Interesting People mailing list archives
Re Trump's budget calls for sensible cuts in research
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2017 16:02:08 -0400
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From: John Gilmore <gnu () toad com> Date: March 19, 2017 at 3:49:28 PM EDT To: dave () farber net Cc: "ip" <ip () listbox com> Subject: Re: [IP] Re Trump's budget calls for sensible cuts in researchThe way to fix the NIDA problem is to fix its charter (or for congress to get out of the research-direction business), NOT to simply lop 20% off the budget.Lopping money out of the budget IS geting Congress out of the research-direction business. Succeeding at that goal would require getting rid of 100% of the research budget, but 20% is a significant start. Congress seems unlikely to fix NIDA's charter. Of course, Congress seems also unlikely to ever cut the federal budget. Every president and every politician who went in promising to do so, has so far failed. All the classic incentives go the other way (c.f. all the scientists screaming to not take away what funds the braces for their daughters' teeth, oops, I mean not to cut that very important national priority, science). It may take a real sport like Trump to do it.I think the real argument is whether our money is better spent on more arms and a wall in the southern desert, or on science and health and local infrastructure.I think the real argument is whether our money is better spent on what governments want to spend our money on -- or on what WE, individually, want to spend it on. The lower the government budget, and the closer the match between government spending and government revenues, the more we each have to spend however we want. Mr. Slaney, feel free to support scientists and and researchers with a portion of your own money. I suspect that you would be more selective than the US Government about which projects you fund, if it was actually YOU deciding which ones to spend it on. If federal, state, and local governments weren't taking about 50% of your income for walls, wars, racist cops, NSA, and NIDA, you'd have lots more for supporting your choice of altruistic projects. (I have learned a lot by working as a philanthropist for 17 years. I have spent multiple millions of dollars on the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as on reforming drug laws. Both of these efforts to improve society are more-or-less directly opposed by government agencies that have more than 100x their annual budget.) Worldwide, Americans are the most generous per-capita funders of altruistic projects. Most of that charity goes to churches, but it could go to science if more people had faith in it ;-). Even more of us could afford to donate, if the government wasn't inflating and taxing away the value that we all make in the world. Cutting the federal budget is part of making that possible. John
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- Re Trump's budget calls for sensible cuts in research Dave Farber (Mar 18)
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