February, 2005

Not to say it’s never been wrong, but over a number of decades my gut has a pretty good track record judging people, places, things and stuff. It doesn’t like the President’s budget proposal at all. On the gut-o-meter, the budget is way below par for budgets.

The reason is not partisan. It has nothing to do with right or left, except perhaps as ancillary comment on the right of presidents to decide who gets left out of luck. And the reason it’s a gut issue is that it doesn’t feel right to continue to insist on huge tax windfalls to the already-rich and at the same time starve the processes necessary for governing.

As an example, I’ll use the budgetary treatment of Hubble. A diversion of the funds it would take to save the telescope has been neatly diverted into a new priority to return astronauts to the moon by 2010. My gut says that’s junking the best scientific equipment ever put into space for the nebulous purpose of a forty-year leap backward to revisit our nearby inert hunk of orbiting rock.

More later, as the folded, spindled and mutilated data unfolds.

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