Chait: Billions for Pork, but Science gets cut

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "John F. McMullen" <johnmac13 () gmail com>
Reply-To: "John F. McMullen" <johnmac13 () gmail com>
Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2005 02:53:50 -0500
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Chait: Billions for Pork, but Science gets cut

From johnmacsgroup -- and there is a relationship here to the recent
discussion about US disaster aid to SE Asia

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Randall <rvh40 () insightbb com>
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 23:02:41 -0500
Subject: [johnmacsgroup] Chait:  Billions for Pork, but Science gets cut
To: JMG <johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com>

Damn the future, the GOP wants to buy votes today.
By Jonathan Chait, Los Angeles Times

Does cutting taxes force Congress to spend less money? So far under
President Bush, the answer has been a resounding no. Now there's some
evidence that Congress actually may be tightening the purse strings.
Unfortunately, what it has done so far doesn't exactly prove the
conservative case.

The new evidence is that Congress voted last month to cut the budget for
the National Science Foundation, or NSF, which supports basic scientific
research. This means that next year the NSF will have about 1,000 fewer
research grants. This comes at a time when scientific experts worry that
the United States is losing its worldwide primacy in science and
technology.

Now, some of you righties may be saying to yourselves, "Great! We scaled
back another big government program." But, remember, Republicans over at
least the last decade have flaunted their support of science and
technology. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich used to go on about
dinosaur research and giving poor people laptop computers. Bush grandly
promised a new mission to land humans on Mars in his last State of the
Union address.

And the GOP commitment to science, at least until recently, very much
included the NSF. Two years ago, the Republican Congress voted to double
the foundation's budget by 2007. At the time, Fred Barnes of the Weekly
Standard wrote that the White House considered the NSF to be one of the
few "programs that work." Its grants go out on a competitive basis.

Mitch Daniels, then Bush's budget director, told Barnes that the NSF
"has supported eight of the 12 most recent Nobel Prize awards earned by
Americans at some point in their careers."

Still, you say, don't we face a huge deficit now? Indeed we do, but
cutting support for scientific research is an incredibly mindless way to
solve that problem. Deficits are bad because they represent a form of
borrowing against the future. Every dollar we spend beyond our means
today is one less dollar that we'll have to spend someday down the road.
But scientific research is an investment in future prosperity. Cutting
the NSF budget is like a family in debt pulling its children out of
college but keeping its country club membership.

And this turns out to be utterly typical of the way conservatives
practice fiscal restraint. Their strategy of "starving the beast" ‹
trimming down government by depriving it of revenue ‹ is not supposed to
chop down spending per se; it's supposed to get rid of waste. As it
happens, though, waste has flourished while Washington has sacrificed
lots of necessary spending.

The former category includes big programs such as the $180 billion in
agricultural subsidies Bush approved in 2001, or last year's Medicare
bill featuring tens of billions in subsidies for healthcare industries.
It also includes garden variety pork, such as money for the Punxsutawney
(Pa.) Weather Museum or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
(Both projects were deemed vital in the same budget that trims the NSF.)

The NSF is not the only worthwhile project that has gotten stiffed. It's
not even the only project that conservatives consider worthwhile that
has gotten stiffed.

Crucial aspects of homeland security ‹ such as inspecting incoming ships
for nuclear material and hiring enough immigration agents to track down
illegal immigrants from the Middle East ‹ are getting far less than
needed to ensure that Americans are protected from terrorism. Even the
denizens of the conservative Heritage Foundation have complained about
the Bush administration's stinginess on homeland security.

Why are bad programs driving out the good? Because budget pressure, the
pressure of the deficit by itself, does not guarantee that Congress will
make good choices. The Republicans' preferred plan, which we've seen
through Bush's first four years, is to say yes to everybody: tax cuts
and spending programs can buy a lot of votes. If they must cut back,
they'll keep the programs that help Republicans win election, including
the home-state pork, and cut out virtuous programs that don't have the
same political muscle. Like the NSF.

Of course, this isn't an unalterable law of nature. If the governing
party has some sense of responsibility, it will fund programs on the
basis of the national interest rather than on the basis of which ones
have the most powerful lobby.

That's what President Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, said he
was doing when he promised to go after "weak claims, not weak clients."
By that he meant he would try to cut out programs with a shaky
rationale, not those that merely lacked powerful backers in Washington.
The GOP's operating principle today is just the other way around.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

Reprinted from The Los Angeles Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-chait31dec31,1,7598975.
column

--
"Orthodoxy: that peculiar condition where the patient can neither
eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one." - Elbert Hubbard
-- 
"When you come to the fork in the road, take it" - L.P. Berra
    "Always make new mistakes" -- Esther Dyson
    "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
     -- Arthur C. Clarke
     "You Gotta Believe" - Frank "Tug" McGraw (1944 - 2004 RIP)

                           John F. McMullen
    johnmac () acm org johnmac () computer org johnmac () m-net arbornet org
                   johnmac () tmail com johnmac () echonyc com
            jmcmullen () monroecollege edu johnmac () alumni iona edu
               ICQ: 4368412 Skype, AIM & Yahoo Messenger: johnmac13
                   http://www.westnet.com/~observer
             BLOG: http://johnmacrants.blogspot.com/

------ End of Forwarded Message


-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com
To manage your subscription, go to
  http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/