'YouCut' Targets National Science Foundation Budget 760
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."
Obscene (Score:5, Insightful)
Science ! (Score:5, Insightful)
kudos americans. you have succeeded in giving a second chance to the morons who have awarded the world with a neverending war on terror, a turmoil in middle east, violation of all constitutional and modern civil rights, kidnappings, torture, wall street DEregulation (and corresponding scam), and body scanners and many, many more !
heaven knows what they will do to you (and the world, if they can) with this second chance. maybe the first thing they will mandate will be mandatory cavity searches in airports.
Um, we're broke? (Score:4, Insightful)
With our national debt at 100% GDP and our unfunded mandates at 8 times that, we're more than broke. We're spending our grandchildren's tax dollars.
When it comes down to choosing between "free" healthcare, "free" medicine, and everything else "free" the government owes people, why is it a surprise that what people think here is "honest" and "important" will fall by the wayside.
Welcome to Idiocracy.
Investing in the Future won't get you votes today! (Score:5, Insightful)
Private companies typically do not engage in long-term research that isn't likely to lead to directly commercializable results. I know this flies in the face of red-blooded 'merican "all socialism is evil" doctrine, but public sector research, funded by tax-payer money, is needed to build the foundations for tomorrow's industries. Quantum computing, like many other bleeding edge fields, is too immature, too high-risk, and with pay-offs that are far too distant for the private sector.
Research and education are both investments that can yield fantastic returns, but they are long-term investments that require steady commitment rather than periodic outbursts of zeal punctuating long periods of apathy. A minor cut now might help balance the books today, but the lost opportunities down the road will more than negate that. Top researchers don't hang around after you cut the funding they run their labs and pay their students and post-docs with. They won't wait a few years until times are good again. What they will do is go where the money they need to work is, and if they can't find that in the U.S., they'll likely find it in Canada, China, Australia, etc.. The U.S. is far from the only country doing quality research in QC these days.
Unfortunately, some U.S. politicians are of the opinion that they can make political hay by screwing over those "pinko" scientists. They're smart enough to know what they're sacrificing, but votes for them are a worthier cause! The only way to fight this kind of thinking is to call up your local representative/senator/etc. and let them know you're not buying it. The only way to make them stop this kind of thing is to make them think they'll lose votes today, because that's all they care about.
Re:haha ahah ahahah (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sigh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or we could tax the rich, close the loopholes on capital gains and outsourcing, enact tariffs against countries with environmental and labor protections weaker than ours, and use the revenue to put the unemployed to work on new infrastructure.
Hah, as if. We'll continue to cut taxes (20 for the rich, 1 for the poor, 20 for the rich, 1 for the poor, etc), then hit the deficit cap and slaughter Social Security and Medicare, and finally end up a destitute 3rd world nation, under god.
Better Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
How about these... (Score:4, Insightful)
Cut the NSA, CIA, FBI, ATF, DEA, and all that anti-democratic shit.
Re:Um, we're broke? (Score:3, Insightful)
I Call Shenanigans (Score:4, Insightful)
If you go to the site, they're not saying we should cut ALL of the NSF funding. They're asking people to suggest specific grants that are not good uses of tax dollars. The OP is essentially saying that there can't possibly be waste anywhere in the NSF budget at that anyone who would even suggest such a thing must necessarily be anti-science.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:2, Insightful)
So let me get this straight. The average American, who is not well versed in our own government, who doesn't really understand financial management, who can't locate Iraq on map, and overall isn't educated more than enough to make them a somewhat functioning worker, will be given the privilege to recommend what programs should and should not be cut.
Well, I guess it can't be worse than the asshats we already have in congress.
Re:Obscene (Score:4, Insightful)
At least don't cut any more funding for education. How else are we all going to learn Mandarin?
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:4, Insightful)
If we start with the TSA I'll support the program, silly as it is.
Simple Solution to this Budget Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obscene (Score:5, Insightful)
The advances of science are not something you can just measure overnight and call profitable. Knowledge spreads around, and benefits everyone. Not to mention the fact that a lot of this grant money creates jobs (lab workers, grad students, aka FUTURE SCIENTISTS) and is spent on equipment made by American manufacturers.
Baby Boomers fucking things up yet again. (Score:2, Insightful)
It basically boils down to the Baby Boomers fucking up yet again. It's something they've done every decade since the 1960s.
In the 1960s, their naivety resulted in protests and riots, along with the rise of "isms" like feminism.
In the 1970s, they started to make their way into power. Their energy and economic policies were absolutely terrible. Stagflation crippled many Western nations' economies during the 1970s.
By the 1980s, they were reaching higher and higher levels of power in business and government. Their total avarice again stunted real growth of the American economy.
They achieved the ultimate level of power in the 1990s. Thanks to their horrid economic policies, they almost single-handedly enabled the Chinese economy to grow so quickly, while at the same time ruining the American economy using "free trade".
They retained power during the 2000s, fucking up the corporate landscape and the American economy even further. Getting older in age, they started turning to religion, leading to shenanigans like this.
Never has a single generation caused so much trouble.
Re:Obscene (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know... maybe this little thing called the "internet", which was developed by DARPA, a government research agency?
Re:Obscene (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, when was the last time that a government science fund produced something worth $24,000,000,000? Every major invention I can think of came from a private company doing research for a specific need, not a government program doing research in order to keep scientists eating from the taxpayers' pork trough.
How ironic that your ability to communicate that to us is only due to DARPA funding what was the initial Internet. Lasers, most of moden medicine, the Internet, all resulted from government research. Private companies don't want to invest in basic research because the time 'till return is "too long" for them (5-20 years out). In short, you're a fucking moron.
Make The Cuts Broad & Deep (Score:3, Insightful)
I've worked 10 years in biomedical research both in academia (where I got my paycheck from the NIH), and in industry (pharma & diagnostics).
I am ABSOLUTELY in making very deep cuts in the National Institutes of Health budget. It should be cut in half over the next 10 years.
I have witnessed the efficiency and progress in industry, and it make some of the top academic researchers look like true money and time wasters. The amount of truly useful work to come out of academia does not justify stealing from taxpayers.
It is the moral position to support cuts to the NIH, military, NSF, Dept of Ed, etc.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:1, Insightful)
So where is that working private industry fusion reactor?
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:2, Insightful)
There is a link on the site to suggest it. Go for it.
I as a republican state this proudly. *ALL* programs need to be on the table. We can not continue to have trillion dollar deficits. This includes all three sacred cows of defense, SS, and education. If we continue down the road we are now we will have nothing left and only be spending all the tax rev on paying interest on loans. The rest relatively speaking is 'table scraps'.
People only want to cut things that 'they dont like'. If we dont cut from *ALL* programs there is no point in doing it at all. It needs to be deep and across the board.
Science funding cuts are the sorts of things that unfortunately will need to happen. We need a surplus budget for 15-20+ years to dig us out of the hole we are in. That is before we can talk about rebuilding and setting realistic guidelines on what we need and can realistically can buy. This *will* involve a tax rate hike on everyone. Not 'just the rich'.
I dont think most people quite comprehend the amazing amount of debt we are in. If we shut down the government for 5 years and devoted 100% of the tax rev to paying off the deficit we *might* just pay it off. It is that big.
Also sometimes you need to get thru the crap politicos call a 'cut'. Where they yank all the funding from a program then turn around and spend it all on another program. That is not a cut. That is a reshuffling of money. It would be as if I am in debt and instead of buying krispy kreme donuts I start buying dunkin donuts and cofee every day. Then saying I cut my krispy kreme budget. When the fact is I am still spending the money on something similar.
Re:Obscene (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obscene (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know... maybe this little thing called the "internet", which was developed by DARPA, a government research agency?
There are two basic observations to note here. DARPA did it first, but creating a large network with some degree of redundancy is obvious, due to Metcalf's Law (larger networks being more valuable than collections of small, disjoint networks) and the unreliability of network components. In other words, the internet would have happened anyway. Second, the vast majority of value was contributed by private interests unrelated to DARPA, both businesses and non-profits.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
Excuse me, could you point to the private enterprise that developed TCP/IP ? Oh, right it was a wasteful government grant to those egghead liberals.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:2, Insightful)
Of those three, SS and education are drops in the bucket. Not so much "sacred cows" as they are "red herrings". You want to cut the deficit? The military is quite sufficient.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:2, Insightful)
In fact SS is still (for the moment) operating in the black. So thank you for playing, try again.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's an article from Wired [wired.com].
It doesn't directly mention NSF, but rather specific scientific research which can be construed as frivolous.
Re:Obscene (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you really think we'd have the internet, satellites (communication/weather/gps), advanced modeling tools, weather radar, numerous synthetics or alloys, and so many other things it would take hours to even dent the total list? Well, if you don't know, the answer is no. Many of them exist because of direct government funding of research, while the rest couldn't have even existed without the prior research that the government paid for.
Companies what research only on what they can immediately commercialize. The government gives grants to allow lots of research with no foreseeable immediate benefit. Did you know that when electricity was first being experimented with most people had no idea what use it was and would have happily stopped people from "wasting money" researching it if they could? Just imagine your life without electricity while you mull over that.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why we have a representative democracy rather than a pure democracy. The Founding Fathers knew all too well not to trust the reasoning abilities of the "common man"
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, business is not very good at disruptive innovation like computers, the internet, nuclear power, space exploration, etc. That is govt's proper role, to fund long-term research and development. Biz is better at incremental innovation: making computers smaller, bringing the internet to the masses, etc.
Steven Johnson in a Salon interview [salon.com] about his book "Where Good Ideas Come From" says:
Re:Cut the IRS and go to flat tax! (Score:2, Insightful)
You want to tax yachts; most yachts are used for business. What if the yacht is used for fishing? What if its used for impressing foreign business executives so that they bring thousands of fishing related jobs to the US? The fishing yacht only benefits the fisherman, the exotic wine-and-dine yacht benefits potentially thousands of fisherman.
How about something both personal and cosmetic like breast implants. Who do you tax more, a stripper or a women that has had a mastectomy. What if the stripper has a family to feed and the mastectomy patient has no financial reason to justify the procedure, only her own self image?
The last one is a particularly harsh example, but I think it illustrates my point. On one hand you have an individual doing something politically distasteful that frees a group of children from poverty, on the other you have an innocent person disfigured by disease but who's purchase will benefit no one but her. My point here is that having anything other then a flat sales tax model allows for politicians to enforce morality or even "class warfare" (clumsy word, I know) via that form of tax code.
Re:Obscene (Score:5, Insightful)
The post I responded to said "when was the last time that a government science fund produced something worth....". I take that to imply all government research, not just the NSF. Quite frankly, the NSF provides funding for a huge amount of research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation [wikipedia.org]
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health. With an annual budget of about US$6.87 billion (fiscal year 2010), the NSF funds approximately 20 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing.
Emphasis mine. Think about that ~$7 billion dollars the next time Wall Street requires $800 billion to be bailed out from a disaster of their own making.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:4, Insightful)
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"
http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/Review.htm [house.gov]
They specifically target NSF projects here. They suggest that regular people go through the NSF list of grants and report anything that they think is wasteful. Which will be everything. Regular people have no idea how much science costs or have any capacity to evaluate what is and is not sound science. Its such a fucking scumbag move.
I went to that site and entered my own submission - I told him he's a scumbag motherfucker. Not very gracious, but after watching his video, that's how I felt. I encourage other slashdot users to go there and add their own comments!
-Taylor
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Um, we're broke? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Baby Boomers fucking things up yet again. (Score:4, Insightful)
As a Baby Boomer myself, I take offense at that. I'd like to point out that during the 70's, we had mostly Nixon and Ford in the White House, with poor Jimmy Carter only there for the remaining 4 yrs. Then the 80's were all Reagan and Bush. In the 90's, Clinton balanced the budget and left a surplus, which was quickly squandered by Bush II on a trumped up war in Iraq.
All of the Republican Presidents named ran up huge deficits, while claiming to be "fiscal conservatives."
"Real" Baby Boomers, who were the ones protesting in the 60's and 70's, were NOT Republicans. I think I can say that pretty much as a blanket statement. They were, by definition, liberals. They opposed war in all its forms. They were for cutting the budgets of the "military-industrial complex" (Eisenhower's words*). They were for solar energy, and earth homes and dozens of other ways of cutting our dependence on foreign oil.
So don't blame the Baby Boomers. Blame the Alex P. Keatons of that generation. They were NOT true Boomers. They just happened to ride along with us.
*"..We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."--In Eisenhower's farewell address, Jan. 1961
Look up "CompuServe". (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. Instead of the Internet, companies were more focused on isolated, for-pay environments. Such as CompuServe and AOL.
Should be interesting... (Score:4, Insightful)
"The YouCut Citizen Review will look at grants issued by the National Science Foundation and identify those that you consider wasteful"
This should be an interesting exercise since there seems to be nothing to stop non-US citizens submitting ideas. Don't like the way that US IT firms are so successful, well clearly any NSF research to do with computers must be a waste of time. Fed up with better security technology catching all your terrorist plots? Well obviously all those innovative sensor projects should clearly go.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
Heck, more to the point: if it was your typical industry focus group, it'd likely be not only patented to the brim, but they'd chase off people who want to make their standard more popular [pbmaster.org] by making, say, an open source implementation.
Every worthwhile industrial communication bus standard has the master implementation that's patent encumbered. In terms of TCP/IP, think of having to have a license to operate an ssh, telnet, http or ftp server. Only the clients would be free.
Never mind that actually implementing almost any popular industrial bus requires purchasing about $2000 worth of standards, and getting your brain to hurt while trying to understand the abstract descriptions offered. The most convoluted RFC is a breeze to understand compared to say IEC 61158.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no justification for tax revenue being spent on science because private enterprise can achieve more faster and cheaper than government sponsored boondoggles.
Privately-funded science produces things like Viagra and a Coke can made with 1% less aluminium.
Publicly-funded science produces things like vaccines and the Internet.
I know which of the above I think are a better use of time and money.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares where we start as long as we start. Waste is waste isn't it?
I mean seriously, this is exactly the type of thing the democrats championed. I mean it's participation in the government by the people, it's the government (pretending at least) listening to the people, it's wet dream of sorts.
Re:Um, we're broke? (Score:1, Insightful)
Regarding the latter, Obama isn't spending at any greater rate than Bush Jr. did
Oh come on, at least don't post shit that's so easily disprovable with literally a 4 word google search.
Here's a nice explanation maybe you'll understand. [youtube.com]
Please don't lie on the Internet, it's impolite.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
Explain to me why the largest military in the world 'needs' another carrier or two.
If we were to cut ALL military spending across the board by 80%, the US military would still be the largest military in the world by about 35% over China.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures [wikipedia.org]
Maybe if the US military wasn't required to be the world's policemen by the US govt, we could get meaningful debt AND deficit reduction. Not spending half a trillion dollars a year might lead to some fiscal responsibility.
Re:Cut YouCut (Score:5, Insightful)
Well here's a hint, you don't target the hundreds of thousands per individual science grant, that people will oppose simply upon the basis that they don't understand the science behind them nor it's potential benefits. Just imagine some idiot decrying research into the genetics of fruit flys, how dumb can you be not to realise how that genetic research can be used in other fields and even used in that field itself to control a pest that destroys hundreds of millions of dollars worth of food every year hint dumb enough to be a vice presidential candidate apparently.
Want to save money than tackle the big ticket items first, aircraft, ships and tanks designed to fight a world war the no longer exists and even if it did, would simply result in mutual nuclear annihilation. So no new planes, tanks or ships for a decade, make do with what is already in the arsenal which is greater than the rest of the world combined. Also an end the the exorbitant cost of militarising the police, the only result of which is to generate tens of millions of dollars of successful lawsuits for the excessive use of force.
So what is YouCut all about, obviously one thing and one thing only to direct peoples eyes away from the billion dollar wasts, such as no bid contracts, the military industrial complex and bridges to no where and get them focused on things they don't understand and they feel superior about when they laugh at them. The ignorant wallowing in the ignorance.
Re:Should be interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Baby Boomers fucking things up yet again. (Score:2, Insightful)
Take all the offense you like, from the greatest generation came the least. Look at your results - you guys really fucked up. You blew all the money on your toys, crashed the economy so you could get rich leaving your children jobless, and polluted the planet driving your SUVs so your grandkids will end up living in desert. Sorry, Boomer, you guys were the biggest fuckup of a generation to ever occur.
I am officially not a Republican anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
This makes me want to throw-up.
Having "the people" review NSF grants, the same people of whom half believe that antibiotics kill viruses (imperiling all of us when they strong arm their spineless doctors into prescribing antibiotics for colds) and think that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, is a freaking ridiculous idea. Furthermore, the idea that targeting grants individually in NSF, whose budget, at $7 billion is 0.2% of the total budget is an effective way of cutting the deficit is asinine. And to top it all off, that measly $7 billion is one of the major reasons the United States is still a power in science and technology at all, especially as private R&D collapses in the face of the recession (in the short term) and Wall Street's fetish for quarterly results.
Fuck you, Eric Cantor. Fuck you, ignorant Republican douche-bags. I am D-O-N-E done. We are going to Hell in a handbasket, and instead of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic (which would be bad enough), you are stealing life jackets from children and setting them ablaze because the water is cold and we need to keep warm.