I wonder if Chuck Schumer has ever once asked himself: "Is this something the government needs to be involved in?".

I would wager no.

As long as we have people who with a straight face come up with things like we need to fund: Synchronized Swimming for Sea Monkeys: $307,524, then yes, I think I beat any elected federal politician at how to spend money.

https://www.cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/c...ur-tax-dollars

This is a pretty worn trope on the right. Reagan began doing this in his early days as a radio show host. He'd pick out some seemingly odd sounding thing and say it's waste. Good to see it's still going strong 50 years later. Let's take synchronized swimming for sea monkey.

https://www.livescience.com/48435-sc...wastebook.html

because let's face it, you've been lied to. You got a specially selected list devoid of context and designed to gin up your ignorance and you easily fall for it because you think you know better than those egg heads.

Great example, a study conducted in partnership with the Navy to study flow dynamics. Certainly the Navy of all people should stop wasting our tax money to understand better how objects within water move.

I remember Sarah Palin complaining about research on fruit flys. Fruit flys, can you imagine!

Of course, this kind of funding has basically helped make the modern world but is hardly a rounding error in the budget. We need to fun more bible reading, cause God will hear our calls and smite our enemies.

And what's the point of having a multi-trillion dollar defense with Trump as the Commander in Chief. That's like having the best formula one car with Trump driving.

Well, congrats in having no idea how animal models in basic scientific research work, I guess. Also, congrats for being receptive to the most basic of anger propaganda.

I agree.

The problem with our current system in 8 words.

It doesn't matter much which particular spending item you choose. The point of that example was that people like Schumer would not vote down anything that spends our money unless it can win him political points. Same on the other side, for the record.

All these things add up.

It's so hilarious how falldown accused dth of being in a bubble but thinks Chuck ****ing Schumer is like, the most leftist guy he could pick for his example.

Schumer didn't personally approve the sea monkeys project or any other ones. He probably didn't know they existed. A budget for research goes out to the various agencies and they take proposals and approve research. The implication from those articles devoid of context is that they're wasting their money for no reason, just because they can. But each of those projects have proposals sent to the agency and evaluated on merits and approved.

Now there maybe projects that really are frivolous but to determine that is going to take a lot more work than "lol sea monkeys, shut it down." Most of the time though there's way more valid proposals than there is money and so the agencies have to pick priorities.

I think it's just picking whoever is the minority/majority leader and ascribing to them the attibutes they imagine all Democrats have.

I think somebody else picked him. I believe I chose Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump as people who I don't think are great judges of where my money should be spent.

Yet sea monkeys floating around got funding. And somewhere there is a taxpayer working a few jobs to scrape out a living and a piece of his pay goes to watching sea monkeys. I know, I know, small potatoes, who cares bout 370K etc...

Note the guy hasn't read any of the subsequent posts about "sea monkeys." The neural networks are fixed, there's no room for disconfirming information.

First they came for the sea monkeys....

https://twitter.com/seanmcarroll/sta...55188558217217

As others have pointed out, you really should find examples of frivolous spending that don’t involve curiosity driven scientific research. (Or you could just start making noises about how the way we deal with carried interest is unfair or something)

There are tons of examples of scientists working on something they think has absolutely no foreseeable practical application that ends up being useful in ways they could never imagine. Crispr, this cutting edge “tool” that can potentially revolutionize medicine, was discovered by a team just trying to understand how bacteria deal with viruses. They had no idea they would find something that could be used to change the human genome.

There still should be (and there are) people looking at proposals, deciding what should and shouldn’t be done but on some level we just have to let scientists do science.

Why should I pay for scientific research about how stuff floats?

The point of the exercise is how many people think we, as taxpayers, should fund this stuff. In my opinion, the federal government should do the things that only they can reasonably do. A few that come to mind include federal courts, military, border security...

Stuff like Nasa, Arts councils, how does stuff float... is all completely and totally not a federal government issue. Let the rich billionaires you all are complaining about fund these pet projects or let them go away.

We talk about our personal deductions and refuse to see how incredibly stupidly ridiculously bloated the federal government is.

Why does curiosity driven scinentific research need to be done by the US Federal Government?

My point is that as long as we have a deficit and a national debt, we should not get to have cool toys like that.

Even if debt/deficits were gone, we should let people opt in to that sort of crap.

The things that falldown is complaining about the most and should be eliminated (from the minor science studies up to things as big as art funds and NASA) would, if eliminated, save his tax liability about $20 per year.

Government can raise funds and sustain losses that no other organization can. It makes them particularly well suited to funding these type of projects which can return value, but may not do so quickly enough for Wall St.

First, because it's not easily replaced by private research. Private research is highly geared towards immediate corporate viability. You'll be hard pressed to find a private company to set up satellite and sensors all around the world just to understand weather patterns without an immediate return to investors. Yet a ton of companies depend on the US to do just that. Those, in return, benefit citizens though they'd never build or do the underlying research and research apparatus.

Second, no one cares about the deficit. The Republicans just passed a bill adding 1.5 trillion to the deficit to largely benefit wealthy people. There's plenty of ways to pay for the deficit that doesn't end public research, the research that's brought you the Internet.

Ah yes, NASA and the arts, just pet projects that can go away. No one will suffer. No impact on society or science whatsoever.

P.S. NASA should have the same budget as the defense department. Add their budgets together, divide by two, and there's your budget for each.

I was listening to a trade podcast that they were talking about the aerospace industry and they made the point that there doesn't exist an aeroplane industry separate from a government anywhere because the time scales and costs are so enormous that no one would support an aerospace company and the complaints about Airbus or Boeing having an unfair advantage comes down to the differing methods of how they're subsidized.

Imagine, god forbid, that 10 years from now you or someone that you love will have a child with extra genetic material that will lead to Down’s syndrome. Because, at some point, there were people 5 years ago asking questions about bacteria and viruses, that child would likely be able to live a normal, healthy life.

You, whether you know it or not, benefit from scientific progress that is a direct result of curiosity driven research. (Which, as hue pointed out, is not easily privatized) If we allow people to opt out, we stop a whole lot of the scientific innovation which we tend to take for granted.

Also, I know not everyone has seen exactly what percentage of discresionary spending goes where and so I’ll leave this here:

https://goo.gl/images/hJM7tU

No one wants 10,000 Ayn Rand plays coming from the Koch Industries with a special appearance from the Heritage Foundation.