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'YouCut' Targets National Science Foundation Budget
jamie writes "As some of you may have heard, the incoming Republican majority in Congress has a new initiative called YouCut, which lets ordinary Americans like me propose government programs for termination. So imagine how excited I was to learn that YouCut's first target — yes, its first target — was that notoriously bloated white elephant, the National Science Foundation."
Look, I'm not an American, I'm just looking over the fence and respectfully trying to make sense of what I'm seeing. But that's just obscene.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
yes, that should be the first thing to cut money from indeed ! because, then, texas education board can claim that jefferson was a godless whore, and instead put the name of an obscure preacher in front of him as a founding father. of course, right after approving school curriculum books that say 'world has been created in 6 days' is a valid theory ...
kudos americans. you have succeeded in giving a second chance to the morons who have awarded the world with a neverending war on terror, a turmoil in middle east, violation of all constitutional and modern civil rights, kidnappings, torture, wall street DEregulation (and corresponding scam), and body scanners and many, many more !
heaven knows what they will do to you (and the world, if they can) with this second chance. maybe the first thing they will mandate will be mandatory cavity searches in airports.
Read radical news here
With our national debt at 100% GDP and our unfunded mandates at 8 times that, we're more than broke. We're spending our grandchildren's tax dollars.
When it comes down to choosing between "free" healthcare, "free" medicine, and everything else "free" the government owes people, why is it a surprise that what people think here is "honest" and "important" will fall by the wayside.
Welcome to Idiocracy.
Private companies typically do not engage in long-term research that isn't likely to lead to directly commercializable results. I know this flies in the face of red-blooded 'merican "all socialism is evil" doctrine, but public sector research, funded by tax-payer money, is needed to build the foundations for tomorrow's industries. Quantum computing, like many other bleeding edge fields, is too immature, too high-risk, and with pay-offs that are far too distant for the private sector.
Research and education are both investments that can yield fantastic returns, but they are long-term investments that require steady commitment rather than periodic outbursts of zeal punctuating long periods of apathy. A minor cut now might help balance the books today, but the lost opportunities down the road will more than negate that. Top researchers don't hang around after you cut the funding they run their labs and pay their students and post-docs with. They won't wait a few years until times are good again. What they will do is go where the money they need to work is, and if they can't find that in the U.S., they'll likely find it in Canada, China, Australia, etc.. The U.S. is far from the only country doing quality research in QC these days.
Unfortunately, some U.S. politicians are of the opinion that they can make political hay by screwing over those "pinko" scientists. They're smart enough to know what they're sacrificing, but votes for them are a worthier cause! The only way to fight this kind of thinking is to call up your local representative/senator/etc. and let them know you're not buying it. The only way to make them stop this kind of thing is to make them think they'll lose votes today, because that's all they care about.
That is a lot easier to do with capitol letters and punctuation in the proper place. Writing like that just makes you look either uneducated or stoned.
Or we could tax the rich, close the loopholes on capital gains and outsourcing, enact tariffs against countries with environmental and labor protections weaker than ours, and use the revenue to put the unemployed to work on new infrastructure.
Hah, as if. We'll continue to cut taxes (20 for the rich, 1 for the poor, 20 for the rich, 1 for the poor, etc), then hit the deficit cap and slaughter Social Security and Medicare, and finally end up a destitute 3rd world nation, under god.
Cut "defense" spending, airport security, congress critter perks, and tax breaks for those who least need them. That should bring our deficit to negative. The republicrats can thank me later.
Great Intellect...
Cut the NSA, CIA, FBI, ATF, DEA, and all that anti-democratic shit.
Circumcision is child abuse.
If you go to the site, they're not saying we should cut ALL of the NSF funding. They're asking people to suggest specific grants that are not good uses of tax dollars. The OP is essentially saying that there can't possibly be waste anywhere in the NSF budget at that anyone who would even suggest such a thing must necessarily be anti-science.
So let me get this straight. The average American, who is not well versed in our own government, who doesn't really understand financial management, who can't locate Iraq on map, and overall isn't educated more than enough to make them a somewhat functioning worker, will be given the privilege to recommend what programs should and should not be cut.
Well, I guess it can't be worse than the asshats we already have in congress.
~X~
If we start with the TSA I'll support the program, silly as it is.
Yes, it's been said on /. a million times before: end the freakin' wars. Stop the runaway military spending. It's that simple. NSF's annual budget = $7.4 billion (source: NSF). That's about a week in a half in Iraq, if memory serves.
It basically boils down to the Baby Boomers fucking up yet again. It's something they've done every decade since the 1960s.
In the 1960s, their naivety resulted in protests and riots, along with the rise of "isms" like feminism.
In the 1970s, they started to make their way into power. Their energy and economic policies were absolutely terrible. Stagflation crippled many Western nations' economies during the 1970s.
By the 1980s, they were reaching higher and higher levels of power in business and government. Their total avarice again stunted real growth of the American economy.
They achieved the ultimate level of power in the 1990s. Thanks to their horrid economic policies, they almost single-handedly enabled the Chinese economy to grow so quickly, while at the same time ruining the American economy using "free trade".
They retained power during the 2000s, fucking up the corporate landscape and the American economy even further. Getting older in age, they started turning to religion, leading to shenanigans like this.
Never has a single generation caused so much trouble.
I've worked 10 years in biomedical research both in academia (where I got my paycheck from the NIH), and in industry (pharma & diagnostics).
I am ABSOLUTELY in making very deep cuts in the National Institutes of Health budget. It should be cut in half over the next 10 years.
I have witnessed the efficiency and progress in industry, and it make some of the top academic researchers look like true money and time wasters. The amount of truly useful work to come out of academia does not justify stealing from taxpayers.
It is the moral position to support cuts to the NIH, military, NSF, Dept of Ed, etc.
So where is that working private industry fusion reactor?
There is a link on the site to suggest it. Go for it.
I as a republican state this proudly. *ALL* programs need to be on the table. We can not continue to have trillion dollar deficits. This includes all three sacred cows of defense, SS, and education. If we continue down the road we are now we will have nothing left and only be spending all the tax rev on paying interest on loans. The rest relatively speaking is 'table scraps'.
People only want to cut things that 'they dont like'. If we dont cut from *ALL* programs there is no point in doing it at all. It needs to be deep and across the board.
Science funding cuts are the sorts of things that unfortunately will need to happen. We need a surplus budget for 15-20+ years to dig us out of the hole we are in. That is before we can talk about rebuilding and setting realistic guidelines on what we need and can realistically can buy. This *will* involve a tax rate hike on everyone. Not 'just the rich'.
I dont think most people quite comprehend the amazing amount of debt we are in. If we shut down the government for 5 years and devoted 100% of the tax rev to paying off the deficit we *might* just pay it off. It is that big.
Also sometimes you need to get thru the crap politicos call a 'cut'. Where they yank all the funding from a program then turn around and spend it all on another program. That is not a cut. That is a reshuffling of money. It would be as if I am in debt and instead of buying krispy kreme donuts I start buying dunkin donuts and cofee every day. Then saying I cut my krispy kreme budget. When the fact is I am still spending the money on something similar.
Excuse me, could you point to the private enterprise that developed TCP/IP ? Oh, right it was a wasteful government grant to those egghead liberals.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
Of those three, SS and education are drops in the bucket. Not so much "sacred cows" as they are "red herrings". You want to cut the deficit? The military is quite sufficient.
In fact SS is still (for the moment) operating in the black. So thank you for playing, try again.
Here's an article from Wired.
It doesn't directly mention NSF, but rather specific scientific research which can be construed as frivolous.
That's why we have a representative democracy rather than a pure democracy. The Founding Fathers knew all too well not to trust the reasoning abilities of the "common man"
Actually, business is not very good at disruptive innovation like computers, the internet, nuclear power, space exploration, etc. That is govt's proper role, to fund long-term research and development. Biz is better at incremental innovation: making computers smaller, bringing the internet to the masses, etc.
Steven Johnson in a Salon interview about his book "Where Good Ideas Come From" says:
The problem I'd have with that is that it would be too difficult to determine what is frivolous spending and what is not. Look at food: What do you tax more caviar or cheeseburgers? How about arugula or spinach? Do you tax mansions more then small houses? What if the small house is made of exotic wood and the mansion is made of pine?
You want to tax yachts; most yachts are used for business. What if the yacht is used for fishing? What if its used for impressing foreign business executives so that they bring thousands of fishing related jobs to the US? The fishing yacht only benefits the fisherman, the exotic wine-and-dine yacht benefits potentially thousands of fisherman.
How about something both personal and cosmetic like breast implants. Who do you tax more, a stripper or a women that has had a mastectomy. What if the stripper has a family to feed and the mastectomy patient has no financial reason to justify the procedure, only her own self image?
The last one is a particularly harsh example, but I think it illustrates my point. On one hand you have an individual doing something politically distasteful that frees a group of children from poverty, on the other you have an innocent person disfigured by disease but who's purchase will benefit no one but her. My point here is that having anything other then a flat sales tax model allows for politicians to enforce morality or even "class warfare" (clumsy word, I know) via that form of tax code.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
Since the blog linked in the summary is down, here is the link to the site itself: http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/ I might be missing something but I don't see anything about the National Science Foundation, never mind being the "first target". The first chosen cut was something called "New Non-Reformed Welfare Program"
http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/Review.htm
They specifically target NSF projects here. They suggest that regular people go through the NSF list of grants and report anything that they think is wasteful. Which will be everything. Regular people have no idea how much science costs or have any capacity to evaluate what is and is not sound science. Its such a fucking scumbag move.
I went to that site and entered my own submission - I told him he's a scumbag motherfucker. Not very gracious, but after watching his video, that's how I felt. I encourage other slashdot users to go there and add their own comments!
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
How about we start with lower hanging fruit like weapons platforms that the military doesn't even want or need first? I bet cutting one of those will fully fund the "fat" in the NSF budget!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Bullshit. Instead of the Internet, companies were more focused on isolated, for-pay environments. Such as CompuServe and AOL.
"The YouCut Citizen Review will look at grants issued by the National Science Foundation and identify those that you consider wasteful"
This should be an interesting exercise since there seems to be nothing to stop non-US citizens submitting ideas. Don't like the way that US IT firms are so successful, well clearly any NSF research to do with computers must be a waste of time. Fed up with better security technology catching all your terrorist plots? Well obviously all those innovative sensor projects should clearly go.
Except industry often isn't better at incremental innovation either because those steps are often taken on the backs of basic science research that the government funds. A classic example is IBM taking state sponsored research that discovered GMR and fine tuning it to make better HDD's. I doubt anyone looking at the grant proposals for guys playing with thin layers of metals could see that it would lead to better HDD's 15 years later. Thinking that you can just fund the big stuff and leave everything else to industry is almost as ignorant as saying that all research should be private.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Well he was a professor on constitutional law, but I'm sure that won't convince you. You will probably need to interview all his past professors and students, analysis the University of Chicago network traffic logs that were taken while he was there, and waterboard him for 48 hours to be sure he is telling the truth only to declare that there is AN EVIL LIBERAL CONSPIRACY AFOOT!
Heck, more to the point: if it was your typical industry focus group, it'd likely be not only patented to the brim, but they'd chase off people who want to make their standard more popular by making, say, an open source implementation.
Every worthwhile industrial communication bus standard has the master implementation that's patent encumbered. In terms of TCP/IP, think of having to have a license to operate an ssh, telnet, http or ftp server. Only the clients would be free.
Never mind that actually implementing almost any popular industrial bus requires purchasing about $2000 worth of standards, and getting your brain to hurt while trying to understand the abstract descriptions offered. The most convoluted RFC is a breeze to understand compared to say IEC 61158.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
There is no justification for tax revenue being spent on science because private enterprise can achieve more faster and cheaper than government sponsored boondoggles.
Privately-funded science produces things like Viagra and a Coke can made with 1% less aluminium.
Publicly-funded science produces things like vaccines and the Internet.
I know which of the above I think are a better use of time and money.
Or, "HOW GET PRAGNANT"
Who cares where we start as long as we start. Waste is waste isn't it?
I mean seriously, this is exactly the type of thing the democrats championed. I mean it's participation in the government by the people, it's the government (pretending at least) listening to the people, it's wet dream of sorts.
Explain to me why the largest military in the world 'needs' another carrier or two.
If we were to cut ALL military spending across the board by 80%, the US military would still be the largest military in the world by about 35% over China.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
Maybe if the US military wasn't required to be the world's policemen by the US govt, we could get meaningful debt AND deficit reduction. Not spending half a trillion dollars a year might lead to some fiscal responsibility.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Well here's a hint, you don't target the hundreds of thousands per individual science grant, that people will oppose simply upon the basis that they don't understand the science behind them nor it's potential benefits. Just imagine some idiot decrying research into the genetics of fruit flys, how dumb can you be not to realise how that genetic research can be used in other fields and even used in that field itself to control a pest that destroys hundreds of millions of dollars worth of food every year hint dumb enough to be a vice presidential candidate apparently.
Want to save money than tackle the big ticket items first, aircraft, ships and tanks designed to fight a world war the no longer exists and even if it did, would simply result in mutual nuclear annihilation. So no new planes, tanks or ships for a decade, make do with what is already in the arsenal which is greater than the rest of the world combined. Also an end the the exorbitant cost of militarising the police, the only result of which is to generate tens of millions of dollars of successful lawsuits for the excessive use of force.
So what is YouCut all about, obviously one thing and one thing only to direct peoples eyes away from the billion dollar wasts, such as no bid contracts, the military industrial complex and bridges to no where and get them focused on things they don't understand and they feel superior about when they laugh at them. The ignorant wallowing in the ignorance.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
This makes me want to throw-up.
Having "the people" review NSF grants, the same people of whom half believe that antibiotics kill viruses (imperiling all of us when they strong arm their spineless doctors into prescribing antibiotics for colds) and think that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, is a freaking ridiculous idea. Furthermore, the idea that targeting grants individually in NSF, whose budget, at $7 billion is 0.2% of the total budget is an effective way of cutting the deficit is asinine. And to top it all off, that measly $7 billion is one of the major reasons the United States is still a power in science and technology at all, especially as private R&D collapses in the face of the recession (in the short term) and Wall Street's fetish for quarterly results.
Fuck you, Eric Cantor. Fuck you, ignorant Republican douche-bags. I am D-O-N-E done. We are going to Hell in a handbasket, and instead of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic (which would be bad enough), you are stealing life jackets from children and setting them ablaze because the water is cold and we need to keep warm.