Some US scientists consider moving overseas to continue their research

Just one example: The F-35 fighter plane project has an estimated cost over its lifespan of 1.5 trillion (no joke) dollars.

Another example: the Virginia Class fast-attack submarine. 2 billion a piece. Around 30 are planned.

Who cares about a superconducting super collider? It's even peanuts in terms of money. Fusion reactor? Renewable energy? Infrastructure?

You are at the wrong side of innovation.

I'll go with jobs, but only tax-financed ones. I'll go, tentatively, with discoveries, although everything to come out of the LHC so far is simply confirmation of the same old Standard Model we've known since the 70s. The SSC would have been able to probe higher energies, but as things are standing, there is no indication of new physics; if it exists, it could easily be out of range for both the LHC and the hypothetical SSC.

More to the point, the economic value of those discoveries is almost certain to be 0, for simple reasons of scale.

As for innovation, what has particle physics brought which would not equally well be brought by any number of other large scale technological projects? We all know the "WWW invented at CERN" story, but surely we also all realize that the physics input to the WWW was exactly 0, that any large organization needing to handle large number of documents over a heterogeneous network would have come up with something similar, that others probably did, and that the real reason CERN's solution took off was it's being free open source?

Particle physics is a luxury. At best, it's pursued for reasons of intellectual curiosity. Trying to portray it as an economic engine is not going to convince anyone worth convincing.

Right. Because it's not like you're trying to make a (conservative) political point every time I see one of your comments.

The problem with the data you've cited is that it actually shows the problem you're dismissing: science funding has declined in real terms (let alone inflation-adjusted terms) since the end of the Clinton administration. There's been a huge bloodletting -- across the board -- over the last 13 years. An entire generation of US scientists has been decimated by pointless budget cuts.

If you don't know anything at all about science, you might look at the overall trend of this graph and say: "science funding has gone up since 1976, so shut up and stop whining". This is the simpleton's interpretation of the graph. A more nuanced interpretation is that we invested billions of dollars into training of new scientists starting in the Clinton administration (~1996), and right about the time those new scientists hit the point in their careers when they needed funding to really get their labs started (~2000), we stranded them. There's an entire generation of scientists with structural under-employment because of this phenomenon, and yes, they're leaving the country (I personally know a few who have, and I can't fault their reasoning. You go where you can work. If I were still doing science, I'd probably be gone, too.)

But that's not even the most important story. An intelligent observer looks at this graph and says: the US budget for 2013 is $3.8 TRILLION. We spend $600 BILLION on the department of defense, and nearly $900 BILLION on Social Security (aka: old people who contribute almost nothing to the growth of the economy). Yet we're trying to "save money" by shaving a few tens of billions (that's 0.8% of total federal spending, in case you're bad at math) off of the one tiny part of our government that has consistently delivered outsized real returns to the economy. Any economist -- conservative or liberal -- will tell you that you don't make your budget by nibbling at the smallest line items while ignoring big expenses.

This is what we call "cutting off your nose to spite your face". Stupid, pointless, and definitely not conservative.

As for scientists leaving the country, I half-agree with you. It's not a sudden crisis in the US, but has more to do with the improving and more competitive economies of other nations, which in turn makes them more attractive places for scientists to work. In the past, you could assume that people would come to the US because it was the best place for academic freedom and to have a financially rewarding science career. Now that there is more competition, we should probably be looking for ways to maintain that status rather than resting on the assumption that we're #1.

If there's one thing American's like its creating their personal identity solely using their job title. I believe the article assumes domestic readers know this peculiarity. The article is full of "Fifty-five percent know a colleague who has lost a job or expects to soon." and “I have just laid off my technician and will lose my postdoc in six months,”

There are no open jobs, and those unemployed workers will have to do "something" if they intend to eat and obtain medical care and shelter. So I would assume once they're hired as day care workers or bartenders or waiters, displacing the mere high school diploma holders, they'll no longer be considered scientists, but be considered taxi drivers or whatever.

There should be data on numbers employed, or fraction of the population employed, or salaries in those fields. For example if there were an extreme shortage of biology grads, you'd expect to see starting salaries for the DNR around $200K or so. Oh wait, most of those grads end up at Starbucks.

The picture is not as rosy for scientists outside the medical field.