How the U.S. became a science superpower

Right from the first paragraph I know this is just nonsense that is only being posted because of currentpoliticalthing

The US leapfroged the rest of the world in both science and engineering by it's civil war, this isn't disputable. It could only do that because of decade long tariffs that existed solely to protect it's nascent manufacturing industry.

People have constructed so many myths about WW2 it's crazy.

GDP: 1871 the US passes GB By 1900 the US economy was double GB's size. by 1910 they've already passed them by GDP per capita. INDUSTRIAL OUTPUT: Again 1870s. You can't really untie science from industrial output. Is there argument here that the US was behind scientifically because of Nobel prizes? If you narrowly define science as "things europeans liked to research" then I guess. But even by that definition Americans were discovering new drugs such as Actinomycin D as early as 1940, during, not after, WW2 and before they entered. So unless people like Waksman (educated in America) count as braindrain 30 years before the fact I don't think the argument is credible.

The UK failed to mass produce penicillin. It's this industrial ineptitude that caused "brain drain".

I guess what is your point though? The current administration has absolutely no plans to reduce debt as a part of these funding cuts. They plan on INCREASING debt by issuing massive tax breaks that no amount of cutting will fund. It’s right there in their own budget.

If anything they’re taking the worst of all worlds by sacrificing future revenue (by way of new technology that can be sold) to give money to people who don’t need it right now. If you think the US is going to remain the center of the western world’s economic universe, or that any of our allies are going to remain on a dollar standard when we can’t be relied upon militarily or otherwise, I think you’re in for a very rude awakening.

Not everyone is happy to depend on USD. BRICs were making plans to introduce their own alternative reserve currency. Trump once threatened 100% tariffs if they followed through with that.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/aggressive-tariffs-f...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-threatens-100-...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-02/south-afr...

It's not wrong.

We were doing great in 2000.

[EDIT] Plus of course there's the '01 crash in here, which doesn't help matters, as those never do.

Bush pushed through a huge tax cut while launching two extremely expensive wars, one of which was definitely not necessary (arguably, neither of them were a good idea—I'd have argued that at the time, certainly).

Then, financial crisis. You (under orthodox modern political-economy and national fiscal policy guidance) usually try to reserve your biggest deficit spending for exactly these kinds of cases. We had no "cushion" because we'd wasted it on tax cuts and wars. The deficit goes very unwisely deep.

Then, Obama. Tax cuts not reversed under the democrats. Wars not ended (fast enough). More expensive foreign adventures, in fact, though not really comparable to the budgetary catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan. At least the economy recovers, but we don't get back to what should be baseline levels of deficit spending, we stay way too deep in the red.

Then, Trump. More tax cuts. Deeper in the red.

And wouldn't you know it, another disaster! Covid. If only we weren't already in awful territory with our budget... but we are, and deficit spending beats a bad recession and still seeing bad budget results due to a weakened economy, so, more spending it is, because that is what you do in these cases, you're just not supposed to start from such a poor position.

Biden. Little done to fix any of that, aside from doing a pretty good job managing Covid on the econ side (which, I have my complaints, but credit where it's due)

Trump again. We're likely to see tax receipts drop due to IRS cuts and a declining economy, this time for no good reason. And they're talking tax cuts... again.

So yeah, we were on track to need decades of very-careful policy to let our GDP catch up with our debt, without making big cuts. And we'd have to raise taxes back to late-90s levels for that to work, anyway.

That many years of responsible management weren't gonna happen. Tax increases evidently aren't, either. Realistically, we were on track to eventually hit and have to work through a crisis over this, probably early in the back half of this century.

This administration appears to be moving that point many, many years earlier, though.

I didn't even reply, as I didn't want to taint my profile. But it looked very interesting and serious.

Plus, from this one can infer they are clearly scouting researchers in a systematic way.