Slashdot Mirror
Obama Says 3% of GDP Should Fund Science Research And Development
tritonman writes "Obama wants to set a goal that the US spend 3% of its GDP on scientific research and development. 'I believe it is not in our character, American character, to follow — but to lead. And it is time for us to lead once again. I am here today to set this goal: we will devote more than 3 percent of our GDP to research and development,' Obama said in a speech at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences."
I'm for this if they can keep administration costs below 1 billion.
...how much were we spending before? This doesn't seem like a tremendously large number.
We already spend more than 3% of GDP on Science R&D....
Oh, he means the government should spend 3% of GDP on R&D. Of course. Can't trust that shifty-eyed private industry. You know... The ones generating the GDP.
I am a big supporter of getting back into a R&D based funding operation. And I don't mean we should be R&Ding war tools, we should be developing better telecommunications tools, better healthcare tools, better computers for both business and consumer, better cars, better planes, better boats, better shipping technology... everything. There is no reason that America shouldn't be the world leader in all of these things.
Crackin' Wise - Blogging about whatever we want
Otherwise, I just dunno how we're gonna pay for everything here in the very recent past.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
FTA:
In recent years, he said, "scientific integrity has been undermined and scientific research politicized in an effort to advance predetermined ideological agendas." He then drew chuckles, commenting: "I want to be sure that facts are driving scientific decisions, not the other way around," Obama said.
hope none of the 420$ billion makes it's way towards the discovery institute.
They don't understand the future value of sending someone to the moon, or studying basic science of bird mating habits, or increasing blue laser efficiency 10% and how it eventually becomes useful. He just wants a job he can report to, and won't think about the future. Nevermind that his job might become outdated in 5 years...
It would be nice if the media would stop glorifying athletes, and stop portraying scientists/engineers/academics as nerds or evil.
..........FULL STOP.
I would like to think they are making this decision because someone finally realized that money doesn't actually grow on trees.
How about we let individuals and businesses decide where they're going to put their R&D money, not some ivory-tower bureaucrats who are firmly removed from reality?
Really: when it comes to deciding what to do with 3% of your income, don't you want YOU making that decision, instead of total strangers you don't know and who know you less and who are operating on non-sequitor ulterior motives?
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
While this sounds like a good idea, I worked for a while at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. It was the poster child of government waste. Most of the funding we received was from the DOE and the DOD. Back in its hay-day the INEL was a front runner in nuclear research. Now its a money-pit. 2/3rds of all grant money is skimmed off the top for "overhead" (pays for buildings, security, office space, etc). To make matters worse, each engineer/scientist has a billable rate. This billable rate is again 2/3rds overhead. Half of your time goes to writing grants to get more money. Very few people there were doing actual science. It was very sad for me to experience directly after getting my degree.
The INEL is not alone in its current state. People I worked with from other labs have similar or worse horror stories.
I understand the desire, I just don't have enough confidence in our government to not botch it up.
I would like to think they are making this decision because someone finally realized that money doesn't actually grow on trees.
And that's what the research is for: Money Trees.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Unless you want to pit your galleys against Aztec ironclads you'll want an R&D of 20% until you get infantry and artillery. After that you can dial it down to 10% and focus on production.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
In other words, our children and grandchildren should pay for technological advances that make our lives easier.
More like their lives easier. Research is slow process - it takes years, maybe decades for an idea to progress from the sketching board to store shelves.
Gold farming is more lucrative than money trees.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Eliminate income tax and replace it with voluntary program where people can donate a share of their income to be used for purposes of their choice and if they want to fund science fine, if they don't then they accept the risk that they and their children will be living in a country that is lagging behind in science. What is wrong with that?
If I pay for this research, then everyone gets the benefits. If someone else pays for it, then everyone still gets the benefits. But what if everyone waits for someone else to pay for it?
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
... he would get Congress to repeal the Bayh-Dole Act, and give the fruits of publicly-funded research back to the real researchers and the public, instead of allowing it to be monopolized by department heads and multinational corporations.
Does the public get any payback if research develops the Next Big Thing? Nope, the scientist goes off, gets a patent and gets wildly personally wealthy.
That would explain why all the kids these days want to grow up to be a wealthy scientist, rather than a pro athlete, rapper, or movie star. Stupid science, stealing our best minds!
I am not a crackpot.
If a man with free healthcare breaks his leg in the forest and there's no doctor to treat it, does he still have free healthcare?
The New York Times recently reported:
The experience of Massachusetts is instructive. Under a far-reaching 2006 law, the state succeeded in reducing the number of uninsured. But many who gained coverage have been struggling to find primary care doctors, and the average waiting time for routine office visits has increased.
Some of the newly insured patients still rely on hospital emergency rooms for nonemergency care,. said Erica L. Drazen, a health policy analyst at Computer Sciences Corporation.
Also, Taxation isn't the only way to pay. There is also inflation.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I don't usually agree with Obama but I'm glad he can see that science is one of the pillars that has made America strong. I was thinking last night that my grandmother saw in just a few decades us go from riding around in horse drawn wagons to going to the moon. That is just amazing. Science did that.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Actually, I was bitching about govt. spending then too.
Still, that is no reason not get get excited now, when after only a few months, the new administration has spent near DOUBLE what the previous admin spent.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't for a minute think the new administration would spend less than the previous one (which did spend like a drunken sailor), but, I had no clue they'd spend so much, so fast, on so much worthless stuff (not directly really aiming funds to fix the economy).
So, yes, a money tree would be a nice project.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Where were you complaining the last 8 years as the government ran up $TRILLIONS in debt, like on an unnecessary and neverending war? Or on unleashing free credit money while wages stayed the same?
From where are you pulling "75% taxes"? What else can we do to work our way out of the hole "we" dug ourselves into?
A tripling of debt is hardly digging yourself out. To me, it's more like digging deeper.
You were complaining about the trillions in debt from the last administration. This administration wants to more than triple that debt.
So allow me to turn the question around on you:
Why are you not complaining now that the current administration is putting us further and faster in debt than the last administration?
Or to put it another way:
Which tea party were you at?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I'm from the Netherlands where we're taxed somewhat more than you US-ians. I must say we have plenty of small businesses; from my many visits to the US, I guess we might have relatively more small businesses that are not part of some chain than in the US actually. This is just from looking around though, I have no data.
You do realize that a good portion of defense spending is science related right?
Your trying to overly simplify something more complex then your allowing for. Currently, we spend about 26 billion on science and technology specifically but when you take the NASA budget, the Science related defense spending, the educational grants and spending, DOE, NOAA, and several other department spending, that number grows significantly. IF you add private research to the mix, we out spend every other country in the world by at least twice as much on Science R&D with a projected total for 2009 of $383,477,000,000 or about $383.5 billion.
My guess is that the Obama is talking about small increases in federal budget expenditures and increases (most likely through tax manipulation) of private expenditures.
While I agree spending is still out of control how do you figure that this administration spent double what the previous administration spent? Are you under the impression the 700 billion in bail-out money passed under Bush is somehow spent by the current administration? Besides that the rest only seems to be small increases in spending in a lot of areas that would make sense if we could actually afford it.
So allow me to turn the question around on you:
Why are you not complaining now that the current administration is putting us further and faster in debt than the last administration?
I recognize that our current economic situation requires actions against my - and Obama's - long term goals. Sometimes spending money is necessary, even when the overall goal is to reduce spending. And Obama has pledges to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. That's further in debt, yeah, but it's certainly not faster in debt as you claim.
Or to put it another way:
Which tea party were you at?
Personally I think my taxes are reasonable given the benefits I receive from my government. If anything, they could probably be raised a bit so the government wasn't needing to borrow to support me.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
The whole time I was watching Obama's speech talking about getting people to lend money again I kept shouting at the TV that more credit doesn't mean anything without more capital to back it up but that basic idea seems lost in Washington. Bush obviously didn't understand and Obama doesn't seem to either. At least I can agree with what Obama wants to spend money on even though I think the timing is poor because of the bad situation he inherited from Bush.
Fox News anchors *hosted* some of the larger ones. They also helped find and setup others. To say that doesn't qualify as orchestrating anything is downright ridiculous.
I am a scientist who believes strongly that government funding of R&D needs to be increased. Often times, I hear the argument that it is not the government's role to do this. Most of our basic R&D now occurs in the universities and the national labs. But it wasn't always so.
Several years ago, I was an intern at Bell Labs, in Murray Hil, NJ, the main research engine of AT&T before the 1984 breakup. Some of the greatest inventions of the 20th century were created there, including the transistor and the laser. The cosmic microwave background was discovered at Murray Hill as well, an example of a pure scientific discovery, serendipitous but yet made more likely by the concentration and dynamic of the brilliant minds working there. As time went on, the research became more and more applied, less basic, less fundamental.
By the time I got there, Bell Labs was part of Lucent, which was a slave to its stock price. All kinds of financial shenanigans were going on in the background, and the business had become focused almost solely on fiber optics and other communications media/equipment. Some of the leftovers from the glory days of basic R&D were retiring, but there were still quite a few more recent hires. These people were let go during my summer. It was sad. It was the death of Bell Labs. All that were left were the old fogies and the people doing work related to the core business. Lucent's stock tanked, and the whole company became a shell of what it once was, and Bell Labs became special only in the history books.
Bell Labs was the greatest death of the old industrial research powerhouses. Few are left, most notably IBM. But even these are more application-oriented than in the past. They depend on the government to fund basic R&D in its labs and universities to keep the technology engine revving. Should that process stop, perhaps industry will revert to its old way, but that will not be a quick process. For almost a generation, we would be left with our pants down while our global competitors assert the lead in the technology race. This will put us at not just an economic disadvantage, but in poor strategic positioning politically. It is paramount that we fund basic R&D via government funds now. If we desire a different system where private industry does the brunt of basic R&D, then we must redesign the system via proper incentives to allow for a smooth transition to such a paradigm. Maintaining science funding at the levels they are at right now is not sustainable in the short term- the quicker we enhance funding, the better off we will be.
I don't know where you are getting 2 trillion dollars from. The stimulus bill was $787 billion and the omnibus bill for 2009 was $410 billion. That's around $1.2 trillion, which is less than the $555 billion omnibus bill + $700 billion bank bailout under Bush last year.
Time makes more converts than reason