Trump, Congress approve largest U.S. research spending increase in a decade
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
In fact the budget Donald Trump proposed [1] mainly was massive increases in military spending with sharp cuts to many domestic agencies (EPA -25%, Education -5%), including many research agencies they don't agree with (like the NOAA [2]).
But what happened is many Republicans in the freedom caucus refused to vote for a budget that increased the debt by so much, so a compromise was required as Democratic votes were going to be needed. So to vastly oversimplify, Republicans wanted higher military spending, Democrats wanted higher domestic spending, and the compromise was reached that everybody got everything and who cares about the national debt. The bill actually passed in a very bipartisan way, with 62% of republicans and 59% of democrats in the House voting for the final bill, but with many of the "no" votes for different reasons (no DACA solution, debt increase too much, not enough wall spending, etc).
So while these increases are good (if you happen to like R&D spending), they aren't due to congress shifting their spending priorities, they are just due to a massive increase in the debt.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/trump-...
2: https://www.aip.org/fyi/2017/trump-budget-cuts-noaa-16-slash...
Obama, facing the biggest recession in a century(which requires government spending to stimulate the economy) only increased the debt 74% after 8 years. The amount he added to the debt over 8 years is likely to be surpassed by Trump in just 4.
If there's one relatively fiscal conservative party in the US, it's definitely not the GOP. Yet the media just takes at their word and continues to associate them with fiscal conservatism.
[1] - https://www.thebalance.com/us-debt-by-president-by-dollar-an...
And then they give all the money to the Republican Presidents when they come into power (see Tax cuts, which I personally consider to be lavish spending)
There's definitely a large group of Americans (likely a minority, but still a large group) who genuinely care about the debt, deficit, and balancing the budget. But there's really no major powers in Washington who actually do care. (And the few Senators who do care are nutjobs IMO. Its difficult to find a "reasonable" deficit hawk who doesn't believe in "Gold Standard " or other crap)
I'm talking about simple, and reasonable ways to get rid of the deficit here: increase taxes slightly, reduce spending where we can. Is it really that hard? Alas, no one I'm aware of is for both increasing taxes and cutting spending.
Apparently, cutting spending puts you in the group of nutjobs who believe that cutting taxes magically increases revenues due to "economic growth".
Increasing taxes (which is championed by the left) also puts you in with the Bernie Bros who then spend all the money made on free college education for everyone, and other such projects we can't afford.
The huge money sink in the US budget is undoubtedly the military. After the current increase the US probably spends more on military than the next 13 or 14 countries combined. If that can be reduced to spending about 2.5x what China spends(still overkill considering the allies the US has) then you have about 350 billion a year to either spend or reduce the deficit with. More than enough to eliminate child hunger, healthcare problems and infrastructure issues.
Case in point: Europeans don't have for-profit companies extracting wealth from uneducated Americans.
There's fundamental problems to the US's education system at play here. We can't throw money at the problem and hope for it to work. We have to culturally fix those issues.
National Accreditation is basically a joke. Only regional accreditation matters. If people actually want to have "free college for everyone in the USA", step one would be to actually DEFINE a college education on the national level.
Which the USA does NOT have yet. We are very far away from the point of "sink money into this project". Ever talk education in the USA? How did "Common Core" do? The political culture is incredibly sensitive and paranoid about education changes.
Just think about how such a "free tuition" project would work. You'd have to have a national team standardize a curriculum. You'd have to then inspect various colleges to make sure they're up to standard. The ones that aren't up to standard lose federal money (aka: free tuition money), so it would be a death-spell for any school who fails.
Its not compatible with US Culture. US Citizens are too particular about how their children are taught, and would never accept people from far away telling them that... well... Thomas Jefferson is a founding father (https://thinkprogress.org/texas-board-of-education-cuts-thom...) or that the Earth is older than 6000 years old, or that Radioactive dating works.
Education barely even is a money problem. Its mostly political. Frankly though, I'd prefer if we fixed our High Schools first. Clearly a high school education isn't enough for most jobs anymore.
In 2017 dollars Regan increased the debt by ~ 4.15 trillion, while Obama increased the debt by ~ 8.88 trillion (using the numbers found at your link (which is just one way of counting the debt for a president), taking the the entire debt increase as a lump payment in the middle of the presidency and using this inflation calculator to estimate the amount forward to the present http://www.in2013dollars.com .
So in absolute terms Obama increased the debt by more than twice as much as Regan who had "insane deficit spending" according to you.
Also you state that Trump is on track to increase the deficit in 4 years more than Obama did in 8 years. I believe this is a lie -- the estimated numbers even on that website show 1.233+1.225+1.193+1.119=4.775 trillion over four years for Trump which is marginally less than Obama spent over his first four years (even excluding the Economic Stimulus Act in 2009) of 0.672+1.276+1.229+1.652=4.829 trillion even before adjusted for inflation. On what planet is 4.8 trillion more than 8.9 trillion?
This can easily be fixed with some more tax cuts if you believe the GOP.
http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1148666/FULLTEXT01...
"Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming. Most importantly, got $700 Billion to rebuild our Military, $716 Billion next year...most ever. Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment." (emphasis mine)
Anyway, I don't think he cares about it as much as you think. He knows who his voters are. He also is aware that it makes people like you irritated so that you keep talking about him, which keeps him in the news.
Anyway, I don't know why the language I used matters. You knew what I meant and had to be pedantic. My second point was more important.
...because, as everyone knows, the US military is in shambles compared to the rest of the world...
(I'm not trying to weigh in on the politics, just pointing out one context where that remark makes sense)
https://www.armed-services.senate.gov
You can do a "wikipedia dive" on that site and take away a depth of understanding that, honestly, probably exceeds 99% of political commentators'.
Knowledge we would be discovering 2038 might be discovered this year. If there is some sort of Moore’s Law for investment in research, by 2050, we’d have technology from 2150 at the current pace?
That being said, throwing money at science and expecting predictable and measurable results on any sort of definable timetable isn't realistic.
Even if the human genome project had been completed in 1993 that's not a promise that every sort of discovery or applications based on that knowledge would have been discovered between 1993 and 2008. And invariably there's things we've learned between 2008 and 2010 that is a dependency for some of the work utilizing the human genome. So sure, somehow if we knew everything in 1993 that we did in 2003 we'd be years ahead. And if we knew everything we did in 1993 in 1893 woah, just think of that. And so on and so on.
More funding can help in the quest to learn about the universe. But you can't just buy knowledge (doubly so for a specific technology or somesuch) by the year, decade, or century. Money doesn't have that power, and that's not how science works.
Could the project have been completed in 1993 with infinite funding? Just taking into account computing power put into the project, it was exponentially greater in 2003, so perhaps in 1993 it wasn't enough. Maybe it would have taken until 2003 no matter what, as the limiting factor wasn't money but something else.
Simply, that we spend more on research, in general, then would we reach the ability to solve the Human Genome Project earlier. I picked this project randomly. The LHC and Higgs could be another.
I'm talking about when internet transaction started becoming an opportunity, there was already a well developed (if esoteric) field of cryptography that could build solutions for that application... and it turned out that was the tip of the iceberg of what crypto is doing nowadays.
On the threat side, there are many examples of Soviet jet can do X, therefore the US has to dip into research on say allow metals, to build a jet that can do Y and counter the threat.
We don't know what grand projects are tractable with today's or tomorrow's technology - beat cancer or invent fusion first, anyone? We know in the future we'll need answers to questions we haven't even asked yet; that's what you're really buying with your research dollars.
It wasn't the funding that fixed things- it was the competitive spirit and a few smart people with duct tape.
It seems to me that these kinds of arguments have a "that which is seen vs. that which is unseen" problem. All the preliminary R&D that sets the stage and builds interest gets forgotten after the big "Eureka!" In reality "Eureka!" is a borderline myth. Look at any big invention and you can find that a lot of fertilizer was added to the soil before it sprouted.
Nobody's denying that the HGP and Celera were able to rest on a strong foundation, but the reality is that the HGP was running itself lazily because they had no competition. I worked in genomics at the time and it was really a sleepy corner of bioinformatics.
I feel like one could draw some connection from this to the fact that technological progress seems to grow at a quadratic-hyperbolic (and not an exponential, as Ray Kurzweil would have you believe) rate, but alas, I can't think of a way to do so right now.
How does it seem to do that? If you're going to call somebody misleading, might as well go through the effort of linking to data that you consider 'not misleading'.
We've been making transistor, silicon based, x86 CPU's for 40+ years now. ARM is 33 years old. And we're just making improvements and refinements to those and to most technology for that matter. I would have to so the only thing that's growing at a quadratic-hyperbolic rate is adoption and application, not the technology itself.
The president has to agree to the budget submitted to him by Congress, so there's usually a lot of discussions between the two parties. The caveat here is that Congress can override a presidential veto.
Pretty amazing
https://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/10/25/2016/national...
This is wrong since it doesn't take into account other governments and entities outside of the US that hold treasury securities.
That's the harbinger of doom, when treasury bond rates start to act weird, no one knows what level of debt that will happen at so the hand wringing over X trillions is kind of silly.
Also bear in mind a lot of that debt is held by Americans...
In any case a fundamental problem is that we have rather more debt than we have any feasible way to pay. A very large part of that debt is held in the form of Treasury bonds issued to Social Security. Which leads to Social Security being financially solvent on paper for many decades to come. In fact it looks like once the Baby Boom retires, either Social Security is solvent or the US government is solvent, but not both.