This last election was mostly decided by the people who didn’t vote. The apathetic, the cynics and so on.
Isn't this the counterargument? Why should the US disproportionately pay for world-benefiting research instead of Europe or China?
The answer, of course, is that other governments do also fund some research, but each government decides how much they want to spend and on what. Which applies as much to each individual state as it does to the federal government.
> California already bears a large burden and that's on top of subsidizing other states through federal taxes.
It sounds like you're arguing that cutting federal programs would benefit California, because then they would have that money to appropriate as they choose for themselves.
What a loaded question. Could it possibly be that the US does so because it disproportionately benefits from said research?
States would need to increase taxes to fund more research, which would cause some of the wealthiest residents to flee to low-tax states. This would result in the pro-research states losing tax revenue and eventually cutting their research funding. The decline in research funding would result in the U.S. experiencing brain drain similar to what has been experienced in red states[1] for decades.
Some of us don't want the U.S. to experience brain drain that will cause our country to become more like the rural states that suffer from the loss of their best and brightest.
The people who actually pay most of the taxes aren't the billionaires (both because there aren't that many of them and because they already engage in sophisticated tax avoidance), they're the likes of senior partners at law firms, cardiologists, successful small business owners, etc. But these people are not only not going to move to Wyoming for lower taxes, because they can't operate the businesses that them that amount of money there, a lot of the reason Wyoming has lower taxes is because they're large net recipients of federal funds. If they had to fund their own stuff that would make it more attractive to live in the states that are currently doing the funding.
Moreover, research funding has always been a small proportion of government spending, e.g. the NIH is ~0.7% of the federal budget. This does not require a large change in tax revenues to move somewhere else.
> Some of us don't want the U.S. to experience brain drain that will cause our country to become more like the rural states that suffer from the loss of their best and brightest.
The first search result from your link is an article saying that isn't actually happening:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/tenure/20...
This can work, but only in an alternate universe where the federal government doesn't get nearly all the tax income. If we abolished federal tax and increased state taxes proportionally, this would totally work. But not the world as it exists today.