US science agencies on track to hit 25-year funding low
nature.com* as a percentage of US GDP, not in terms of actual dollars
Actual dollars are meaningless anyway, I wonder what about inflation adjusted dollars?
Maybe 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.
The 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.
>Maybe instead of hiring private contractors to invent new propulsion systems and then conceal them from the public good, ...
Citation needed.
I 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.
I 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?
(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.
I 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.
Someone 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?
Optimizing 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
Literally 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.
How 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.
You don't. You pull a North Vietnam and never surrender to the occupation forces. Eventually the enemy cannot afford to sustain an occupation and withdraws. America has so many more guns than any other country on earth and people intelligent enough to use them well that an invasion force has NO CHANCE of success in the medium to long term. Never underestimate the amount of power and influence a small group of people with rifles and irregular warfare tactics can wield. Especially locals that know every square inch of their backyards by heart. Look no further than Ukraine for a recent example, which is somehow hanging on for over two years mostly with light arms, almost no training, while completely outgunned. America has geography strongly in its favor except Alaska. A successful adversary would need to fragment and manufacture American allegiances with divide and conquer tactics to succeed.
Ukraine seemed to do it with MANPADs and anti-tank equipment over small arms. Unless you're counting those, but that doesn't seem like the kind of weapons ordinary Americans have at home.
Unfortunately, at the moment, Ukraine lost more than 10% of territory under occupation, and other suffer from constant attacks on infrastructure, and sea export extremely limited, so we now very depend on grants from US and EU.
In foreseen future, if West will not give aviation and long range rockets, Ukraine will need revolutionary restructure of economy to survive.
For example, before war, Ukraine was one of the top food exporters, but now, with limited access to sea, have to use land routes, which are just add too much to cost of raw grain.
Yes I don't disagree with any of that, I was just commenting that Ukraine probably couldn't have resisted nearly so well with just small arms. I sincerely hope western govts continue to support them and wish they/we had done more and faster.
I’m not sure being Vietnam in this scenario is particularly desirable.
Not being completely defeated during a bloody invasion isn’t the same as never being invaded.
Being Vietnam would suck, sure, but being in Vietnam also sucked and is avoidable.
(And who do you think has the resources to pull a Vietnam on the US?)
Sure. I’m not advocating for the US invading Vietnam.
But holding up Vietnam and Ukraine as examples of successful outcomes is also missing the horror and destruction wrought on those countries and their people in the process.
The commenter I replied to is using the fantasy of armed citizens valiantly repelling invaders in their backyards in guerilla warfare to support the idea that “Literally nothing.” would happen without the US military.
There'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.
Any 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.
Awesome - 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.
TV used to be the opiate of the masses. Now it's video games and social media.
And open source software.
By 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.
>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?
> 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.
Debt 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.
Debt-to-GDP has been (essentially) monotonically increasing since the year 2000. You’re not going to like the value each year until infinity.
What 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).
I 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
I'm not sure what you're wanting to angle for here, that doesn't seem like a specific formula. If you're trying to calculate a single metric it seems to be number of years to pay off the debt? At current trend, that is infinity years. I'm not seeing how it could get worse than that, although no plans to pay back the debt is just business as usual by now. And I suspect the information in your sentence is actually contained in a Debt/GDP ratio (eg, is interest + GDP growth going up faster than debt implies Debt/GDP ratio dropping).
> I wouldn’t compare my $400k debt with my monthly income.
Pretty sure that is actually a fair way to assess your creditworthiness. I can see the conversation in the bank going "Yo I want $400k", "What is your income?", "$X", "Yea"/"Nay" with some basic due diligence.
The amount of debt doesn't matter, only the cost to service the debt. They're certainly related though.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. It’s so clear this isn’t sustainable.
>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.
Japan 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.
OK. Let's take the U.S. out of the equation and look at Japan's inflation - https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/inflation-cpi. Hmmm... you'd expect with the 'unsustainable' government spending in Japan that there would be an uptick in inflation. There's nothing of the sort - unless my eyes are lying to me. And this goes back to my second point - nobody really knows what levels of government spending are sustainable, and my guess, given that it's not just Japan with a high debt/GDP ratio, that it's likely a much larger number than some posters here would like to admit.
US debt repayments are similar to their military budget, and their military budget is designed to hold down China (rival superpower) and Russia (possesses a global threat nuclear arsenal, with whom they are actively at war with) and a few other countries.
I'll happily agree that the limit is unknown and it might be higher than anyone expects - but at the current trajectory we're all going to find where it is as the US hits it face-to-wall-at-speed style. Years ago we crossed the limit where that debt was never going to be repaid in real terms. Now we're getting to levels where even the interest probably isn't going to be paid back in real terms.
And, in amongst this, it isn't really clear what the debate around science funding is supposed to look like. The US appears to be going broke. It'll probably struggle to find the money for big spending on science over the next few years. Even if they execute some sort of default they're still going to have to do a round of belt tightening.
Also - on Japan - topical news: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/10/ja...
I'm actually not as opposed to belt tightening as you might think. I just get aggravated seeing narratives without a whiff of empirical evidence to support them. (I've informally studied economics and probably know enough to be dangerous.) My personal indicators that we may be on shaky fiscal ground are the rise of monopsonies/monopolies in vertical markets that depend on discretionary income (concert tickets anyone?) and the most troubling chart I've ever seen from the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) https://www.bls.gov/bdm/entrepreneurship/entrepreneurship.ht... (scroll to the bottom and look at the last chart).
At risk of belabouring the point [0]; but the empirical evidence is that debt/gdp is an a clear uptrend. Initially when the debt was taken on, the justification was that economic growth would be fast enough that it'd not need to be paid back. That didn't happen. Then the narrative shifted to the point where ok well the debt isn't going to get paid back as such but that doesn't matter because the government can just pay the interest and roll the debt over. Now that isn't working. The justification is shifting to "well ok the US can't pay the principle or the interest but that is OK because it is a government but it can print money and force people to go along with the spending, maybe declare that lenders don't get paid back but don't call it a default?".
Waiting for more empirical evidence that this will break everything is not a great strategy. By the time the evidence is in, everything will be broken and the US will be deeply in debt. The US is already acting like an economic system under significant stress (prosperous people don't elect Trumps). When the dust settles it'll probably turn out that there were huge costs to the debt and they just didn't turn up as inflation (for example, if people literally can't afford something, then price inflation won't matter).
Japan having high debt and the US having high debt is no evidence at all that the US will end up like Japan. They've got completely different laws and people. Plus the median Japanese income is something like 80-60% of the median US income [1] so that is hardly an economic outcome to aim for.
[0] Started out with "Noy wanting to" but I figured that couldn't be true.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
I'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.
Home 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.
In 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.
It be not so! The US public has been surreptitiously cheering the madness on. I'm sure they'd agree with fiscal conservatism in principle - but ask them to support tax hikes? No way to win an election. Ask them to support budget cuts? Literally nothing on the table.
I've been arguing the fiscal responsibility side on HN for a long time. There is nearly no government program where a strident call for fiscal conservatism won't get a comment downvoted. It is a needle-threading exercise to make any points in favour of not spending money; it takes a lot of care, practice and timing to argue without kicking one of several hornet nests. And that in on HN where the crowds are more reasonable and logically minded.
> the culprits instead of the useful idiots
The useful idiots are the culprits. Being an idiot doesn't absolve someone of responsibility.
Let's set the rhetoric aside. What debt to gdp ratio would be reasonable? Do you have any sources to support said ratio?
If you don't have sources, the sensible target is 0. Projects should be funded on an as-makes-sense basis and paid back. Or if you have some reason to pick a different target then sure, do that.
The issue at the moment is that the ratio is trending upwards until something breaks. And debts are hitting levels where not only is it reasonable to expect breakages, but it is also mad to expect that the debt can be repaid. If people keep going the way they are, can you even imagine a realistic scenario where it ends well? People are relying on a McConnell-Schumer-Trump-Biden-No Speaker-in-the-House controlled system to take a situation where everyone is acting unreasonably and suddenly start behaving with fiscal prudence. That is unlikely. It is more likely that catastrophic consequences will happen first, then courses will be changed.
I don't think there are even questions of rhetoric at this point, it looks to me like all the decisions have been locked in. I mean, they may as well bump up the budget for science at this point, why not. Great thing to spend money on. But where are the resources supposed to come from? The system is already in crisis and gridlock.
I would say go ahead and kick the hornets nest. The people who are here to spend other people's money must justify their existence, not the other way around.
Without getting too inflammatory, if they were as knowledge seeking as they claim to be, they would not be fervent and unwavering about their ideas. Most of them are toothless insults anyway.
Neither of the two available political parties routinely make both tax hikes and budget cuts staples of their platform. So explain again how the general populace is somehow responsible?
Probably 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.