On top of that, these things make the US money. We have, by far, the strongest pharmaceutical and medical technology industry anywhere. Those companies pay taxes.
(Those companies also screw us and the government over in myriad ways, and that should be addressed, but cutting off the research system that supports the entire industry in like throwing out the baby without even draining the bathwater.)
political opponents of the newly elected administration are obviously going to go fully hysterical over any change, they already did last time. the science industries in the US aren't going anywhere, neither is research at the universities.
the ideological discrimination and money laundering coming out of these departments are going to end. and did we all forget about COVID? The fact that the NIH funded the research that happened in china ILLEGALLY, because this was a really stupid idea and we found that out the hard way, and it was covered up, and we were lied to, it killed millions, destroyed economies on a global scale.... do we really not want to see this agency dissected under a microscope? They need to be investigated.
this is the grant, but this was public info for years https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Year-...
The federal government almost certainly does absurdly overspend, but you’re missing the point: all of these drops in the bucket add up to far less than the deficit.
Also, for better or for worse, operating departments efficiently may well be the executive branch’s job, but setting all these budgets is Congress’s job, not the executive branch’s. In fact, Congress tried, not all that long ago, to allow the President to veto specific line items, and the Supreme Court struck it down:
I'll shortcut it real quick - we're all dead from lung cancer and leaded gasoline, so there's no one to do the calculation.
Oil companies weren't going to publish research saying leaded gas was bad. Tobacco companies weren't going to publish research saying cigarettes were bad. Have fun being healthy when you inhale leaded gasoline every day.
Forget about things like, you know, the internet. Or any medicine.
BTW, private companies are not paying for basic biological research. Good luck making a drug when no one knows what target to drug. VC firms will park their money in the bank instead. The value from biotechs is already marginal - investment basically vanished when interest rates went above 4.
Ive also been told in the past that its somehow ok that the government never breaks even, I can handle that maybe Im too stupid/uneducated to get it... but nobody ever even tries. Use little words, Im sure we will make progress. How can the government continue to exist and not go broke if it continually spends more than it brings in?
That's just one (big and easy to recall) example. There are countless.
Spending public money on public research grows the economy. Cutting it is penny wise and pound foolish.
I work at a biotech. We have $150 million in private funding. My biotech wouldn't exist, and I wouldn't have a job if it weren't for decades of public research doing the foundational work that allows us to target a protein to make a drug to help people. None of that would exist if not for NIH, NSF etc
And Musk has stumbled into several known right-wing conspiracy theories based on knee-jerk reactions, so I find it far more likely that he’s just fishing to validate his pre-held knee-jerk opinions rather than doing a careful investigation.
If I were president I would probably cut from military spending - but at some point that becomes painful to cut aswell.
A lot of people have misunderstood me in this thread, at no point do I want to see public research cut. Its just that the same people who are worried about what climate change will bring over next 50 years (and I am too!) dont seen to feel any sense of alarm at the federal government living outside its means for the next 50 years, and I can not understand why
I’m not sure how to explain this to you, really - you’re fundamentally stuck, I think, on the idea that the gov is like a business or a household, and needs to budget the same way. It really doesn’t.
Maybe think of it this way, to start to get your head around it: current debt is just over 100% of GDP - so in some sense the US has borrowed about a years worth of production. 100% sounds scary, but does 12 months sound so scary? Would you consider yourself in catastrophic debt if you owed a year of your salary?
Personally I wish my mortgage was only a year of my salary!
Consider the idea that without decades of money printing, your house might only cost 1 year of salary in the first place
Or maybe let me ask it a other way - if the govt really doesnt need to balance the budget, why dont we have 50 aircraft carriers and free healthcare for all? Such huge sums of money go beyond merely number balancing, at some piint theyre forcefully managing the real resources of the nation
And the current finite number is nowhere close to causing a crisis for the US (Japan had two and a half times GDP in debt and did not collapse into hyperinflation or some other catastrophic fate, for example).
Because we invested in those technologies and they paid off handsomely. What you are seeing is the result of "profit externalization"- laws like Bayh Dole allow universities to profit from the research they carry out under contract with the government.
Everything we did, we did because the alternatives were worse.
USG revenue/spending should be reasoned about in terms of the resources it directs, and the resulting effects on US and world GDP. Everything else is just accounting.
Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and defense are larger.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...