Approximately what proportion of the US federal budget is spent on scientific research? What proportion is spent on foreign aid? Looking up these values is a useful exercise.
A billion here, a billion there, before you know it you're talking about some real money.
If I were president I would probably cut from military spending - but at some point that becomes painful to cut aswell.
A lot of people have misunderstood me in this thread, at no point do I want to see public research cut. Its just that the same people who are worried about what climate change will bring over next 50 years (and I am too!) dont seen to feel any sense of alarm at the federal government living outside its means for the next 50 years, and I can not understand why
Because the federal government is not in any sense living outside its means.
I’m not sure how to explain this to you, really - you’re fundamentally stuck, I think, on the idea that the gov is like a business or a household, and needs to budget the same way. It really doesn’t.
Maybe think of it this way, to start to get your head around it: current debt is just over 100% of GDP - so in some sense the US has borrowed about a years worth of production. 100% sounds scary, but does 12 months sound so scary? Would you consider yourself in catastrophic debt if you owed a year of your salary?
Personally I wish my mortgage was only a year of my salary!
You can call it stuck if you want, I guess I am - how can this not be a bad thing? It feels like its not a bad thing until suddenly it is. Countries can & do go broke. You can sell your house and break even, thr govt cant sell the NIH
Consider the idea that without decades of money printing, your house might only cost 1 year of salary in the first place
Or maybe let me ask it a other way - if the govt really doesnt need to balance the budget, why dont we have 50 aircraft carriers and free healthcare for all? Such huge sums of money go beyond merely number balancing, at some piint theyre forcefully managing the real resources of the nation
Debt can’t increase to infinity, true - but that does not mean it can’t be a finite number indefinitely.
And the current finite number is nowhere close to causing a crisis for the US (Japan had two and a half times GDP in debt and did not collapse into hyperinflation or some other catastrophic fate, for example).
