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US Federal Budget Proposal Cuts Science Funding (washingtonpost.com)
hey! writes: The U.S. Office of Management and Budget has released a budget "blueprint" which outlines substantial cuts in both basic research and applied technology funding. The proposal includes a whopping 18% reduction in National Institutes of Health medical research. NIH does get a new $500 million fund to track emerging infectious agents like Zika in the U.S., but loses its funding to monitor those agents overseas. The Department of Energy's research programs also get an 18% cut in research, potentially affecting basic physics research, high energy physics, fusion research, and supercomputing. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) gets the ax, as does the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, which enabled Tesla to manufacture its Model S sedan. EPA loses all climate research funding, and about half the research funding targeted at human health impacts of pollution. The Energy Star program is eliminated; Superfund funding is drastically reduced. The Chesapeake Bay and Great Lakes cleanup programs are also eliminated, as is all screening of pesticides for endocrine disruption. In the Department of Commerce, Sea Grant is eliminated, along with all coastal zone research funding. Existing weather satellites GOES and JPSS continue funding, but JPSS-3 and -4 appear to be getting the ax. Support for transfer of federally funded research and technology to small and mid-sized manufacturers is eliminated. NASA gets a slight trim, and a new focus on deep space exploration paid for by an elimination of Earth Science programs. You can read more about this "blueprint" in Nature, Science, and the Washington Post, which broke the story. The Environmental Protection Agency, the State Department and Agriculture Department took the hardest hits, while the Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Veterans Affairs have seen their budgets grow.
Total, utter morons.
THANKS, Trump voters.
While everyone will bitch about (with merit) or rave about (maybe with merit) the actual details of the budget, the big requirement this time, MIGHT be, it actually be a budget.
Or at least, soon.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view...
I'm not sure if the current proposed budget seriously expects the debt ceiling to remain in effect. What is sure is that the debt ceiling has been punted in the past: hence it being suspended until yesterday. Talking about the budget without any decision on the debt ceiling is pretty stupid, but we will do it anyway. If the debt ceiling is real, we probably need to cut more than 18% off of a few things, and eliminate more than just a few programs- we probably need to axe at least one department over the next few years. If instead it is just another punt to younger people to pay off our national credit card, then you can go ahead and parse the proposed budget through a petty and partisan lens.
I might agree with you except the budget increases spending in total. Basically everything is moved to defense, and a little more added to defense after that.
Starting with the biggest area of discretionary spending:: the military.
Also, spending isn't the only way to affect the problem. Taxes on the wealthiest Americans could be increased.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
At some point, someone has to be the grownup in the room and say "you know, that would be really nice, but we simply can't afford it".
One if we apply this logically we would go, "do we really have to spend more on military than the next 10 nations combined, 8 of them are allies and all of them are trading partners?
We pay abysmal interest rates for our T-bills and the world still thinks it is a safer investment than anything else. World trade is dollar denominated and foreign exchange of all the countries are in dollars.
In fact it is criminal not not to borrow to the hilt and invest in infrastructure, at this low interest rates. Not merely bridges and roads, universities, research labs, data collection and archiving, everything we can think of, and then a few we can not think of too.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Except of course, you don't understand what the debt is. This allows Republicans to con you into thinking cutting useful things is good for you.
The debt is actually predominantly Americans investing in America. Its like investing in companies but safer (and hence provides an important part of our economic system). You don't tell companies to stop investing in things that make them more profitable, but somehow when it comes to making America better suddenly people don't think its a good idea. If you have almost any kind of retirement savings its a good bet it has some government bonds.
In almost every way science and education increase the value and GDP long term, and so borrowing for them is a good idea. Not being able to track climate change puts us at a disadvantage. Reducing health care coverage massively increases inefficiencies and costs everyone more money. Deregulating companies allows them to externalize costs which are imposed on everyone else - aside from being grossly unfair it more inefficient than doing things correctly in the first place.
Cutting all these things makes things less efficient, less productive, and more expensive as a whole - which in the long run reduces what the government takes in as taxes. In many cases this can make the debt worse.
Please stop falling for and spreading this con. This is all here to make a few people (not you) richer.
Explain how the national debt cripples the economy. No seriously, explain it. The debt carried by the fed, debt that domestic and international banks spend money to acquire and get consistent returns on, halts growth because....
(first my disclaimers...) I'm a research scientist. I've worked in academia, for a government lab managing grants, and in private industry.
There are many good reasons to change the way science funding is done in the USA.
First, we all know here that there is a surplus of certain STEM labor, including a large number of the researchers (postdocs, grad students, etc.) funded by the government.
Second, there is a serious and long running lack of practical progress being made in science. By some metrics (# of degrees, # of papers), we are doing great, but by others (# of companies founded, return on investment, research efficiency) we are at a generational low-point.
Third, some practical STEM fields (i.e. medicine, manufacturing engineering) DO exhibit a labor shortage, and also rely on training programs largely outside the research grant driven model.
The budgets we're looking at in the government grant space are enormous. It doesn't seem that way to many researchers, but the annual NIH budget alone is about equal to all of the funding provided to all startup companies annually. There's a lot we can do with that, provided the right direction. NIH, for example, could be re-focused on grants for training medical doctors, PAs, nurses, etc., instead of researchers. Yes, that would slow research down, but it would also contribute significantly to lowering the cost of medical care, and it would be appropriate for the mission and people at the NIH. A mature approach to climate change might cut some climate research funding, but increase funding for faster roll-out of a power and transportation infrastructure free of fossil fuels. Surely such an infrastructure could be an obvious point of agreement between the right and the left; start the construction in coal country.
A thoughtful approach to science funding would encourage researchers to look beyond their next federal grant to other (private) funding sources, and would encourage (force) private funding sources to invest in transitional research. The UC pension system has been instrumental in fueling the startup economy for a long time by devoting 1% of it's money to funds investing in startup companies. If other groups did the same (... were forced to do the same...), we would increase the total amount of science funding by several orders of magnitude more than the total federal R&D budget. Prior to the 1990s, all large DoD contractors were required to spend 15% of their budget on R&D projects that were reviewed by government scientists to ensure they were actual R&D projects. Removing that requirement shut down a lot of very good industrial research programs. We learned then that most companies performing internal R&D can't compete with companies using subsidized academic R&D. That's an important lesson that the pharmaceutical industry is just now discovering, and it's an economic fact we need to fight. Reinstating requirements like minimum and audited internal R&D budgets for government contractors would also increase private spending on real research.
Not all research can use a "transition to private funding" model, so there is a need for continued blue sky research funding from the government. However, right now, we are saturated with the results of blue sky research and in serious need of support for transitional and applied research. As a nation, we are paying for this basic research, but we are not seeing the benefits of it. Some small amount is commercialized here, some is commercialized elsewhere, but a whole lot just gets forgotten. That's a waste, and it's stupid.
So basic research could be de-emphasized for a while, and non-government resources could be directed to lead to an overall increase in work and funding for researchers (while also delivering a profit... usually). That's another way of saying that a decrease in federal research funding could be done in a constructive way. We could even look at the labor market for cues as to whose graduate education we should be subsidizing. However, this is not what Trump is suggesting here... but it's nice to daydream about what an intelligent jobs-and-commerce science budget would actually look like.
Which is a bullshit argument right out of the fucking stupid supply side economics (aka: fucking idiocy). Higher taxes, such as we had in the 40's and 50's, leads to more investment in business because they're looking for someplace that can store their money so they don't have to pay heavy taxes on it. It's one of the reasons those years had such high growth. The reduced tax rate since the 70's is what's caused owners to pull profit out instead of reinvesting it, hence why growth has been half what it should/could be.
Let me give you a primer.... Supply side economics = stupider than shit.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Fuck you.
"From 1972 to today, the EPA has grown by 115%"
From https://www.epa.gov/planandbudget/budget:
1972: $2,447,565,000
2016: $8,139,887,000
So, first up, you pulled numbers from your ass. Good job. It's actually increased by a factor of 3.3. Before your stupid ass starts gloating, let's look at what inflation has done since then.
From: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=1972&year2=2017
A 1972 dollar is worth $5.83 now. So in constant inflation adjusted dollars, the EPA budget only has 57% of the purchasing power it did in 1972.
Learn to do actual research, with actual sources, and don't quote some fucking "conservative premiere media watchdog." I mean, for fuck's sake, they can't even capitalize shit correctly. Why do you think they can do math?
There is this thing called interest, and we'll have to pay it, see...
1. We just went through a time where the fed rate was 0%. Literally no interest and people still bought in.
2. So long as inflation matches or is slightly higher than the interest rate, we make money on our own debt. Why did you think economists obsess over the relationship between the fed rate and inflation?
There are a significant number of Republicans who support fiscal restraint.
Bullshit. There isn't a single republican seriously asking for cutting the military budget or medicare which are by far the two biggest line items on the federal budget along with social security. Any discussion about "fiscal restraint" that does not involve cutting the military or medicare is a bogus argument. The republican's don't give a shit about fiscal restraint. They care about getting elected and promising to cut people's taxes (while ignoring the consequences of doing so) is a good way to do that. In reality we need to RAISE taxes to cover the entitlements we so clearly are unwilling to do without.
I have no problem cutting programs which are peripheral to core government. But I want that to be accompanied with tax cuts, which allows those who wish to support specific programs to "vote with their dollars."
Again, you are studiously ignoring the elephant in the room. Tax cuts? We aren't even paying for the government services we use. The federal deficit last year was right around $600B. You would have to cut basically every single program in the government except for the military, social security, medicare/medicaid, and interest on the debt to make up for the missing taxes. We basically fund almost the entire budget of our military (coincidentally around $600B) by borrowing it. Tax cuts? Taxes have to go up to pay for the stuff we already refuse to cut. Pay for what we buy before you talk to me about tax cuts. Otherwise you are just loading up your children and grandchildren with debt.