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How the U.S. became a science superpower

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Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#421

Post by anonfordays »

SecretDreams wrote: post #380
BobbyJo wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im afraid you'd need to be pretty liberal with your definition of rich at this point to dig us out of this hole through taxes alone.

Tax wealth somehow, not just income. It's clear the accumulation has become a generational problem. Your great grandkids could cure cancer and bezo's could do nothing and yours would never have a fraction of the wealth his have.

>Tax wealth somehow

I don't unserstand how you can tax something that varies in value by double digit percentages every week. If Elon got taxed when TSLA was $450 per share, and six months later it's now $250 per share... How much should he be taxed? Should he be provided a tax refund?

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#422

Post by ripe »

roenxi wrote: post #412
ripe wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As we have seen, Trump can hire prosecutors who will prosecute anybody he points his little finger at. He always hires lackeys, so it was easy to predict he would harass Fauci.

So how will the pardon help? If the assumption is that the prosecutors are going to fabricate crimes, the pardon will only help if they fabricate a crime that happened under certain conditions (see: https://www.justice.gov/pardon/media/1385746/ ). If they're just making something up they can make something up and claim it happened in 2013. The pardon doesn't protect him from harassment, it only protects him if he spe…

None of your links show any indications of crimes. I don't get the obsession with Fauci when there's an actual criminal using the Oval Office to harass innocent people every day.

This conversation is pointless. Have a nice day.

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#423

Post by comte7092 »

jack_h wrote: post #52
cs702 wrote: post #7

Worth reading in its entirety. The following four paragraphs, about post-WWII funding of science in Britain versus the US, are spot-on, in my view: > Britain’s focused, centralized model using government research labs was created in a struggle for short-term survival. They achieved brilliant breakthroughs but lacked the scale, integration and capital needed to dominate in the post-war world. > The U.S. built a decent…

> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over. I find it amazing that this is the conclusion when earlier in the article it was stated that "[Britain] was teetering on bankruptcy. It couldn’t afford the broad and deep investments that the U.S. made." The US debt is starting to become an existential problem. Last year the secon…

The amount of money we are talking about for research is so small in comparison to the debt that it’s a red herring to even bring up the current debt level. As you’ve noted, even the largest parts of the budget are dwarfed by the total deficit. Researching is a rounding error.

There’s this thing called taxes. We’ve had thirty years of tax hawks intentionally creating this situation that we find ourselves in, because they’ve cut taxes without any sense of responsibility for its impact on the debt/deficit. In fact that’s been their plan all along, to “starve the beast”, cause a crisis, and force cuts to popular programs that they wouldn’t get political support for otherwise.

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#424

Post by SecretDreams »

anonfordays wrote: post #421
SecretDreams wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax wealth somehow, not just income. It's clear the accumulation has become a generational problem. Your great grandkids could cure cancer and bezo's could do nothing and yours would never have a fraction of the wealth his have.

>Tax wealth somehow I don't unserstand how you can tax something that varies in value by double digit percentages every week. If Elon got taxed when TSLA was $450 per share, and six months later it's now $250 per share... How much should he be taxed? Should he be provided a tax refund?

He can't eat with his shares. He can use them as collateral for debt. Presently, that's how he dodges taxes. You'd close that loophole.

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#425

Post by jack_h »

rurp wrote: post #420
jack_h wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over. I find it amazing that this is the conclusion when earlier in the article it was stated that "[Britain] was teetering on bankruptcy. It couldn’t afford the broad and deep investments that the U.S. made." The US debt is starting to become an existential problem. Last year the secon…

The national debt is a complete red herring here. It's a real problem, sure, but that is completely unrelated to these cuts. The party implementing these cuts is currently debating how many trillions of dollars to increase the national debt by. They are completely unserious about reducing federal debt payments and there is zero ambiguity about what they are saying, drafting, and voting on. That is also the same party…

I posted elsewhere about my displeasure with what is happening in congress. A large chunk of the Republican base is not willing to address the national debt; the $5 billion in cuts from the Senate bill going into reconciliation is a rounding error in the national budget. This seems like a golden opportunity for the Democrats to be the adults in the room and propose a solution to the problem with numbers, charts, economic projections, and math.

We're not seeing that. The national debt is not the red herring rather all of the ideological arguments happening in this thread are. Politicians *should* be working on fixing the national debt, but their constituency keeps telling them they'd rather balkanize. So that's what will happen.

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#426

Post by monknomo »

consumer451 wrote: post #259
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are numerous studies showing that higher housing costs reduce the fertility rate, e.g.: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2024.102572

Thank you. This is excellent. I am really curious how we fix this in the future.

My crank idea to fix both of the issues you mention is mandatory national service.

This would provide everyone a common ground, similar to how widespread military service in wwii did. It would promote civic virtue by exposing everyone to how they personally can make the government useful. And it could be made such that we have our national service corp just build useful things, like houses. Additionally we could provide similar benefits to folks that go through national service as the military - healthcare, payment for college, etc.

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#427

Post by jordanpg »

prpl wrote: post #89
oldprogrammer2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systems don’t remain constant, though, and every system gets “gamed” once the incentives are well understood. I’m 100% for investment in scientific research, but I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds. We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions, and a publish or perish model that encourages that bad behavior as well as junk sc…

>>> We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions Can you define "many"? 100k reports? 10k reports? 1k reports? 150 reports? 15 reports? What's the incidence? What's the rate compared to the public and private sectors? What's the rate for defense contractors? Are we talking social sciences, hard sciences, health sciences? What's the field? "many" is just intellectu…

OP, please grapple with this.

This is precisely why Ted Cruz, etc. go on TV and read out the titles of silly-sounding research about beehives and condoms. Because they know that most Americans have no sense of very low-N statistics. A few examples out of hundreds of thousands proves the point!

Of course it doesn't.

Do you understand that? If so, then why are you casually throwing around those talking points that are contributing to the destruction of scientific infrastructure and human livelihoods? This isn't a game.

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#428

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

consumer451 wrote: post #259
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are numerous studies showing that higher housing costs reduce the fertility rate, e.g.: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2024.102572

Thank you. This is excellent. I am really curious how we fix this in the future.

one possible answer is removing property taxes and replacing them with land value taxes. property taxes dicensentivize development while land value taxes incentive it.

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#429

Post by ar_lan »

misiek08 wrote: post #418

[flagged]

> It’s not superpower, because it’s not the local people who are so smart. It’s only small percentile of imported skills.

This is the entire basis of the US, excluding Native Americans. I'm first-gen American, have only ever lived here and wholly identify as an American. My story is super common here - and its not that many generations back that most Americans were European/African/Asian as a whole. So I don't exactly understand what you mean - the power did consolidate here with the mixture of many brilliant minds across the globe, and largely has remained until a recent President has decimated our reputation.

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#430

Post by kevinventullo »

Robotbeat wrote: post #387
bgwalter wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr... the top 0.1% hold $22.14 trillion and the top 1% hold $54 trillion. The total federal debt is around $35 trillion. So for sure the top 1% could pay off the debt in order to have a reset at least. I'm not saying it should be done, but it does not seem impossible.

It’s paper wealth. If you forced a sell off, the value would plummet. Look at revenue.

Maybe a direct transfer then. Don’t have to worry about share prices when the tax is a % of shares owned.
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