'YouCut' Targets National Science Foundation Budget 760
Posted
by
timothy
from the conjugate-special-interest dept.
from the conjugate-special-interest dept.
jamie writes "As some of you may have heard, the incoming Republican majority in Congress has a new initiative called YouCut, which lets ordinary Americans like me propose government programs for termination. So imagine how excited I was to learn that YouCut's first target — yes, its first target — was that notoriously bloated white elephant, the National Science Foundation."
Cut YouCut (Score:3, Informative)
The smart move is to cut YouCut, because your Congressman should already be cutting the crap you dislike,
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed. That and cut congressional perks too.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:1, Informative)
Since the blog linked in the summary is down, here is the link to the site itself: http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/ [house.gov] I might be missing something but I don't see anything about the National Science Foundation, never mind being the "first target". The first chosen cut was something called "New Non-Reformed Welfare Program"
Re:Investing in the Future won't get you votes tod (Score:5, Informative)
Early computers
Internet
Countless advances made by publicly funded scientists
Of course you could argue that EVENTUALLY, all these would have been done by private interests. I don't believe that is true, but even if it is... the question is becomes how long would it have taken and how closely would it be controlled?
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Informative)
"The YouCut Citizen Review will look at grants issued by the National Science Foundation and identify those that you consider wasteful"
From http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/Review.htm [house.gov]
As an occasional NSF Reviewer... (Score:5, Informative)
From time to time, I act as a grant reviewer and panelist for the NSF. I can quite frankly attest that the NSF is anything but bloated. The number of excellent and virtuous projects that do not get funded is always a crying shame. Of course, some proposals are utter rubbish. However, far fewer projects get funded than are deserving of funding. Not only that, the NSF provide us with a small *per deium*, from which we have to pay our own hotel, meals, transportation and everything else, apart from travel costs. One is lucky to break even, when working for the NSF. In addition, it is hard work! Our lunch break is usually just long enough to run across the road to a food court and then we eat as we work. In the evenings, there are summaries to write. I only do it because I believe that it makes the world a better place. However, if this is what the Republicans are intending, there will be no need for more business bailouts, as they will just outsource the whole country to multinationals (who usually don't pay tax, due to off-shore 'arrangements'). Thus, this is a strategy only Osama bin Laden could rationally endorse.
Re:perspective (Score:2, Informative)
Your math is wrong. Not everyone pays the same amount in taxes. So you cant average it out over the entire population. People that pay no federal income tax paid $0 dollars to Defense and Science.
The three biggest items in the national budget are: (2009 numbers)
Dept. of Health and Human services $834 Billion
Dept. of Defense $685
Social Security $678
For perspective:
NSF $6.5 Billion
Interest due for the national debt $189 Billion
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1305
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:2, Informative)
Spending does not equal deficit. SS is still taking in more than it is sending out.
You should examine the terms you are using before attempting to correct someone else.
Re:Um, we're broke? (Score:5, Informative)
The bottom line however, isn't that this is the end of the world, the U.S. just needs to ensure that the deficit spending is being spent on things that will improve the economy in the long-term. However, tax cuts are absolutely the worst way to improve the GDP in the long-term. It would be better to spend the money on replacing aging infrastructure and building new infrastructure, or other things that have a direct and unambiguous effect on the economy.
Republican Majority (Score:3, Informative)
The Republicans don't have a majority in Congress, they have a majority in the United States House, one of the two houses of Congress, the other house, the United States Senate retains a Democratic majority.
Re:Obscene (Score:5, Informative)
DARPA's research predates Metcalf's Law by more than a decade. As a leader in network research Metcalf must have been famliar with ARPANet. It is quite likely that work influenced Metcalf's perception of networking. Regardless, Metcalf's law doesn't say anything about network reliability.
Prior to DARPA the prevailing theory was that circuit-switched networks were the way to go. The entire phone system was built on circuit-switched networks. There is no reason to think a packet-switched network would have suddenly become popular without a little prodding by the government.
Long after DARPA's research, commercial entities such as AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe had their own ideas about how computer networks should function. If a commercial entity had invented the Internet it would have functioned like the AOL of 1993 where all content has to be approved by a single corporation. That corporation would collect a tax on all transactions. It would kick out anyone it did not agree with. It would be far, far different than the Internet we have today and it would have undoubtedly happened much later.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:3, Informative)
Um, no [washingtontimes.com].
the "true Scotsman" fallacy (Score:4, Informative)
My dad was a protesting baby boomer. He was and is a republican. He strongly supported the Vietnam War. He strongly supported building more nuclear weapons, more bombers, more submarines, and so on. He loved Reagan's proposed defense against ICBMs.
Yep, he'd be out there holding a sign to protest against nuclear treaties, defense cutbacks, etc. He got arrested for chopping down political signs for liberals. He would attend rallies for republicans. He did his best to support Goldwater. He wrote to congresscritters and talked to several in person. He wrote letters to the editor.
These days he spends his time at Tea Party meetings. He's certain that Obama wasn't born in the USA, based on an admission by Obama's own grandmother.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Informative)
Do you really want your tax dollars going toward research for Soccer (Football everywhere else in the world) and video game sounds?
As one might expect, the characterization you allude to from the YouCut project page isn't quite accurate. First off, here's links to actual research info on the so-called "soccer research" [plosone.org] (actually research into a means of quantifying individual contributions to team performance) and the sound rendering for physically based simulation project [cornell.edu]. Here's some snippets from a news article [msn.com] regarding the projects:
But the researchers behind these projects say Smith has misrepresented their work and the amount of money spent on the projects. ... ... ...
"This was not $750,000 given by NSF for us to develop an algorithm to look at the performance of soccer players," Northwestern University engineering professor Luis Amaral told LiveScience. Amaral, who was the lead investigator on the soccer study cited by Smith, called the congressman's portrayal of his work "not only incorrect, but misleading."
"This was $750,000 that was given to a larger team of researchers to study a very broad range of questions related to creating provocative, efficient teams of researchers who innovate," Amaral said.
Amaral's soccer study, published in June [plosone.org] in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, was supported by two NSF grants. The first was a $450,000 award to develop efficient methods to evaluate the productivity of researchers and research institutions. The second was a $300,000 grant to study how teams collaborate. By quantifying researchers' contributions to their fields, Amaral and his colleagues hope to help funding agencies like the NSF allocate money more effectively.
How do those grants translate to studying soccer? According to Amaral, an M.D./Ph.D. student was rotating through Amaral's lab to learn the computer software Amaral and his colleagues use to model complex systems such as to explore how creativity and innovation arise from networks of researchers. The researchers decided to train the young scientist using easily available data from the World Cup. Soccer was particularly appealing, because team performance is difficult to rank using regular statistical methods, Amaral said.
Smith's second target, research to model the sound of breaking objects, is supported by an ongoing $1.2 million grant given to three researchers over four years. The goal of the research is to create advanced simulation technology for virtual environments, Cornell's James told LiveScience.
"Just think of the impact of computer-graphics rendering, and now imagine the combined potential for realistic computer-sound rendering," he said, citing possible uses of realistic simulations for engineering cars, aircraft and even spacecraft. The results may also be useful in designing rehabilitation and training simulations like those used in the military. Even robots could become better at navigating their environments with higher-level sound processing, James said.
Re:Um, we're broke? (Score:1, Informative)
Your willful ignorance amuses me greatly. There's this wonderful site called Google you can use to look up various facts and figures on issues like this. It takes literally 5 minutes to find multiple sources for the obvious fact that as much as a dirty spending whore as Dubya was, Obama will far, far outpace him in spending.
At least jump to the usual mealy mouthed whore excuse and claim it's because he had to clean up "Booosh"'s failures.
What's funny is even most of the Obama projections are lies, he'll end up spending far more than projected because it's the conservative (i.e. made up) numbers they tend to use, in real life we'll spend a lot more on everything - especially health care.
Re:Simple Solution to this Budget Problem (Score:4, Informative)
No it's not that simple. I wish the people saying this would go to the Congressional Budget Office web site and actually try reading some of the budget projections instead of parroting some line which happens to fit their worldview.
In a nutshell, U.S. military spending has more or less been steadily declining [cbo.gov] as a percentage of the GDP and percentage of the budget [urban.org], up until 9/11. After 9/11 it started to tick upwards, but is still near the lowest it's been since WWII [truthandpolitics.org]. It's actually one of the few parts of the budget which has been getting smaller over the last 50 years.
What's killing the budget are the social programs. Specifically Medicare/Medicaid, though Social Security rears its head every now and then. Medicare and Medicaid are projected to grow so much [cbo.gov] and so quickly that if we completely eliminated all military spending - dropped it to zero - within about 20-25 years the growth in Medicare/Medicaid will have consumed all of the savings.
This isn't a conservative problem, this isn't a liberal problem. It's a straight-up accounting/math problem, and I know most of the folks here are pretty good at math. Put aside any preconceptions you may have. Go read the the CBO report on the budget [cbo.gov]. See for yourself where the problems in the budget are.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:2, Informative)
Why yes, I know what you mean. I know a couple poor people who refuse to give up their cable TV and all the options on the phone and internet because it's not that much money. And when you really look at it, they crank up the heat in the winter because every 3 degrees is only 5% of their heating bills right. I mean 5% doesn't make a different so why should they turn the furnace down to 69 or 72 degree.
Here is the problem you are looking past. A lot of little things add up to one big thing. So if you save 5% a month on a $100 bill, it's only what $60 a year? But if you do that for 10 different things, it's now $600 a year. So dismissing something because it's insignificant or small is pretty much why poor people tend to remain poor- even with ever increasing incomes.
I'm not sure how they figured out what from where or which target to aim for. My impression was it's a culmination of suggestions and a number of them entered by the people that picked the category from budget expenditures. Perhaps you know how they picked it. And no, it's not the only category they picked. But I think you know that already.
I'm just going to point you to your own first suggestion. And judging from the site, they can't be wasting to terribly much money on it. In fact, they probably has some kid do it or an intern because he had a pocket protector or something.
So sure, I can see spending 20 dollar to tell congress where not to spend millions or more. I guess the real score card on how effective it might be is when the lame duck congress gets out and we get people that have to get reelected looking at the results.
Re:Um, we're broke? (Score:3, Informative)
The first projections for deficit for Obama's first budget was 1.8 trillion.. which happens to be more than it actually was. Your suggestion that Obama's numbers are "conservative" are basically bullshit.
Are the numbers good? Hell no. They'd be much better if that fucking idiot Bush hadn't cut taxes, and they'd be better in the future if the fucking conservatives didn't think that the top 2% of earners needed to keep their ridiculous tax cuts.
But lets lay blame where it goes... fucking idiots who fell for the bullshit trickle down economics crap, and the fucking idiots that don't understand that if you spend a dollar, you should be taking in a dollar.