2009 US Budget Holds Mixed News For Science

sciencehabit writes "ScienceNOW has the details on the impacts of President Bush's appropriation request — bad news for biomedicine, better news for the physical sciences. Some agencies really get slammed and many projects are jeopardized. The Bush administration's theory is that a 5-year run-up in National Institutes of Health funding, which ended in 2003, left the federal funding picture seriously unbalanced. Each year since then the administration's budget request for science has moved to shift the balance. Biomedical researchers are expected to lobby hard in Congress for relief. The NYTimes notes that prognosticators expect Congress not to act on a budget until the next President arrives, betting on it being a Democrat. "

Comments

Re:But funding is up?

[tjstork]

Never said anything about funding. I'm talking about the distortion of scientific research to meet political goals. I'm talking about slashing proven space programs to shift money into a single legacy-oriented goal of a Mars mission. I'm talking about pushing abstinence programs when we've already proven that educating kids about STDs and contraception is far more effective. It's not the size of the budget, but his general attitude towards academia.

This is a legitimate argument and the choice is not as clear cut as you make it, and, contains a few distortions of its own.

First off, you are flat out wrong on space. The present Bush Mars plan is a direct consequence of Zubrin coming before the house and pitching his idea for a manned mars plan. The Bush plan IS the Zubrin plan, get it? Zubrin, you know, scientist! Prior to that, the Bush plan was to build unmanned nuclear rockets via the Prometheus project to go look for oceans on Europa, and possibly life. Of course, that got killed because the left wing got all in a tizzy about nuclear power in space, even though we have had the technology since the 1960s.

Speaking of nuclear power, the left has done a remarkable job of distorting every fact there is about the science and relative safety of nuclear power, and the effect of that has basically imposed fossil fuels to the point that you have, out of your irrational nuclear fears and lies about nuclear power, have caused global warming. Just look at the US energy portfolio, and understand that, if the left wing and environmental whack jobs had not have whined about nuclear power, there WOULD BE NO GLOBAL WARMING. All those dead bears and underwater cities are a direct consequence of your knee jerk reaction to a safe technology, largely fueled by science that you choose not to understand.

So please, go on about stem cells (which, if they were so lucrative, don't you think a Pharma company can pay for the research itself? or a university?) Please, go on about abstinence versus telling kids to have sex. Whatever.

But until the left wing comes around and grows up about nuclear power, the entire commitment to science on their side is a total joke.