What kills me is that it's not even saving that much money.
The average salary for a government employee is $67k. Round it up to $100k, and multiply by 2 for the usual overhead. That means that removing 4,000 salaries saves us $800,000,000 a year. Or about .046% of the deficit.
(That's the amount of the shortfall. It's .012% of the budget.)
Employees aren't the driving factor in the cost of the government. A lot of the money goes out the door, in the form of entitlement payments, grants to states, and contracts. If you want to cut the budget seriously, you have to cancel programs, not just the individuals who manage them.
The article says that these 4,000 employees are 20% of the agency. Applying that to my estimate, that means you could fire everybody, and save $4 billion per year. That would still leave $21 billion in NASA's budget.
Canceling that, too, would not even be a rounding error in our $6.66 trillion budget and $1.27 trillion deficit.
It attracts a lot of attention, and removes the much-reviled government employees that they've spent decades demonizing. But it doesn't solve any of the budget problems, and doesn't even pretend to. So we're losing a key element of American prestige, and getting basically nothing in return.
lawlessone•16m ago
“Cecil Graham: What is a cynic?
Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing" - Oscar Wilde
jfengel•37m ago
The average salary for a government employee is $67k. Round it up to $100k, and multiply by 2 for the usual overhead. That means that removing 4,000 salaries saves us $800,000,000 a year. Or about .046% of the deficit.
(That's the amount of the shortfall. It's .012% of the budget.)
Employees aren't the driving factor in the cost of the government. A lot of the money goes out the door, in the form of entitlement payments, grants to states, and contracts. If you want to cut the budget seriously, you have to cancel programs, not just the individuals who manage them.
The article says that these 4,000 employees are 20% of the agency. Applying that to my estimate, that means you could fire everybody, and save $4 billion per year. That would still leave $21 billion in NASA's budget.
Canceling that, too, would not even be a rounding error in our $6.66 trillion budget and $1.27 trillion deficit.
It attracts a lot of attention, and removes the much-reviled government employees that they've spent decades demonizing. But it doesn't solve any of the budget problems, and doesn't even pretend to. So we're losing a key element of American prestige, and getting basically nothing in return.
lawlessone•16m ago