WTF is Rand Paul talking about here?

[Initech]

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) railed against what he cast as runaway government spending, days after he forced a short-lived government shutdown with a lengthy floor speech decrying the budget deficit.

Speaking to radio host John Catsimatidis on New York radio station AM 970, Paul accused lawmakers of kicking the can down the road on budget issues by repeatedly turning to continuing resolutions to keep the government running, and took aim at what he called "wasteful spending."

"I can give you a quick example of some of the stuff we spend money on," Paul said. "We spent $700,000 last year studying what Neil Armstrong said when he landed on the moon."

"Remember, he said 'one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.' Well, some idiot in government took $700,000 of taxpayer money and wanted to know whether he said 'one small step for man' or 'one small step for a man.' So that's the kind of stuff your government is spending money on," he said.
http://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/373282-rand-paul-rails-against-wasteful-spending-after-forcing-brief

Did the US government really spend $700,000 to figure out what exactly what Neil Armstrong said when he landed on the moon or is he pulling this stat out of his ass?

[Proud Liberal Dem]

1. Yeah, that sounds credible

Maybe somebody told him that as a joke. Or, as often is the case with Republicans, he is pulling that out of where the sun don't shine, which is always useful when they want to attack government spending, particularly when a Democrat is POTUS or when Democrats control Congress. This strikes me as being particularly bizarre.

[zipplewrath]

2. Accounting

This has been researched on and off for years. There was probably some effort to review the recordings using more modern sound technology. It may easily have been an excuse to research/demonstrate some new technology and they used this as a subject for their research. Also, be careful about accounting like this. It's pretty standard to estimate that one person, working for the government for 1 year, costs about $300,000. That's known as the "loaded rate" which pays for everything from their health insurance to the computers, lighting, air conditioning.....

It doesn't take long to burn through $700K, especially when you count all the "strap hangers" that can be included. (that's basically all the supervisors, secretaries, payroll folks, etc.)

[Initech]

11. Yeah I'd be willing to bet he didn't read past "$700,000".

[Cartoonist]

3. My guess

NASA spent $700,000 re-examing all the discoveries made from that trip. They spent $5 re-listening to the tape.

[ProfessorGAC]

6. And It Is All A Sunk Cost

If they didn't listen to the tape and review the findings of that mission, the people that work there still would be employed and still would cost the same to be part of that governmental department.

It did not cost one dime extra, no matter if they spent $5 or $500 listening to the tape.

All that said, i don't believe a thing this guy says, so he probably just made the whole thing up.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

4. Of course

Paul and other Republicans are always ALWAYS ignoring the ginormous "Tank in the room", namely military spending and how it is sacrosanct and inviolable.

[SharonClark]

5. Paul is a known liar, and there is this.....

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/politics-government/article122646074.html

Aya Collins, a spokeswoman for the National Science Foundation, said Paul’s report “mischaracterizes a substantive body of research with significant scientific value.”

“The foundation would have appreciated the chance to provide this report’s authors with the full context about the scope and significance of the research prior to publication,” Collins said....

That Neil Armstrong study? Collins said it supported research into treatments of autism, dyslexia, stuttering “and other conditions related to the brain mechanisms involved in understanding spoken language.”

“Contrary to Sen. Paul’s claim, NSF did not issue awards to specifically support research into Neil Armstrong’s moon landing quote,” she said.

[Sneederbunk]

7. Hasn't been the same since the lawn mowing incident.

[oasis]

13. He's spending more time in Wash.D.C. to avoid a rematch w/neighbor.

[Grammy23]

8. That is one way to characterize a real effort to study that event

and try to explain it in the smallest way possible. In order to make it seem like a total waste of resources, he focused on one of the tiniest details of the study. I find it quite unlikely that the only thing they analyzed was the recording of what Neil Armstrong said. But policians are fond of extracting one tiny detail like that and using that to represent the whole thing.

[onecaliberal]

9. ALL republicans are pathological liars. This has been a public service announcement.

[Initech]

10. Well yeah that's obvious!

[unblock]

12. typical of republican cherry-picking and distortion of facts

first, the government budget is staggeringly huge and they fund tons and tons of things. it's child's play to comb through them and find something dubious. that's perfectly normal and reasonable, no effort on such a scale can be 100% perfect in everything it does and that's hardly an excuse to take the kinds of drastic actions republicans would want.

second, as to the particulars of this story, the $700,000 was, in fact, used more generally to study how the brain understands speech. they needed to use sample speech so rather than making up a sentence, they used a famous one. the *goal* of the study was not to resolve any question about that particular quote, but gaining some insight into that quote might have been an incidental byproduct of the research.

a byproduct that they would have gotten, in effect, *for free*.

that's right. had they used a less famous quote or just made up their own sentences to dissect, we would have never heard about it and the study would have proceeded just fine. and it still would have cost $700,000.

so, in shoft, rand paul is a lying idiot.

but we already knew that.


http://www.wsbtv.com/news/washington-news-bureau/government-spends-700000-on-missing-letter-a/454687102

The grants, totaling more than $700,000, were distributed to improve and understand communications for people with conditions that may affect speech, like autism and Parkinson’s disease.

One of the grants came through money provided by the 2009 American and Recovery Reinvestment Act.

The NSF acknowledges that a portion of the money was used to try to find the missing “a," but it was also used to research how the brain understands speech.

[Ohiogal]

14. I think his concussion has addled his brain

even more so than it's usual addlement. (is that a word?)

[Orsino]

15. No, the US government did not.

Paul latched onto a real figure connected to an actual NSF grant, and reduced it to the absurdity being cited everywhere.

He's a fraud.