Comment by tartoran
3 days ago
> Weather balloons are a recurring cost.
What do you think taxes are? Do we pay taxes once and that's it?
3 days ago
> Weather balloons are a recurring cost.
What do you think taxes are? Do we pay taxes once and that's it?
Huslage said “I ALREADY paid for the weather balloons and they are no longer being launched.”
Past tense. You could say that you have already paid for something where the cost is largely up-front. Like for example you could say it for the aircraft carriers. Imagine that (ad absurdum) the administration would want to sink all aircraft carriers. Then you, or Huslage, could rightfully say “I have already paid for the aircraft carriers…”. You could complain that your tax dollars are being wasted by sinking them.
But with a recurring cost like weather balloons the same sentence doesn’t make sense. There you could say “I have been paying for those balloons” (for which presumably you got the data you wanted from the balloons). Once they no longer are launching them, you are no longer paying for them. (Modulo some stock remaining on the warehouse shelves I guess. But that is basically a rounding error in a government budget.)
What Huslage said makes sense if they think of the weather balloons as a large up-front cost, like an aircraft carrier. Huslage already paid for them and now they won’t be used anymore! What a waste! But in reality it is more like a recurring cost. Like for example if the pentagon had a Netflix account and now they are canceling it. You wouldn’t say “I ALREADY paid for the netflix account”. You haven’t “already paid” for it. You were paying for it up until now, and you won’t be paying for it from now on.
There are many great reasons for why it is a good idea for the government to keep launching weather balloons. Huslage “already paid for it” is not one of those great reasons. It demonstrates a misunderstanding of how weather balloons work.
But do change my mind. Why do you think it matters that taxes too are recurring? How does that make the weather balloons “already paid”?
It's extremely unlikely any of your tax dollars were allocated to projects like what is being discussed here. It's much more likely (given the Federal Government's total budget and allocations) that this money was being borrowed and/or printed.
So, put another way, is it better for the government to continue going into debt to operate projects like this with potentially dubious returns - or better to allow the private industry to find a way to operate it instead?
>So, put another way, is it better for the government to continue going into debt to operate projects like this with potentially dubious returns
Yes. The government is not a business. It does not need to turn a profit. Government services are not products for the generation of profit.
Nobody said anything about profit. We don't need to move the goal posts here.
There is a difference between the government operating programs with tax dollars and operating programs with fantasy money that ultimately hurts every single citizen.
This framing is off. Weather data isn’t a fucking mars habitat, it’s core infrastructure. Airplane travel, agriculture, emergency response, and private weather services all depend on it. If anything, handing it off to profit-driven firms creates more risk with things like black-box pricing, gaps in data coverage, or national security issues.
And, “dubious returns” ignores that some of the highest-leverage investments in history looked like this. Government-funded satellite weather programs, GPS, and early internet tech weren’t obviously profitable, but I'm so glad we wasted tax dollars on that.
The government obtains weather data in other ways. This isn't an all-or-nothing thing based on balloons...