Are you seriously quibbling about $8bn when we happily spend $3500bn on bank bailouts, or $500bn/year for the military (not including the various wars)?
Budgets tend to be somewhat compartmentalized. If a project in compartment X goes over its budget, that tends to come at the expense of other things in compartment X.
$8 billion was a huge amount in the science compartment. It is completely irrelevant that some other compartments might have had much bigger budgets.
It is completely irrelevant that some other compartments might have had much bigger budgets.
While you may consider this point unrealistic or unhelpful to the argument, it cannot be characterised as irrelevant. Adding the word 'completely' only weakens your case.
It's completely relevant if your point is that we nickel-and-dime essential scientific funding but spare no expense when killing brown people across the globe. You don't have to go to too much effort to understand that's what the grandparent was driving at.
Your definition of 'essential' and my definition of essential are vastly different, and we are both very interested in science. Imagine the difference between your definition and most Americans who wind up paying for the thing. I personally would rather see the $8 billion go to medical research or energy research with a closer time horizon than physics research.
Agreed. I'd like to see the energy industry fumble around with maps trying to locate oil deposits because this new fangled GPS-thing doesn't quite work right.
Personally I don't have a very strong opinion on where the funding should go at all, just that it should exist and that it should be increased by an order of magnitude at least. Even experts in a field can have a hard time deciding where to allocate resources, what hope do I have? And more importantly what the hell business does Congress have providing for these allocations? They don't know shit.
I would rather shovel billions at universities with little more than an unenforced request that they spend it on pure research, than allow Congress any control over scientific funding at all.
Mainly I just think that drawing attention to scientific funding as some kind of waste of taxpayer money when it is such a drop in the bucket is more about serving the interests of the American conservative establishment in villainizing intellectuals than actually solving a problem.
Somehow you added two zeros on to your $3,500bn on bank bailouts! In 2009, it looked like the actual cost would be about $350bn, which is a lot, for sure, but literally an order of magnitude less.
According to the treasury department, by 2010, projected cost of TARP was $30-50bn. That's /two/ orders of magnitude out.
You also handily miss out the multiplier effects of military spending, and act like the government is taking the money and shoving it up the ass of a small animal. In fact, the vast majority is given to US industry and to US citizens. I'm sure if you Google'd you'd find the source I'm looking for who described the US Military as the world's largest welfare system.
He is right. 3.45T are total costs of bailout. $2T Emergency Fed Loans (you can give shit-sandwich and exchange it to get real $$). $700B TARP. $300B Hope Now program. $310B Fannie/Freddie and AIG. And ya... we also added $140B Tax Breaks for Banks.
Did you intentionally ignore the $80bn to AIG? TARP was just one program of many used in the bank bailout. The OP didn't say TARP was 3500bn s/he said the total bailout(s) were that amount. Including the government taking on all the junkbonds.
What my peer means to say is that the Govt. spent a ton more than the TARP amount on buying what basically amounts to garbage debt - almost a pure gift. It's a less reported but much more important number. The banks, of course, like to claim that the TARP stuff was just a loan, to misdirect your eyes from the elephant in the room.
