"healthy people stay alive, sick people will die" that's a tautology. I do not know you, but I am willing to bet that there are some people who you know who'd have a far worse life if it was not for modern publicly funded research

I dont dispute this at all - I want the research, I would pay higher taxes to support it, but it baffles me how the government can continually lose money and people handwave away the entire issue

I can't tell if you're intentionally misunderstanding, or not. So I'll spell it out: public non-biased research is a public good.

Oil companies weren't going to publish research saying leaded gas was bad. Tobacco companies weren't going to publish research saying cigarettes were bad. Have fun being healthy when you inhale leaded gasoline every day.

Forget about things like, you know, the internet. Or any medicine.

BTW, private companies are not paying for basic biological research. Good luck making a drug when no one knows what target to drug. VC firms will park their money in the bank instead. The value from biotechs is already marginal - investment basically vanished when interest rates went above 4.

I feel the same way back haha, are you intentionally misunderstanding me? Nobody is claiming research is bad! I dont want to see it cut either. I want the government to be running a surplus though. You can argue we should cut other places like military or whatever, I agree thats probably wiser, but what Im asking is, surely we can only prioritise what to spend once we are back to surplus

Ive also been told in the past that its somehow ok that the government never breaks even, I can handle that maybe Im too stupid/uneducated to get it... but nobody ever even tries. Use little words, Im sure we will make progress. How can the government continue to exist and not go broke if it continually spends more than it brings in?

I'm trying to say that having a society of people breathing in leaded gas would be insanely expensive. Both in terms of lost productivity from stunted brain development, and actual acute symptoms. Public money was crucial to unbiased understanding of that, and lead to prevention. How much money do you think that saved/grew the economy? For like 0.5% of the Federal budget.

That's just one (big and easy to recall) example. There are countless.

Spending public money on public research grows the economy. Cutting it is penny wise and pound foolish.

I work at a biotech. We have $150 million in private funding. My biotech wouldn't exist, and I wouldn't have a job if it weren't for decades of public research doing the foundational work that allows us to target a protein to make a drug to help people. None of that would exist if not for NIH, NSF etc

This was a good reply, thanks for taking the time. I could be convinced that this is a money making investment and therefore foolish to cut. If you have no money though, you cant afford to make any kind of investment, and from the outside looking in (to govt I mean, I live in the USA) it seems the US is going broke. Like I said though, I hve come around and maybe it really is super dumb to cut this - if you want to see it continue for the next 50 years, I would urge you consider how thats possible if the USA continues to lose money though.

While the Unabomber, Luigi Mangione, and Communism may have correctly diagnosed socioeconomic pathologies their prescriptions were largely counterproductive. It is magical or superficial thinking to believe that aggressive chaos is somehow curative or better than following a more consultative and cooperative process like first assessing and auditing an organization thoroughly by eliciting input from all parties at all levels and gathering data before proposing recommendations, implementing those recommendations, and following up to adjust them.

Sorry do you really think Musk and Trump are eliciting input from all parties and carefully gathering data before giving recommendations? Because given how frequently they talk about the “radical left” and “marxists” I really don’t think they are considering dissenting opinions in good faith. They invariably insult people who have the slightest disagreements with them, even when those people have facts and data on their side.

And Musk has stumbled into several known right-wing conspiracy theories based on knee-jerk reactions, so I find it far more likely that he’s just fishing to validate his pre-held knee-jerk opinions rather than doing a careful investigation.