In 1961, the world was at war. The United States and then U.S.S.R. were locked in the dead heat of Mutual Assured Destruction. In the midst of this silent conflict, great strides were being made in science and technology. The Russians had beaten us into space; but our nation, captained by JFK, focused and set its sights on a much loftier goal: to put a man on the moon.
On May 25, 1961, as part of a special address to Congress, Kennedy called upon the American people to commit their nation's wealth to the exploration of space.
First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.
To this end, Kennedy proposed that the Senate commit a staggering volume of tax-payer dollars: $531 million in fiscal year 1962, and an additional $7 to 9 billion over the course of the following five years.
That figure, my friends, was in 1962 dollars. Adjusted for inflation in 2008, that sum would have been equivalent to nearly $67 billion dollars.
In times like our own, figures like these are important, because the goals being set by the Obama administration are long-term and expensive:
- provide an entire nation of people with access to health care, and boost preventive medicine
- force the domestic automobile industry to stop producing products that exert a dramatic downward pull upon our economic stability and energy independence
- pump liquidity and cash into domestic and international economies
That's a lot of dough to be spent. In fact, one reasonable estimate places the total amount of money "spent, lent, or committed" at about $13 trillion dollars: about 200 times what Kennedy pledged only five decades ago, and roughly equivalent to our GDP. All told, we've actually spent about $2 trillion, which is still roughly 30 times the price tag placed on exploring local space.
Thirteen trillion dollars is such a large amount of money, that it exists somewhere beyond our capacity to relate it to anything and reveal its true magnitude. So instead of focusing on the actual dollar amount, what we could do is focus on results.
If I lend you a dollar and all you do is buy a candy bar, then I've wasted my dollar. But if with my dollar you buy a pack of seeds, plant a row of tomatoes, and sell the produce for a dollar a pound, I am certain to see a return on my investment.
The greater mission of NASA was to innovate - to use science to benefit mankind. In it's 60 year history NASA has filed 6,300 patents, and the technologies it developed have been the basis for many every-day products: scratch-resistant lenses, memory foam, long-distance telecommunications, and one of my favorites - cordless power tools, just to name a few.
History has demonstrated that government spending in the interest of innovation - sometimes known as "meddling" or simply "waste" - doesn't always end in disaster. I'm not arguing that every dollar spent on my behalf since 2008 has been in my best interest - some of it has definitely been pork.
What I am saying is that sometimes change must be forced. Unlike an individual's motivations, our nation is guided by a system. It has rules and hosts a grand scheme of expectations, some of them more bloated than others. And sometimes the rules must be brought again into balance with the expectations.
Case in point: the domestic auto industry. To date, a combination of free market principals and labor laws have produced a domestic automobile industry that is in the business of producing cars many Americans don't want and none need. To compound this problem, their system of production has grown prohibitively expensive and absolutely uncompetitive.
The current global recession, which we began to feel in 2008, was the last coffin nail for two of the Big 3 US automakers. Although it is not the first time that the Federal Government has gone to the aid of the auto industry, the 2008 bailout and subsequent soft bankruptcy for Chrysler differs both in terms of scale and the accompaniment of public policy that will force the industry to retool.
That public policy to which I refer was announced today: that by 2016, the national standard for fuel economy will be 35.5 MPG. The estimates as announced by the President himself are that the fuel savings accrued between 2012 and 2016 will be 1.8 billion barrels of crude.
Now, that's just a fraction of our total consumption (7.5 billion barrels in 2007), and those savings are spread out over four years. But the policy is a monumentally important step for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, it capitalizes on the current economic situation. When times are "good," change is an irrelevant topic, as no one looks for stability much further beyond the end of the fiscal year.
Second, the new public policy (which will certainly become legislation, if the Democrat-controlled Senate has anything to say about it) is the first policy to set a national standard for fuel economy. A national standard dramatically reduces the complexity for automakers in manufacturing a scalable product.
So the automakers get to go back to work, and will do so driven to produce the next generation of automobiles. The environmentalists get their reduction in emissions. The green energy proponents get a first step toward an energy-independent United States. And the world bears witness to a democratic government not afraid to take charge of its economy and society and propel it in the direction it needs to travel.
And all this is possible only because of a willingness to spend when spending made sense.
I can only hope that in the end, I get a tomato, not a lemon.
