The NSF budget is ~$10billion. That's about half of NASA's, 1.2% of the DoD's, 0.5% of the discretionary budget ($1.7 trillion).
Why is this the focus of the admin? Science is one of the few things the US is doing well.
Why is this the focus of the admin? Science is one of the few things the US is doing well.
This probably won't end with millions of Americans starving to death, but I'm sure the administration is hard at work looking for ways to destroy our seed corn.
People on the left are going to be caught totally flat-footed if they don't pull their head out of their bubble. Trump is a populist president. He was elected by working class individuals and so far he has shown every intent of following through for them. People on the left don't recognize it because they don't recognize the tools that right wing people use to stimulate the working class.
Right now, if Trump has his way, people under $150k will pay no income tax, no tax on tips, increased tax on millionaire earners, and tariffs to shield American blue collar jobs.
Trump is dangerous because he is an idiot and recklessly pulling levers. He is clearly bent on the idea of abolishing democracy so he can be the king of America savior of the factory worker.
He is clearly not working for billionaires when he tanked the stock market and spiked bond rates playing his tariff game. Stop using that dog whistle because it makes it clear you are ungrounded from what is happening, unless all you care about is praise from other detached people.
[1]https://www.ft.com/content/93a064db-624d-413f-a751-0b957f8e3...
This has been countered better elsewhere, but the gist is that this proposed taxation is for posturing only -- it's taxes on wages, not on income, and the rich don't get their wealth from wages.
Great, so he won't need to cut the NSF then?
Except that Trump's tariffs are causing massive financial uncertainty for small/medium-size businesses. If you want to onshore manufacturing and production, and specifically build up the blue-collar class, you don't implement tariffs immediately and unilaterally. You plan for them to be implemented over time and give businesses the opportunity to shift their procurement and production to domestic sources.
When you implement tariffs with no warning, the only businesses that can absorb those increased costs are the largest businesses. Then those large businesses can also start to buy up every other business, or at least outcompete on price long enough to monopolize the market.
>Trump is dangerous because he is an idiot and recklessly pulling levers
> He is clearly not working for billionaires...
Not working for Wall St or Main St.
It's a food fight between opposing elites. ("The grass suffers when elephants fight.")
As you surely know, some do advocate crashing our economy, enabling them to seize even more power. They use shibboleths like dark enlightenment, free enterprise, taxation is theft, yadda yadda.
"Trump said..." is the precursor to winning the fooled me again award.
Trump might have a populist appeal, but it doesn't make him a populist. The weight of Trump's actions and promises lie in all this deportation and culture war nonsense, not actually populist solutions to popular problems. None of these cuts are going to benefit the American populace at all. I doubt there will be a reduction in the taxes most Americans pay (this is just some new rhetoric from Trump, likely stemming from his horrible approval ratings because his administration is operating like shit), but there is already a reduction in the services populist America receives like social security and medicare.
The idea that a politician who seems to fundamentally want to destroy the mechanical functions of the government, operate an executive branch that is beyond the reproach of the courts, and privatize America's crucial social programs, does not comport with populism.
I don't even think the notion that Trump isn't working for billionaires because he tanked the stock market even makes sense. Did you not see the video where he points to his friend who made hundreds of millions that day? While smiling, joking, laughing? He's letting his best friends do inside trades on the huge market-moving moves Trump makes in the news and you think it's somehow not cronyism? I'm sorry, but your intuitions are off.
>People on the left don't recognize it [populism] because they don't recognize the tools that right wing people use to stimulate the working class.
I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole because it takes years to escape the ideological camp you grew into. But suffice to say, both sides ultimately want the same things and disagree on the route to take to that destination (while telling their base that obviously they are right, and obviously the other side is just evil).
I'm not talking about the route, I'm talking about the destination. A socialized medical plan is incredibly popular on both sides of the political spectrum and polls well with Trump's supporters. That's not an avenue, that's a destination. I have a feeling you will twist this around and try to make it how it can either be served by market forces or the gov't and that's just "idealogical" but populism is an ideology which I am accusing you of not understanding. You didn't engage with that. You just repeated your premise.
For as long as you have the cult of personality going, anyway. Which is plenty of time to put your men in key positions of power for when your charisma is no longer convincing enough.
Pulling someone out of that "it's an oxymoron" hole takes a long time. I don't want to go back and forth with you here trying to explain what right wing populism is here, and the philosophy behind it.
I don't "not believe" in right wing populism, I disagree with your assertions of how it functions and what its goals are and how that relates to your notion that populists want the same thing regardless of whether they are "left" or "right" and that it's just "different paths."
>It's because most people on the left are not aware that there even is a right wing populism.
This isn't even remotely true. What "left"ist stuff are you reading?
What actually matters is what he does. And nothing that he has done suggests to me that he will actually push for tax increases on the rich. It would be great to be proven wrong here, but I'm not holding my breath.
(Regardless, Trump can't raise taxes on anyone. Congress does that. On tax policy, it's not clear that even the MAGA fools in Congress will play ball if it upsets the rich people in their states.)
He also said he would end the Ukraine war on day 1.
> He is clearly not working for billionaires when he tanked the stock market and spiked bond rates playing his tariff game. Stop using that dog whistle because it makes it clear you are ungrounded from what is happening, unless all you care about is praise from other detached people.
Of course not. Why would anyone get the idea that Trump is working for billionaires? It's not as if he hawked cars on the White House lawn for the world's richest man.
Speaking of ungrounded, detached people..
Trump makes the billionaires work for _him_.
It’s sad, but that’s the whole thing.
Real answer: universities are "woke" and liberal. This is their punishment.
Destroying science research is just collateral damage.
The issue is not that they don't like the NSF in general or that science funding is breaking the bank. The issue is that people they hate rely on the NSF.
This is a pretty old belief system amongst conservatives. God and Man at Yale was published seventy years ago and argued that universities should actively teach that Christ is divine and that free market capitalism is the best thing ever at all times and in all venues.
The question is about real actual resource distribution. SS is drawing more resources from young people than it is giving back. That's an actual problem, no matter how many tabs you add to your excel spreadsheet.
> The SS Trust Fund is numbers on a spreadsheet. It doesn't matter.
"Numbers on a spreadsheet" is meaningless, you just described functionally all of accounting for the entire economy, and if that's a reason it "doesn't matter" then the debt also "doesn't matter" because it's also just numbers on a spreadsheet. What do you think nearly all money is?
> It's gone and spent.
Simply, factually wrong. If so, then so's your 401k. And all the money in your bank account.
> The question is about real actual resource distribution. SS is drawing more resources from young people than it is giving back. That's an actual problem, no matter how many tabs you add to your excel spreadsheet.
You're wrong about Social Security (and medicare, for that matter) contributing to the budget deficit, so you're trying to change the topic to "is social security's funding fair?"
The SS trust fund produced a surplus. Boomers then spent the entire surplus on their own deficit spending. There is no actual cash in a bank — it was put on a spreadsheet and then spent on other budget priorities — wars, military, medicaid, everything else. The SS trust fund was one of the main reasons the US could spend profligately for the past couple decades!
The SS Trust Fund is NOT A BANK ACCOUNT. I cannot emphasize this enough. The money got spent.
Now, boomers are retiring and demanding that money — which they already spent — back again. That's absurd double spending which impacts young taxpayers as inflation or deficit spending.
The money didn't "get spent", it's invested. If that counts as "got spent" then your savings account also "got spent" (funding loans) and your retirement accounts also "got spent" (buying bonds, treasuries, securities) so you can go ahead and sign those over to me since they're empty anyway—right?
If the money had been spent then it would have reduced deficit spending by that much, but it didn't, because that spending was funded by debt (some of which the SS trust fund owns). If that isn't "real" then the entire debt isn't real so who cares if anything contributes to it?
Framing it that was is just priming us for the government to actually empty the account by defaulting on that debt, i.e. rendering the assets owned by the fund worthless.
It's true in the same way that it's true to say that cars can fly, which is to say, that it's way more true to say that no, they cannot, even if yes, sure, the other thing is "true".
> Lol what an internet tough guy.
Please take care to read and observe the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
More seriously, the NSF isn't the focus of the admin. They're going through every federal agency making cuts, not singling out this one in particular.
That's BS. They are already bragging about raising defense spending.
Sure, but that's the exception. The cuts to the NSF are the norm.
If you actually split up the line items to the point where NASA and the NSF are separate it would be 9 exceptions or more.
Not to mention that the Department of Defense has never passed a financial audit in the last seven years and money frequently disappears into contractors who are known to delay projects on purpose to make more money.