In Monday’s part 1 of “VSE and the Retirement of Baby Boomers,” Charles Miller and Jeff Foust port the conventional wisdom about budgeting to the space discussion. These are two of the most well-read, connected and smart people on space topics. I’d like to give folks addressing this issue some more texture to add some items that are not part of the conventional intergenerational budget debate which can be summarized perennially as “vote for me or things will all go to hell pretty soon if they aren’t already there”, but every year real personal income rises and real government spending minus interest payments rise; life expectancy goes up and almost all the Cassandras are proven wrong, but by then they’ve long since moved on to the next pending calamity. Here are the unconventional texture points:

• Personal income is continuing to rise ahead of inflation such that every generation earns about twice as much per capita as the one before
• That is, a falling percent of the federal budget should still buy more robotics, rockets, science, human spaceflight, exploration (and settlement?!) even as it buys fewer staffers and is a lower share of GDP
• Bracket creep, estate tax and alternative minimum tax are going to increase receipts above historical revenues and changes that fix these are likely to fix macro spending issues at the same time
• The boomers are likely to work part time or full time during retirement years
• The boomers are more comfortable with the stock market and are likely to earn higher returns there than previous generations of pensioners
• The boomer echo will put more workers in the worker to retiree ratio again as the boomers die off before the boomer echo generation retires
• Between Federal, State, County and Local taxes, we are taxed together at above the monopoly rate; if there were a coordinated decrease, revenues would increase for each
• Private spending on human spaceflight will rise and is already about 0.3% of NASA spending; depending on how you count capital spending by people like Bigelow, it’s in the single digit percent
• First-party State, County and Local spending and incentives for space flight will increase as more states cross the income threshold of the US and USSR economies in the late 1950s which was about 1/8 what it is now for the US. California has already crossed this. Texas and New York will in the next 20 years. If space gets cheaper, Florida may enter the ranks of states that could have their own space programs. Initiative by a vocal minority may rocket this issue into the fore. Oklahoma and New Mexico are more like the USSR in the space race looking at space as a way to look far bigger than their economies suggest and to leap frog other states in an emerging industry. The Soyuz is still flying and is now profitable even as Russia has an economy 1/6 the size of the US (USSR had 1/2 the US economy in 1960) so the space portion of their strategy is validated. And may even work for New Mexico which has about 1/12 the size of the 1960 USSR economy now
• Boomers dying will likely dry up support for a cargo-cult do-nothing NASA as memories of Apollo die with them; Obama can be seen as a coming attraction of how the next generation will treat NASA
• Support for ITAR and missile counter proliferation will wane, but existing techniques will ossify as civilian launches start to dwarf military ones as long as there is no space 9/11 which has a mixed effect on cost of flight
• Competition and achievement from the private sector will put pressure on budgets to achieve more value for the dollar, but at the same time make obtaining that value easier