No. of Recommendations: 1
I generally enjoy and rec your comments. But I'm damned if I understand your point on this one. Reducing spending on science is the way to solve our national debt problems?
I'm sorry I thought I was clear enough. But to be clear, Reducing Spending is the way to solve our national debt problem.
At this point I would favor a balanced budget amendment. CLEARLY the US Government as currently constituted has not business making rational decisions about when it makes sense to take on debt. The more polarized our politics become, the more readily each side when they get their filthy hands on power briefly will use the public moneys to try to bribe voters to vote for them. Not a good recipe for... anything really. And we have given NOT having a baalanced budget amendment more than 50 years of a trial, and what we got for our efforts was all the jokes about a billion here and a billion there have had to be rewritten using trillions.
I would favor telling the congress that if they think something is important enough to spend money on, they it is important enough to tax the country to raise that money for. And a good way to tell something is NOT important enough to spend money on is that you don't or can't or won't increase the tax to pay for it.
I would favor answering EVERY claim that spending cuts are the wrong cuts to make with "wow, you are right, so great, what tax are you going to raise to pay for it?"
Or more trivially, "good point, and just as soon as we are not increasing our debt anymore we can put that right back on our list of things to spend on."
As long as the population thinks "well surely the thing that I like spending money on is not the right thing to cut" then the population thinks "NOT driving the economy over the cliff is NOT the most important thing we can do with our budgeting process."
None of these kids - my granddaughters or her boyfriend - depended in any part on government support for their educations.
The only part the government funded was their ability to participate in meaningful research on a subject pretty important to the well being of us all.
Respectfully, I'd be quite surprised if those kids were not going to receive "research fellowships" that would pay them a monthly stipend to do the research and would also pay their tuition. At least that's the way it was done when I was the recipient of this government largesse 40 years ago. If I am actually mistaken, then my apologies. But in my experience as both a student and a professor, the students who didn't need a tuition subsidy or a stipend were admitted whether or not we had research money, and the government research grants were always budgeted to pay a certain number of student stipends and tuition subsidies in order to get the proposed research done.
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Of course it would be better if a rational thoughtful process was used to cut government spending and eliminate the deficit. Indeed, this was done successfully 30 years ago by Clinton and Gore and the federal budget was balanced. But in the absence of anybody who wants to do it the right way actually being able to do it, I'd rather have a slash and burn BEFORE we actually enter the debt death spiral than to pretend we have a choice to not enter the death spiral and to wait for a better option.
I did just realize that I consider defaulting on gov't obligations to be the "death spiral". I think that is a pretty reasonable definition of the death spiral. And if anything, the current administration seems hell bent on getting us to that point earlier rather than later. Indeed the whole discussion of any kind of coercive exchange of 10 year notes into "perpetual" notes is, in fact, a default.
Of course, if you think we should keep science funding an not let concerns about the death spiral screw up the good that that will do us, then we just disagree.
