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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. "
The military spending really is needed.
Why is military spending "needed"? Most of it is spent on a stupid war that we had no business getting into, and much more is spent maintaining military presence on 700 bases around the world. How about we end the war right away, shut down all the foreign bases (that's why we have a Navy, after all), and trim down the military to a size appropriate for defending the country's borders? We don't need a huge military for that, and we can even keep much of the Navy and the nukes, just in case anyone gets any ideas about invading us.
Some like to point to WWII as some kind of evidence that we need to be the world's policemen, but times have changed. Other countries need to pay for their own security, and we're not in any danger of invasion like we might have been back then: that all changed with the development of the thermonuclear bomb and MAD.