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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."
The smart move is to cut YouCut, because your Congressman should already be cutting the crap you dislike,
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.
.... same acronym.
Not Sufficient Funds.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
It works for me. Where are the "get the government out of my choices" voices for this?
If nothing else, it would cut part of the prison population and increase the tax base.
All you need to do is make it a multiplier for other crimes. Murder? And high? Looks like you get an additional 5 years.
And how about fixing the tax system a bit? Why does Bill Gates need a tax cut? Why does he need a tax cut MORE than a guy who makes $30K a year? Why does Paris Hilton need to protect more of her inheritance?
"And instead of buying computers for every little snotnosed curtain climber, let's just focus on getting them able to READ and WRITE"
Because computers never helped anyone learn either of those skills, let alone any other useful skills that they will use later in life...
Great Intellect...
This is exactly the kind of framing that brings joy to those with a grudge against effective government - playing entirely in their end zone, scoring point after point when they're supposed to have the ball.
Corporations have proven that, given the option, they will simply not do basic research. Now, we're using recent tax breaks (plus extra double tax cuts for the rich) causing further massive deficits to argue that huge swaths of basic research be eliminated, because they're too luxurious for us to afford (compared to the utter non-luxury of war-time double-tax-cuts for the mega-rich).
Basic science is really our only path towards actually knowing how to solve a lot of deep, inherent, and growing problems in our world. Problems that will only get worse as more resources are pulled into the hands of the few who will never let that money out of their small investment circles and estate holdings by choice.
The rich (frequently) aren't villains - they're just those that are good at gathering resources, the natural end result of selecting for people who can best acquire resources from others. The dynamic of a glut of rich getting more controlling over more resources is an ancient dynamic - the very word Crass is an example of this - take a little time to read up on Marcus Licinius Crassus adventures in emergency real estate acquisitions if you want a little insight into to today's real estate capitalism. Of course, he did die getting gold poured down his throat after his overreach - but he also created an empire too.
Sacrifice research on the alter of making room for tax breaks, however, and you're selling the very soul of your nation's future. You're creating an empire at the cost of drowning your future in your acquired gold.
Ryan Fenton
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.
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.
This is wrong on so many levels. First off the NSF budget is just pitiful, 6.85 billion in 2009. The physical sciences are flat out starving. Come on, this is the groundwork of our entire technical civilization...how many trillion is that worth a year? And most importantly the examples that he gives...soccer grant, and grant for video game sound. Well all right. The video game industry (which is entirely predicated on math math math more math -- insert joke [head shots]) is like 50+ billion. I think that research may well pay off. The NIH budget is 29.5 billion. I am in the biosciences and if you cut that in half and it would make no difference to the health of this country. Cancer...the same...Alzheimers...Schizophrenia...no progress... My point is that of all the Government research agencies, the NSF is in the most need of some love. This is just shameful.
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.
Rocket technology
Early computers
Internet
Countless advances made by publicly funded scientists
Of course you could argue that EVENTUALLY, all these would have been done by private interests. I don't believe that is true, but even if it is... the question is becomes how long would it have taken and how closely would it be controlled?
Great Intellect...
2010 estimates (in billions of dollars) from OMB's hist03z1 spreadsheet:
National Defense: 719
Human Resources: 2504
Education, training, employment and social services: 143
Health: 372
Medicare: 457
Income Security: 686
Social Security: 721
Veterans Benefits: 125
Physical Resources: 176
Energy: 19
Natural Resources: 47
Commerce and Housing credit: -25
Transportation: 106
Community and Regional Development: 28
Net interest: 188
Other functions: 214
International Affairs: 51
General Science, space and technology: 33
Agriculture: 27
Administration of justice: 55
General government: 29
Allowances: 19
So, figure Congress and the general operation of government costs about $84 billion. I agree we should cut Congress' expenses and their perks, but that would barely be the tip of the iceberg. I favor a 10% cut across the board from every outlay in each of the next 3 years. The problem is, for every one of those lines above, there are hundreds of lobbyists doing everything they can to access your wallet and thousands or millions of Americans that demand that you fund their idea. And don't let this year's interest line fool you, in just a couple years, interest on our debt will exceed the military budget (2015's estimate puts it at 685 military vs 571 interest).
Raising taxes isn't going to solve the problem, we have to cut spending... and yeah, that means someone's sacred cow is going to be gored, so I say we gut them all equally. Just look at slashdot, we already have the "gut the military but spare NSF funding" posts going on... everyone favors cutting the stuff they don't like while keeping or increasing funding for the things they do. Lets cut everything... we simply can't afford to continue spending the way we have for the last century.
Stop Koolaid Politics
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.
Understanding global warming, basic nuclear physics, basic quantum mechanics and the number theory underlying public key encryption come to mind. There is no profit in laying the groundwork for things like that. Such things aren't a specific thing you do and then market what came out of it. It's a rising tide of understanding that enable you to even think the thoughts involved in making products based on it.
Multiple FAIL: It is not Republicans who put up this site but a Republican, Rep. Cantor. "YouCut Targets National Science Foundation Budget" is unnecessarily inflammatory and factually incorrect: one or two of the science grants with titles like "collaboration among soccer players" and "sound of breaking objects" were given as examples of unnecessary gov. spending. No cuts to NSF budget were proposed or voted in by anybody. It is ridiculous that something like this is posted on the front page. I long noticed the leftist bias among slashdot editors but at this point they seem to be turning this site into "another dailykos for the nerds, stuff that matters to liberals only"
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I read recently that Newt Gingrich said he'd like to triple the NSF budget
I could never imagine I would ever come to the point of saying this: but Newt Gingrich is one of the few people left in the Republican Party I can respect.
I disagree with a lot -maybe most- of what he's saying, but he does have a brain, and he uses actual arguments, with premises and statements and conclusions and all that stuff. He's fluent in the English language, well read, and rather eloquent.
Now for the rest of his party..
Ok, so we eliminate some questionable grants that the NSF hands out and reduce the deficit by something on the order of .000001%. Great.
Look, I don't have any problem with trying to eliminate earmarks or funding for the Department of Silly Walks, but pretending this is anything more than a principled stand against waste is foolhardy. We're not going to eliminate the deficit by nibbling around the edges. We're going to need pretty heavy cuts across the board and tax increases for everybody. That's the way the math works out.
And I would put a few hundred dollars on you not being in a position to hire anyone.
Whether or not you can learn without a computer is irrelevant. The old education system is quickly falling apart, either because of its inherent flaws or inability to cope with change. "Go back to math and reading!" is not the answer and will only make the problem worse and hurt our ability to compete in an increasingly electronic world.
In short, what you want isn't relevant; adults are discussing important matters.
Great Intellect...
Personally, I think the modeling of sound for shattering objects is some pretty cool stuff with actual applications in industry. Not sure what that soccer player project was about, but that website doesn't really provide enough details for people to make an informed judgment about these projects.
In other words, we don't train scientists in this country without NIH/NSF/DOE funding. It simply doesn't happen, because it is too expensive to do any other way. If those three agencies were all terminated this afternoon, grad schools across the country would suffer immediately. Eventually the number of new degrees issued would plummet and employers looking for PhDs would have to hire from abroad.
In other words, congratulations you just expressed support for accelerating the brain drain.
The amount of truly useful work to come out of academia does not justify stealing from taxpayers.
Just because you don't understand the work - or the value thereof - coming from academia does not mean it has no value.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
From time to time, I act as a grant reviewer and panelist for the NSF. I can quite frankly attest that the NSF is anything but bloated. The number of excellent and virtuous projects that do not get funded is always a crying shame. Of course, some proposals are utter rubbish. However, far fewer projects get funded than are deserving of funding. Not only that, the NSF provide us with a small *per deium*, from which we have to pay our own hotel, meals, transportation and everything else, apart from travel costs. One is lucky to break even, when working for the NSF. In addition, it is hard work! Our lunch break is usually just long enough to run across the road to a food court and then we eat as we work. In the evenings, there are summaries to write. I only do it because I believe that it makes the world a better place. However, if this is what the Republicans are intending, there will be no need for more business bailouts, as they will just outsource the whole country to multinationals (who usually don't pay tax, due to off-shore 'arrangements'). Thus, this is a strategy only Osama bin Laden could rationally endorse.
To quote a song on my iPod "Majority rule don't work in mental institutions"
also, notice that there is not a "vote for" option, so really any small number of votes (maybe a couple thousand trolls) against anything can be used to discredit any potentially ground-breaking work. Looks to me like a very well disguised plan to provide ammunition against whatever research the politicians desire.
Witch hunt of the 21st century anyone?
Also the two examples they use, couldn't the research in soccer player dynamics be applied to swarm robot technology, potentially resulting in advanced search and rescue applications? Couldn't the sound of breaking glass modeling be applied to similar goals, or maybe security systems ("window just shattered in room X, according to the analysis it was a high-speed impact, likely bullet impact" vs "window just shattered in room Y analysis indicates slow projectile, i.e. thrown rock")
Your math is wrong. Not everyone pays the same amount in taxes. So you cant average it out over the entire population. People that pay no federal income tax paid $0 dollars to Defense and Science.
The three biggest items in the national budget are: (2009 numbers)
Dept. of Health and Human services $834 Billion
Dept. of Defense $685
Social Security $678
For perspective:
NSF $6.5 Billion
Interest due for the national debt $189 Billion
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1305
I always wondered what it would be like if we gave Congress a giant pie charts instead of monetary figures. Every time they wanted to spend money they were given a percentage figure by a calculator and they would have to shrink other pie pieces to make it fit...
We'd have a branch set of charts. One is simply Domestic and Foreign and the others list the subparts of those two. Any change in spending for each chart would require a 2/3 approval as well as any change in the Domestic/Foreign chart.
Congressmen would not know how many actual dollars go to each program by looking at it, but maybe the top 10 items would be listed by percentage next to it. I'm sure some will be able to use a calculator and figure out the raw dollar value, but the purpose of the pie chart is to be able to see at all times where the bulk of their spending is going. It will make the "big budget" items giant targets for allocating to new projects.
There may also be a fourth chart for average taxes taken from their citizens to remind them how much they are taking (if we had a uniform tax code, this chart may have more weight... but whatever.)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
What, you mean the one you crashed into my police box last we-
. . .
Oh dear. Terribly sorry. You'll find out in your near future, I guess.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
The Republicans want me, an ignorant, uninformed American, to decide what to cut from the US Government budget?
I vote we cut the Republican Party.
Who's with me?
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
If you can track and model every player on the soccer field, it makes it that much easier to track and model every person in an airport, busy street... just guessing on that.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
And spending money on education is going to shit the kids don't need to learn properly. Computers waste money that could otherwise go to hiring better teachers, raising standards, and not making a bunch of texting morons.
Paper, pencils, and a good teacher. Worked for fucking centuries.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Bullshit. Instead of the Internet, companies were more focused on isolated, for-pay environments. Such as CompuServe and AOL.
The Republicans don't have a majority in Congress, they have a majority in the United States House, one of the two houses of Congress, the other house, the United States Senate retains a Democratic majority.
"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.
So, pick a republican backed fundamental program (probably one which subsidizes big businesses) and this intelligent community can all go over and intelligently propose the same thing to YouCut. If they can shape media, so can we.
One might wonder about the literacy rates prior to public education.
My dad was a protesting baby boomer. He was and is a republican. He strongly supported the Vietnam War. He strongly supported building more nuclear weapons, more bombers, more submarines, and so on. He loved Reagan's proposed defense against ICBMs.
Yep, he'd be out there holding a sign to protest against nuclear treaties, defense cutbacks, etc. He got arrested for chopping down political signs for liberals. He would attend rallies for republicans. He did his best to support Goldwater. He wrote to congresscritters and talked to several in person. He wrote letters to the editor.
These days he spends his time at Tea Party meetings. He's certain that Obama wasn't born in the USA, based on an admission by Obama's own grandmother.
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.
The irony...
When I did my Ph.D. I had the good fortune to meet Charles Townes, the inventor of the maser. According to him he was told it was very interesting, but there would never be any real use for it.
Remember - basic scientific research is a public good; we all benefit from it, so everyone would rather wait for someone else to do it
I'm not so sure about this. In my somewhat limited experience, US universities aren't always doing the most interesting research, but they are very good at technology transfer (well, in comparison with their European counterparts, not necessarily in absolute terms). A small decrease in funding of academic research in the USA now could provide a considerable competitive advantage to other countries in 5-10 years. If I ran a research-driven company outside the USA, I'd be very interested in a cheap way of lobbying for reduced science spending in the USA.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Take a look at the tax dollars paid by "the rich". They already significantly pay more in taxes than all other income classes - combined.
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.