What a shitty article. I hit "back" when the article went to the trouble of putting up an entire chart to show: "spending on R&D has essentially been flat since 2011 across several countries including the U.S."
Well, remember that the chart was "change in percentage of GDP". GDP is fairly large, and scientific funding is fairly small relative to that, so the change in the percentage of GDP is going to be a fairly small value. The US's GDP is $14.99 trillion; so a -.05% change in scientific funding represents a change of about $7.5 billion, while in the meantime, China had an increase in scientific funding of close to the same amount (.1% of their GDP is $7.3B).
Now, they don't say how much that is relative to what the US or China spend overall on science. But still, that's a fairly big change either way.
If you take a look at the linked report http://www.asbmb.org/uploadedFiles/Advocacy/Events/UPVO%20Re..., it's even worse if you expand the time scale. Between 2010 and the estimated spending for 2013, there's a drop of more than $20B in scientific funding, from nearly $160B to less than $140B. That's a noticeable change; and based on the percent GDP figure, it's not just because the economy has been down, it's gone down more than the economy as a whole.
In fact, in constant dollars, taking inflation into account, funding has been declining since 2004, as funding levels were stagnant for a while and not keeping up with inflation. Now they are actively declining.
My general worry is that 'investment' has become too financialized, and political hostility to any sort of industrial policy is hampering economic development. I note that China is planning a lunar landing later this year (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/29/world/asia/china-plans-fir...) in preparation for a manned mission. I don't have a very high opinion of the Chinese space program but I really feel we need another Sputnik moment.
Are you referring to the chart that illustrates funding as a percent of GDP? If so, I think that the numbers may be larger than you think. Half a hundredth of a percent of the US GDP is still 7.5 billion dollars per year.
To put this into perspective: The entire annual NSF budget is $7 billion.
From Wikipedia:
"With an annual budget of about US$7.0 billion (fiscal year 2012), the NSF funds approximately 20% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities.[1] In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing."
The entire NIH budget is 30 billion a year. NASA's is 18 billion.
The second chart of the article shows that adjusted for inflation, the purchasing power of scientific funding has decreased from 10-30% since 2004.
The article is pretty bad, but I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the issue. If you work out the numbers, it's still an alarming problem.
I think that the article should do the math for the audience to better report on the problem though. Five minutes of following links looks like the Salon article is a summary of the Huffington Post article, which is a summary of the original report by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB).
