71–80 of 420 posts
These kind of policies and that amortization tax law for software development will probably encourage quite some exodus of talent. Would it be to Europe or South East Asia, though?
USA pays engineers like 3x as much as those places. It's still global brain drain destination #1.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a starting premise, we might define "enough" as a balanced budget.
If a balanced budget is your goal, only two steps are required: reduce military spending, increase taxes. No need to cut research. In practice the current budget bill is wildly unbalanced and will vastly extend our debt, despite extensive cuts to important programs.
You do know the military spend on research dwarfs any other federal agency, right? The DoD research budget is about 5X that of NASA.
This gets to the point early where it’s easy to be in favor of cuts in the abstract but much harder in practice once you see that it touches something you favor.
These kind of policies and that amortization tax law for software development will probably encourage quite some exodus of talent. Would it be to Europe or South East Asia, though?
USA pays engineers like 3x as much as those places. It's still global brain drain destination #1.
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If Texans want to fund a military parade for $45 million, and spend $16 billion on an armed secret police force, they are welcome to do so, but then Californians should not have to fund that (and neither do the rest of us who do not agree with such things while producing an outsized portion of the federal government's income).
The issue is not which of these are federally funded vs state funded, unless of course the federal income tax for Californians is specifically reduced in turn. It's a zero sum game: as a Californian, your tax dollars (whether state or federal) are now going to more objectively horrible things and few fewer objectively good things. That's the problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oligarchs first... much like Russia.
That was at first, then Putin started having them murdered. If you think about it, there isn't much of a reason for the individual that is allowed to have all the power to share it with anybody.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a balanced budget is your goal, only two steps are required: reduce military spending, increase taxes. No need to cut research. In practice the current budget bill is wildly unbalanced and will vastly extend our debt, despite extensive cuts to important programs.
We could zero out the military budget and that still doesn't get us anywhere close to balanced. Even cutting 100% of discretionary spending barely does the job. We either need massive cuts in mandatory spending (fundamental changes to social contract) or increased revenue (politically not viable). There's also near zero evidence we actually need a balanced budget for a healthy economy.
The alternative is to pay an ever increasing amount of interest on our ever increasing debt.
The other alternative is to default on our debt obligations.
Neither option is good.
Wherever budget cuts are proposed, you can rely upon detractors to present the issue in apocalyptic terms. If we believed all of these claims, then it would be impossible to cut the scope of government spending. Furthermore, if we accepted the premise promoted by some commenters here, then research, which is presented as incredibly valuable - would be unable to be funded or valued in the private market. For these rea…
This will not work because fundamental research is high risk, and even if it is successful it takes decades to turn into profit. No lender or investor is going to finance that kind of pipeline given the opportunity cost; the returns are just not high enough.