So right now the moonshots are privatized and the liberals are unhappy about it. When the pendulum shifts, the moonshots will be publicly funded again and the conservatives will be unhappy. Takeaway: happiness is unattainable.
I've never heard this take before, can you elaborate?
So we're left with mostly Elon Musk to carry the embers of our space program while Craig Venter, Google and a few other companies are increasingly taking on aging research, something I think will ultimately have enormous returns in the private sector. Just not in time for next quarter's results so David Einhorn (and his net worth of 1/40th that of Bill Gates) can go @#$% himself.
And for all the supposedly wasted public money on science cited by conservative sorts that got us here, it's trivial to find yet another dead-end weapons system or overseas military adventure that cost the taxpayers exponentially more.
To be fair, there is the Connectome Project ($100M annually) and also the Exascale Project ($126M) but those won't even cover the cost of a single F-22 fighter jet ($339M).
Defense R&D spending is way higher but nondefense spending is still keeping up with inflation [1]. There are some agencies who have had reduced budgets, such as National Institutes of Health, while DoE and NSF have enjoyed increased budgets. [2]
Overall I find your post hyperbolic and not consistent with the stats and figures. I'm assuming that your university's research was defunded and that's why you have adopted this world view. It's consistent with your experience but I believe that it doesn't represent funding in general.
But from the above articles, I see two trends.
From (1) Nonmilitary science funding has been effectively flat for a decade while military research was increasing annually roughly until a year or so into the Obama administration.
From (2) and its responses, the money itself is being misallocated to the top (just like everywhere else) and also into a metastasizing tumor of administrators:
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-11-21/the-troublin...
And then there are articles like this:
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/report/2014/...
http://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/nsffundhist_files/frame.htm
which imply the NSF is relatively OK but that the NIH is increasingly underfunded relative to GDP, no?
It's not like we've cracked mortality, figured out our own minds, or even cured a whole bunch of nasty diseases yet.