitalism and the Stock Market is bad, and they caused all this pain for the rest of the world. Outside of the USA nearly everyone was already reeling from disastrous events for a full decade before the crash. God I despise these vermin.
A far more lucid way to grasp our 1930’s depression coming so late in the game is that we were far more isolated and self-sufficient than the tangled tentacles of European economies and vicinity (not to mention being thousands of miles away, the ocean still only crossed by ship). What happened over there simply did not impact here, or if it did the effect was highly muted. Being isolated and insulated, and the much smaller scale fiscal budgeting and spending during the 1920’s just delayed our own collapse (see: Terminator, Judgement day was only postponed, but always inevitable). It took speculating and in particular margin buying that crashed the market, and many feel it was necessary and don’t feel sorry for those that over-extend themselves (don’t walk into a casino unless you can afford to walk back out with empty pockets). However, what we Americans had better start to realize today is that we do not have that buffer anymore, self-sufficiency and isolation were dismantled by politicians of all parties and gleefully accepted by greedy and disloyal (to the USA) businesses that farmed out and out-sourced this luxury. It doesn’t take a genius to see what is going to happen next.
What the leftist socialist propaganda fails to mention is that with or without the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930’s and even without the USA itself, those 75 million would still be dead (probably more), the economies would still be mangled and we would still get Lenin, Stalin and Hitler anyway.
I think the end of the dollar as the world currency is closer than many think (or wish) it to be– probably 10 years or less. The replacement will likely be a “basket” of currencies, similar to the current SDR (special drawing rights) of the IMF. The current SDR however is not suitable, so the new SDR will need to include the currencies of emerging markets like China and India. A basket of currencies or SDR approach makes a lot more sense than having one nation’s currency be the “world” standard, and certainly if the world had to choose a standard now, it would not be the debt laden U.S. dollar. The British pound was the world’s currency for long time, but with the collapse of that empire, the dollar came to the front, and now it is approaching the time for the dollar to be replaced as the U.S. empire can no longer be supported by incurring huge debts. Based on the current huge indebtedness of the U.S., when a new world currency is chosen, it will necessarily mean a huge hit on the standard of living for the citizens of the U.S. as the dollar crashes and is valued in respect the all other currencies and each nations relative indebtedness.
Ten years is a long way out. Anything could happen, so I’ll avoid predictions. The dollar will crash, the only question is: when? Answer that precisely and you can get enormously rich.
A world currency scares the hell out of me. Who will admisister such a beast? The über-corrupt from top to bottom UN?? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
How about a 10% paycut across the board for all “Public” employees? I hear them complaining of not getting a raise…… I not only haven’t had a raise in 4 years, every employee for the comapny I work for took a 10% cut 2 years ago March 1st. It was that or the company potentially goes out of business. Oh yea and that Obamacare reaised our Health Insurance rates by 19.8% at the end of last year. This madness can’t go on
Smokey says:
March 9, 2011 at 8:51 am
Ten years is a long way out. Anything could happen, so I’ll avoid predictions. The dollar will crash, the only question is: when? Answer that precisely and you can get enormously rich.
_____
Well, you may not get enormously rich, but you won’t get enormously poor either if you start now to diverisfy your portfolio away from all dollars. Some gold, some silver, some Swiss Francs, some Canadian or Australian Dollars would all be great hedges against what is to come…
Alan Simpson says:
March 8, 2011 at 3:45 pm
This is the correct answer. The Federal government needs to get back to doing what it is ALLOWED to do according to the powers granted in the Constitution. Any authority not EXPLICITLY granted to the Federal government belongs to the states or the PEOPLE (it is still “we, the people,” right?). The feds (Republicans and Democrats alike) have spent the last 70+ years slowly giving themselves authority over more and more things they are constitutionally forbidden to be involved in (and no one has called them on it yet). That is why we are in the situation we are in. The Federal govt. has finally gotten to the point that the bloat will cause dire consequences if something is not done about it and now.
Now, if someone could point out to me the article, clause, or even sentence fragment in the Constitution that explicitly grants the feds to do anything in regards to weather (or a host of other things), I’ll sit down and shut up. Otherwise, defund the entire NWS, and the EPA, and several dozen other agencies…
Seems these types don’t consider high energy costs also kills.
Peter in MD says:
March 9, 2011 at 8:54 am
How about a 10% paycut across the board for all “Public” employees?
How about 50%?
@ur momisugly Blade says:
March 9, 2011 at 8:30 am
I won’t argue the “Stock Market Crash” vs “Great Depression” nomenclature or timing, etc.. But I think you’ve made my basic point that what happens in one country ( economically speaking ), does have a significant impact on the rest of the world; especially those with large economies. I should clarify that I’m not implying a direct cause and effect relationship, only that the trickle down of a failing, or failed, large economy does have a global reach that cannot be avoided in today’s world. And once that feedback loop begins it is very, very difficult to interrupt it, as we’ve seen in the past few years. Whether we like it or not, we live in a inter-dependent world.
Printing money causes that standard of living of the middle class to go down. And usually after a period of heavy money printing war follows. I hope this time will be different.
Marc Faber on what potentially is coming:
If you want to see some reasons why America is in such economic trouble this video will clear some things up. Much of it has to do with banks being given permission to be exempt from safeguards that were set up by Washington in the 1930’s as a result of the Great Depression. Starting in the early 1990’s some banks were allowed to be categorized as hedgers instead of speculators. And here we are.
These banks being given these exemptions is also part of the reason food prices have gone up. Speculators are driving prices up.
Curiousgeorge says:
March 9, 2011 at 4:28 am
Sorry, I was not terribly clear. No, I was referring to the useless products sold to the US by other countries. There is a practical limit to the number of shoes and clothes and mobile phones that one can use, but marketing has found ways to obliterate that limit amongst those with more money than sense, and even amongst those with less money than sense from what I can see in Asia.
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
March 9, 2011 at 9:56 am
Oh, I could not agree more. I have worked in and for government departments, and in my experience, the efficiency level is about 25% of the private sector. Even at my low level I have seen literally millions of dollars thrown away on a regular basis because of a very small number of inept people. These are my tax dollars, and there is nothing I nor anyone else can seemingly do about it.
The only real problem is that if the work is farmed out to the private sector, the management of these contracts is so inept and corrupt that the cost gets even greater.
Given that we spend significantly more than half* of our hard-earned in taxes, our only solution is to pare government to the bone in order to merely suvive. More government does NOT work, we have seen that in the USSR, and in China, surely. To be honest, I sometimes feel that the only reason we do not suffer massively from government control is that they are so damned inept!
*Add them up, and remember they are cumulative. I pay about 25% in income tax, 10% in GST on most of the remainder. A great deal of what we do and buy involves private transport, which involves petrol, which has a tax of around 30% AND 10% GST on top of that (a tax on a tax). It goes on, and on, an on. VAT in the UK is now at 20% (introduced at 8% when I was a lad). Now we’ll be taxed on our carbons too.
Re above, UK tax on petrol, now at 175% and rising!
@ur momisugly Jer0me says:
March 9, 2011 at 1:25 pm
Ahh. Ok. Thanks for clearing that up. But, I also would point out that the people who make those trinkets ( China, et al ) don’t think they are useless – they bring in money, which raises their standard of living, and creates downstream effects. Some of which results in them buying our stuff (like John Deere tractors, Caterpillar heavy equipment, and Boeing jetliners – ~ 49% of parts for the later are made in foreign countries, btw; and, of course, our agricultural output ). It’s all very circular, complex and interdependent. In a word: “Chaotic”. 🙂
“”””” Jer0me says:
March 9, 2011 at 1:41 pm
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
March 9, 2011 at 9:56 am
Peter in MD says:
March 9, 2011 at 8:54 am
How about a 10% paycut across the board for all “Public” employees?
How about 50%?
Oh, I could not agree more. I have worked in and for government departments, and in my experience, the efficiency level is about 25% of the private sector. “””””
Well I think you are being a bit harsh on public employees, many of whom, do earn their pay.
But some adjustments of their taxpayer funded pensions are in order. I’m all for letting public employees retire while they are young enough to go and get a real job; in fact the yournger they retire, the better.
And as for those Taxpayer funded Retirement plans, the fix is simple. All retired former Public Employees become eligible to start drawing their taxpayer funded pension, when they reach the then prevailing Social Security full retirement age (currently 66 I think) no matter whether they retired at age 45 or age 35.
See how simple that is to fix.
Have read and reread some of the comments written so far. Yes money is tight, people don’t spend as much and the federal, state and local gov’t suffer when tax money doesn’t come to meet budgets. But in spite of less money, life must go on. This does apply to how the weather will affect your life.
Your media weather man or lady has loads of tools at hand now days to explain what the weather will do 24 hours away or 3 to 7 days away. But they can not do all the many jobs the NWS does in just their day to day duties. The media folks depend in a great manner to what the sensors in the weather balloons send, this info generates the daily weather models. The local NWS guy and usually 2 to 4 extra people will look over that daily and figure how much of it will play out in the forecast, the folks who come in the next work shift will get the low down and look at new data which comes in from remote sensors or spotters. I’m one of those spotters who make sure I’m sending info which is current and so far I’m told my info is close to 100% verification.
Some of you see it as an alarmist move for their union to voice their concerns. The NWS is one of the lower paid branches of the federal gov’t but these are people , not computers , with families to look after. Also the NWS also falls under not just NOAA but Homeland Security as well.
I had a fight a while back with some people who believed that money was being wasted on the weather balloon sensors, they thought that the same data could come from radar. I’ve been a spotter for over 14 years and have asked alot of hard questions during those times. I don’t see these folks who run the local offices wasting money.
One of the big events which lead me to get the training to become a spotter was an EF4 tornado which I got a front row seat to witness, no warning. This was back in 1989, changes were being made to down grade the NWS then mother nature had her way, across the country tornado outbreaks and during the next decades hurricanes wreak damage on the coastal areas. Roughly 10 years later I had enough and took classes. Have also taken classes from FEMA to get certification there as well.
These people work 12 hour shifts and sometimes more right after finishing one. We can’t stop mother nature but if we know ahead of time from a forecast or a loud ringing NOAA radio then hopefully you have a safe place to get.
Right now across most of the country, these same NWS are holding classes to educate people on dangers and encourage community involvement to assist them with valid reports. These classes are free and you can ask questions if all this is new. This one branch of the gov’t has the backing of thousands of people like myself who volunteer time to do this. Also the Cocorahs.org have many like us. We’re not into the global warming debate we just forwarding real valid weather data.
I encourage you to go to class and then afterwards spend some time to ask what all they do that the private or media branches can not do. Budgets cuts in all branches of gov’t are needed but not so harsh on those that can save a life.
“Jer0me says:
March 9, 2011 at 1:41 pm”
Still not quite as rough as it is in New Zealand. Last year GST went up to 15%, an increase of 2.5%. The the ETS, estimated to have added ~8% to the cost of goods etc. Instant ~10.5% increase. Saving the planet? No signs of that yet, but the consolidated fund looks flush!
The first prick to the U.S. Bond bubble? The first domino to depression?
Gross Eliminates Government Debt From Pimco’s Flagship Total Return Fund
…..Yields on Treasuries may be too low to sustain demand for U.S. government debt…… Gross in his February commentary urged investors to reduce holdings of Treasuries and U.K. gilts and buy higher-returning securities such as debt from emerging-market nations. “Old- fashioned gilts and Treasury bonds may need to be ‘exorcised’ from model portfolios…. “……… website first reported the change in assets today…… Gross noted that inflation may be a bigger factor than many suggest…….
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-09/gross-drops-government-debt-from-pimco-s-flagship-fund-zero-hedge-reports.html
PIMCO’s Gross Asks: ‘ Who Will Buy Treasuries When the Fed Doesn’t?’
The world’s biggest bond fund has dumped over $28 billion in U.S. Treasury securities since January……… shed its entire stash of Treasuries from 12% of assets to zero……..
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/03/pimcos-gross-asks-who-will-buy-treasuries-when-the-fed-doesnt/72276/
In simpler terms, the inflation rate could rise faster then the interest rate on Bonds. Which means in the real world, for all intents and purposes, the interest rate on Bonds would be negative. You lose money on negative interest. You end up with less money in the end than you put in at the beginning.
Arguments over a possible budget cut to the National Weather Service will look ridiculous if the dominoes fall in America. The unions can lay on the floor kicking and screaming all they want. They won’t get their way. People will have far more important things on their mind.
“…in the longer run, for sure, U.S. Treasuries and most Government Bonds are a suicidal investment.”
11:35 video, Marc Faber on Bloomberg, 1/25/11