US science agencies on track to hit 25-year funding low
72 points by jedwhite 1 year ago | 50 comments- apsec112 1 year ago* as a percentage of US GDP, not in terms of actual dollars
- taway1237 1 year agoActual dollars are meaningless anyway, I wonder what about inflation adjusted dollars?
- taway1237 1 year ago
- ofslidingfeet 1 year agoMaybe instead of hiring private contractors to invent new propulsion systems and then conceal them from the public good, we should give some of our ~$600 billion military budget to these agencies.
- oldbbsnickname 1 year agoThe official budget for 2023 was $773 B with ~$350 B going to contractors.
There are multiple elements to issuing grants. It's not simply moving money around from one line item to another. If agencies have been gutted or don't have the budget, then can't write requests for grant proposals or can't offer what they don't have.
- rl3 1 year ago>Maybe instead of hiring private contractors to invent new propulsion systems and then conceal them from the public good, ...
Citation needed.
- mcpackieh 1 year agoI agree, this is a great time for a peace dividend. The geopolitical situation in Europe and Asia is more stable than ever before. The Soviet Union is gone, NATO seems like an irrelevant relic from the cold war, and China is rapidly liberalizing thanks to free market forces. The rules-based international order has won and history is finally over.
Yours truly, Rip Van Winkle.
- xyzelement 1 year agoI am curious, let's say we wound down the military and gave all the money to something else... what do you think would immediately happen to us right after?
- RangerScience 1 year ago(not OP)
Defense contractors would start pulling out the cost-saving technologies, etc that they've been sitting on to win bids, now that there's less money in the pot. Cost-plus contracts are whack, man.
Source: Way back when, worked in industrial augmented reality, and some colleagues came from defense (ship building) because of exactly this issue. Their prior employer had (quietly) pioneered various uses of AR in ship assembly, which drastically reduced costs, but wasn't actually deploying it because cost-saving actually reduces their profits, so they only actually use them when it comes time to win bids.
Pretty sure you're fishing for "we get attacked" tho, which I neither agree with, nor have the background to coherently argue against.
- ofslidingfeet 1 year agoI wouldn't be in favor of winding down the military. I would be in favor of giving private contractors a choice between subjecting themselves to meaningful oversight or we can reallocate their funding to entities that will.
- stetrain 1 year agoSomeone suggestions diverting some wasteful spending from the military and you jump to winding down the military and giving all of its money to something else?
- henry2023 1 year agoOptimizing the DoD is very different from having all the money going to something else. To stop funding overseas wars as one of many many more example shouldn’t affect our ability to protect our country
- orangepurple 1 year agoLiterally nothing. America is armed to the teeth. If the government deputized and allowed citizen militias to patrol its borders, there would be very low risk of invasion. Any invasion force would face tremendous logistical problems and irregular warfare by a well armed populace. Simply put, nobody can invade and control America. We would see a repeat of the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
- rhcom2 1 year agoHow does a populace with small arms defend against a cruise missile? A bomber? A submarine?
Certainly there would be irregular war akin to any of the irregular warfare the US military has faced and control might never be completely established, but it wouldn't have to be for it to be the end of the US as we know it.
- defrost 1 year agoThere'd be an excess of bored former soldiers and a barely secured excess of military hardware loose in a nation polarised and sharply divided.
If the FBI terror watchlists are in any way accurate it's not threats from beyond the borders that the U(?)SofA would be threatened by.
- nine_k 1 year agoAny invasion force on land would have to attack either from Mexico or from Canada. I don't see it as remotely probable.
An invasion force with a slightest chance of success would have massive seaborne and airborne components, along with armor, and would start with a massive aerial and missile attack at the area of prospective invasion. This is not something a well-regulated militia with small arms would be effective against. If the current war in Europe is any indication, small arms are not even effective against armed consumer-grade drones.
What a militia might be efficient against could be e.g. short-term incursions by drug cartels, or similar.
- fnordpiglet 1 year agoAwesome - so we would live in a mad max world fighting irregular warfare across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, instead of developing open source software and playing video games? I think I’d rather be conquered if that’s the alternative and go back to playing video games and developing open source software.
- rhcom2 1 year ago
- RangerScience 1 year ago
- oldbbsnickname 1 year ago
- 1 year ago
- roenxi 1 year agoBy traditional indicators the US is broke. Debt to GDP is at historic crisis levels, debt service is eclipsing the military budget (though I didn't check if that includes the spending for the war in Ukraine) and it is unclear where the oomph to pay for retirees will come from. The main thing optimists seems to be pinning their hope on is that the authorities can print money and it will all turn out OK.
What is the conversation around science funding meant to look like? Spending money on productive investments is a great idea, but the practice of the US government is nowhere near that.
- sigmar 1 year ago>What is the conversation around science funding meant to look like? Spending money on productive investments is a great idea, but the practice of the US government is nowhere near that.
This year's Nobel prize for chemistry went to three Americans (edit: I was mistaken, one of them was living in the USSR when his initial discovery was made, though he now lives in the US). Both the winners of the Nobel prize in medicine were American. and one of the three winners of the Nobel prize in physics was American. By what metric are we "nowhere near" productive in how we fund research?
- roenxi 1 year ago> By what metric are we "nowhere near" productive in how we fund research?
Spending as a % of budget. I feel that was obvious given the article.
I suspect you're reading something that I didn't write though - I'm just pointing the US government doesn't have spare money lying around to increase their funding of science projects. It isn't a case of "oh we'll just budget a bit more for science". There are enormous cuts/tax increases needed before that conversation can even begin.
- roenxi 1 year ago
- tonmoy 1 year agoDebt to GDP has no meaning as one is a balance and the other is a balance over a time. A better indicator will be Debt to GDP until the year infinity. Same goes for military budget, it’s for a year.
- 4death4 1 year agoDebt-to-GDP has been (essentially) monotonically increasing since the year 2000. You’re not going to like the value each year until infinity.
- roenxi 1 year agoWhat measure do you want to use? Given that debt has been consistently trending up faster than GDP for a while ... I dunno, couple of decades? ... Debt:GDP until year infinity is also quite concerning (we could reasonably project a ratio of infinity unless policy changes - ie, the US is at crisis levels).
- tonmoy 1 year agoI wouldn’t compare my $400k debt with my monthly income. I’d compare my monthly income vs my mortgage payment and my investment incomes. Same goes for the government, divide debt by number of years needed to pay it off including interest subtract the earnings from economic activity and interest earning from giving out loan to other entities and the see if GDP is able to counter that
- thfuran 1 year agoThe amount of debt doesn't matter, only the cost to service the debt. They're certainly related though.
- tonmoy 1 year ago
- 4death4 1 year ago
- henry2023 1 year agoI don’t know why you’re being downvoted. It’s so clear this isn’t sustainable.
- thedragonline 1 year ago>It’s so clear this isn’t sustainable. Maybe. Having that much debt is problematic in a household budget. However, governments are a different animal - just look at Japan's debt to gdp ratio (https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/CG_DEBT_GDP@GDD/CHN/...). Posters who claim the US Gov's debt is strangling the nation are obligated to explain why Japan hasn't imploded. The likely real answer: nobody knows what levels of debt are sustainable for a government.
- roenxi 1 year agoJapan can't sustain a bunch of things that the US can and has a substantially lower GDP per capita. They aren't a counterexample to US debt being a problem - calibrating to follow Japan's example will involve the US dialing back its spending.
- roenxi 1 year ago
- roenxi 1 year agoI've always assumed it is that the trends are damn scary and people don't want to think about them. Most people struggle with financial concepts like (earning >= spending -> good outcomes) and I assume at the root it is some combination of emotional responses that just don't want to tackle the uncertainty of the future.
If you look far enough out, the future is scary. If nothing else eventually we get hit by a meteor. So people generally don't look forward more than a week or few - because it is unpleasant and seems a little pointless. They live with whatever seems like a good idea right now. I just wish they'd let people who are a bit more math-oriented take on budgeting decisions. We're going to be eating consequences that we didn't have to because the US public can't sit down and agree that solvency is more important than whatever distraction came up this electoral cycle.
- OkayPhysicist 1 year agoHome economics and nation-state level economics are entirely, qualitatively different, not just different scales of the same thing, and people who think they're clever by comparing the two are insufferable. Global superpower economies are even more so.
A government collecting more tax revenue than they spend is a sign things are going terribly wrong. Best case scenario it means they were temporarily, inadvertently overtaxing everyone. The government "printing money", and thus creating some level of inflation, is a good thing. Deflationary economies are failing economies.
By far the biggest difference is that to you, money and debt are real. If you don't have enough money, you can't pay for the things you need. If you have too much debt and can't pay, people will show up and commit violence against you. At the sovereign nation-state level ("sovereign" excludes countries that gave up control over their money supply to disastrous effect, like Greece), money and debt are far less concrete. Debt represents "buy-in" on your monetary system: If people and nations are owed money from a country, they have a vested interest in that nation's continued economic prosperity. Money is an infinite resource to a sovereign nation: it can simply print more. Via taxation, they effectively destroy money, since Infinity + 1 still equals Infinity. Thus, money from a nation-state's perspective isn't about balancing the books, it's about controlling the flow.
- forgetfreeman 1 year agoIn point of fact the US public has literally no control over budgetary policy so perhaps pointing the finger at the culprits instead of the useful idiots that put them there would be worthwhile.
- OkayPhysicist 1 year ago
- yongjik 1 year agoProbably because "debt to GDP ratio" is a made-up measure and it's totally unclear that it actually indicates something. Only two things seem obvious to me:
(1) There is no hard limit to how much dollars the government can issue.
(2) Of course, the government cannot just issue more dollars indefinitely, before Bad Things(TM) start to happen.
However, this (rather trivial) observation tells us nothing about "What is the limit (or rather, range) of how much dollars the US government can issue, before bad things start to happen?" Without explaining how you can estimate such a limit, (US debt / GDP) is just some number: There's no reason to believe that there is some hard, fixed limit X that this number is not meant to exceed.
- thedragonline 1 year ago
- sigmar 1 year ago
- peepeepoopoo43 1 year ago[flagged]