I don't know what Hillary actually believes in.

[joshcryer]

139. Completely agree.

I spent a lot of time on Space Politics (it's a blog) trying to say that SLS should've been scrapped completely and NASA should go the Saturn V route. One of the biggest concerns from the MIC when the Shuttle got scrapped was that the Shuttle SRBs were actually subsidizing the military's ballistic missile program (that was so fucked up when I learned that; something you just don't think about).

Put the J-2X into hard development and make another Saturn V, call it Saturn VI or something. In the short term that'd be harder because you're looking at basically going back to the drawing board and building a whole new rocket. And government is highly resistant against such risk taking. It's actually a feature of bureaucracy, because if you're constantly changing things up, the system becomes unstable and nothing gets done.

The DEA and even more so the MIC are hard to get rid of for those reasons. I've noted this recently but we do like to talk about the US's encroachment on other countries by building bases there. What we forget to recognize in that debate is that the US has a lot of military bases at home, too, and each one fuels a local economy and each local economy is represented by someone who has to recognize that. This is a very tough thing to sell to the representatives. But the population can change it, just not quickly. Hickenlooper got elected in 2010, a bad year for Democrats, because he pushed back against an expansion of the army bases in Colorado.

I don't see Clinton rocking the boat but I do see stuff happening that we may not like. Social Security is going to have to be fixed, raising the cap is the most logical route, but it can't happen without a united (or fully controlled) congress. I think the most likely scenario is Social Security gets cut (age raise, CCPI) in exchange for addressing the student loan problem which is going to seriously affect the economy in the coming years. We'll probably also get the corporate tax rate lowered in exchange for some loopholes being closed. These things are just things that have to be addressed for the future, it doesn't matter who gets elected. The options are pretty damn slim unless you have a super majority and can get things done.