Mariannette Miller-Meeks triggers mentally ill Iowa City Democrats #DOGE

Mariannette Miller-Meeks triggers mentally ill Iowa City Democrats: They see their taxpayer-funded, unaccountable gravy train ending.

The relevant sources

NIH waste, NIH funding (the first 2 links feature waste from many govt agencies, NIH included) https://web.archive.org/web/20220615031448/https://professor_enigma.webs.com/old-fart-rants-4 https://web.archive.org/web/20231001191515/https://professor_enigma.webs.com/oldfartrants2.htm https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/category/1 https://officeofbudget.od.nih.gov/pdfs/FY25/spending_hist/Mechanism%20Detail%20for%20Total%20NIH%20FY%202000%20-%20FY%202023%20(V).pdf https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/page/historical-data-books https://www.paul.senate.gov/?s=National+Institutes+of+Health

Federal Spending data https://web.archive.org/web/20240705083452/https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241128153942/https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/hist04z2_fy2025.xlsx https://web.archive.org/web/20241130122049/https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/hist_fy2025.zip https://web.archive.org/web/20241229072453/https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/hist08z8_fy2025.xlsx https://web.archive.org/web/20241228032211/https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/hist08z6_fy2025.xlsx https://web.archive.org/web/20241230073255/https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/hist09z7_fy2025.xlsx https://web.archive.org/web/20250116091656/https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/hist12z1_fy2025.xlsx

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Recently, Johnson County, Iowa NAMBLA Groomers held a “townhall” https://www.facebook.com/jcdemsiowa/posts/959939839593544/ https://www.1630kcjj.com/2025/03/21/ic-federation-of-labor-to-hold-town-hall-saturday/ to rage over NIH waste being preserved (most of them don’t pay a dime in federal income taxes, so they have no skin in the game) because what would we do if we didn’t have “hair research” or figuring out why people like spicy foods – you know, the burning questions that everyone wants answered.

I’d wager a good portion of the attendees are likely dependent on taxpayer subsidies to the HHS & NIH, so if this waste & this frivolous spending gets taken behind the woodshed, they might have to get a real job where they get paid to do something noble in the private sector.

Pedocrats have always sought to expand the size of government, not just to exert control over the plebs, but to increase the share of folks who will vote for them – as well as mobilizing these clowns when Donald J. Trump, Elon Musk & “Big Balls” start looking through the federal budget & find what we all knew they would find (I do have to admit, even I didn’t think it was this bad). When you make people dependent on government & others come along & try to avoid the collapse of the dollar due to our bloated national debt – it’s hard to get these people off of that. It’s like a drug addiction & treatment; you need some tough love.

I urge you to write your elected officials now & tell them you support #DOGE & a reining-in of wasteful spending (see the links at the top, I did that almost 10 years ago & that’s just the tip of the iceberg) at NIH, HHS & ending the federal department of “education.”

In this exercise, I’m going to cover (because I’ve been queried about it numerous times) education spending, HHS spending & NIH spending/waste (but mostly the latter).

I often hear “education is underfunded” & the details following are non-existent. If you constantly claim that “education is underfunded” {X} when the results are not positive, you autistically-repeat “education is underfunded,” wash, rinse & repeat.

I remember right after Barry Obongo signed the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act into law & the ink was barely dry when Collectivists started wondering, “was it big enough? Did we spend enough money?” It’s never enough, get it?

Turning to Table 4.2 (the Federal Dept. of “Education” in its current iteration did not exist prior to Peanut Head Jimmy Carter’s regime, but spending was still allocated towards that), from 1980-2000, 1.923% of all federal spending was “The Federal Department of Education.”

If the groomer says, “see, it’s less than 2%, that’s not much.” I’ll retort, “If ONLY 1.923% of the Pacific Ocean was dumped on your hovel, it wouldn’t be much of the Pacific Ocean but would still cause widespread damage.” Get it?

From FY 2010-17, the Federal Department of Education was 2.025% of all federal outlays. From FY 2018-21 it was 2.7% & in FY 2022-23 it was 4.75%. Under Ronald Reagan (FY1982-89) it equaled 1.812%.

Why is that important? The Federal Budget en masse has absolutely exploded over the past 50+ years, I have the data in a previous video >>> https://rumble.com/v6qiakw-lyin-brian-tyler-cohen-is-really-worried-about-medicaid-spending.html Agency X could see its share of all federal spending (adjusted for inflation) decrease in a decade, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its funding is being cut, it’s just not growing as fast that the entire budget.

All the money Leviathan spends on “Education” (unless it is the District of Columbia, as it is a federal enclave) should be returned to the taxpayers & Iowa can educate its children, so can Idaho & every other state sans any “assistance” from Leviathan.

Unfortunately, they don’t have a table that looks at agency spending adjusted for inflation, but Table 4.1 does show you the yearly totals. Table 4.2 is all you need though to know how much it has grown.

If you wander over to Table 8.8 (inflation-adjusted), “Total education, training, employment and social services” spending averaged “only” $55.112 Billion from FY 1982-89. FY 2010-17 it had grown to $105.787 Billion & FY 2018-23 it shrunk to $102.533 billion. Still >86% larger on an inflation-adjusted basis when compared to the Reagan presidency. They would call it a cut if it grew at the rate of inflation until Jesus comes back.

Turning again to Table 4.2, “Department of Health and Human Services” averaged 18.58% of all federal outlays, FY 1970-2023. From 1982-89 HHS was 12.475% of ALL federal outlays, FY 1994-01 it was 20.925% & FY 2010-17 it was 26.275%. FY 2018-2023 HHS was “only” 25.516% of all federal outlays.

Again, if you go to https://rumble.com/v6qiakw-lyin-brian-tyler-cohen-is-really-worried-about-medicaid-spending.html (I have the population data there) & peruse the data, you will see HHS is growing much faster than the federal budget en masse & the federal budget en masse since the 1970s has been in overdrive. So, if anyone complains about HHS cuts, they’re either lying or very stupid. I’ll be generous & say they’re stupid.

How about HHS spending per capita? I can’t give you a definitive total on that, but going to Table 8.6 will get us close. I will be adding lines 13 (which has a number of items under it) & 14. I will also be adding lines 28 & 29 (“Health” + “Medicare” on the Discretionary side) on Table 8.8.

From FY 2000-23 ($22.4105 TRILLION & 7,473,134,960 population) those metrics (“Total Health” + “Medicare”) averaged $2,998.80 per capita, adjusted for inflation.

From FY 2010-17 (2,536,990,138 population & $7,845,600,000,000 in spending) those metrics (“Total Health” + “Medicare”) averaged $3,092.48 per capita, adjusted for inflation.

From FY 2018-23 (1,986,627,255 population & $8,044,500,000,000 spending) those items (“Total Health” + “Medicare”) averaged $4,049.32 per capita, adjusted for inflation. No cuts there kids, not even close.

I’m guessing the rubes whining about #science & NIH funding (which is under the auspices of HHS) being gutted have no clue about this spending, but they do have an entitlement mentality. Many of these #sciene lunatics also think Dylan Mulvaney, William Thomas & Tim McBride {Y} are women. No, they are dudes pretending to be women & they want you to take part in their psychosis. No thanks & if you want to do that fine, but as soon as you go into the women’s locker room, you will be arrested. Now, back to the game.

Let’s go to Table 9.7 & see how “SUMMARY OF OUTLAYS FOR THE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT” has fared over many years & only the “NONDEFENSE” total.

FY 1970-2023 “SUMMARY OF OUTLAYS FOR THE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT” (Nondefense) “as a percentage of total outlays” averaged 2.036%. Again, remember how much the federal budget en masse has grown since the 1970s.

FY 2000-2023 “SUMMARY OF OUTLAYS FOR THE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT” (Nondefense) “as a percentage of total outlays” averaged 1.695%.

FY 2010-17 “SUMMARY OF OUTLAYS FOR THE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT” (Nondefense) “as a percentage of total outlays” averaged 1.712%.

FY 2018-2023 “SUMMARY OF OUTLAYS FOR THE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT” (Nondefense) “as a percentage of total outlays” averaged 1.316%.

Now let’s tally this spending (adjusted for inflation, Table 9.7) shall we?

FY 1970-2023 “SUMMARY OF OUTLAYS FOR THE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT” (Nondefense) “In Billions of Constant (FY 2017) Dollars” average yearly spending = $47.76 BILLION

FY 2000-23 “SUMMARY OF OUTLAYS FOR THE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT” (Nondefense) “In Billions of Constant (FY 2017) Dollars” average yearly spending = $62.162 BILLION

FY 2010-17 “SUMMARY OF OUTLAYS FOR THE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT” (Nondefense) “In Billions of Constant (FY 2017) Dollars” average yearly spending = $65.387 BILLION ($65,387,000,000)

FY 2018-23 “SUMMARY OF OUTLAYS FOR THE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT” (Nondefense) “In Billions of Constant (FY 2017) Dollars” average yearly spending = $66.133 BILLION

Does that look like any cutting is being done? If you listen to the shrieking #science zombies, there’s cuts being made, there’s always cuts being made & there’s always a crisis. That’s how they keep this gravy train rolling & they want the taxpayer to continue handing them a pile of money that they can then waste on frivolous ventures because the troglodytes at NIH know better & you’re just a pleb.

Now let’s evaluate that inflation-adjusted spending (Table 9.7) on a per capita basis, shall we?

FY 2000-23 “SUMMARY OF OUTLAYS FOR THE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT” (Nondefense) “In Billions of Constant (FY 2017) Dollars” average yearly spending per capita ($1,491,900,000,000 spending & 7,473,134,960 population) =$199.63

FY 2010-17 “SUMMARY OF OUTLAYS FOR THE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT” (Nondefense) “In Billions of Constant (FY 2017) Dollars” average yearly spending per capita ($523,100,000,000 spending & 2,536,990,138 population) = $206.18

FY 2018-23 “SUMMARY OF OUTLAYS FOR THE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT” (Nondefense) “In Billions of Constant (FY 2017) Dollars” average yearly spending per capita (1,986,627,255 population & $396,800,000,000 spending) = $199.73

It fell a bit per capita in that last time frame, NIH has been so cheated & mistreated. However, the last time frame is pinch higher than the FY 2000-23 average. You owe NIH a $200 check, pay up. You also Medicaid a large check, you owe the Fed. Dept of “Education” a check, & HUD, Dept. of Energy, foreign aid subsidies, agricultural subsidies, the Dept. of Food Stamps, I mean Agriculture – you see how that all adds up.

There’s a bevy of “it’s only 1% of all federal spending” programs & here we are, $35 TRILLION in the hole.

Let’s look at NIH spending (and unfortunately, not inflation-adjusted) itself & see the trends there. https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/charts/ https://archive.is/6TtCH https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/health-and-human-services According to Cato, NIH spending adjusted for inflation has spiked massively since the 1970s & 1980s. Unfortunately, their graph stops at FY 2019.

If you download https://officeofbudget.od.nih.gov/pdfs/FY25/spending_hist/Mechanism Detail for Total NIH FY 2000 - FY 2023 (V).pdf https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/226 you’ll get some good information.

From FY 2001-03, average yearly NIH funding in toto was $23,480,397,667. From FY 2021-23 that yearly average was $45,479,029,333. For those of you keeping score at home (and I used 3 FY’s two decades apart, so I am not cherry-picking) that’s a nominal increase of >93.5%! Yet, you will hear these clowns screech about #science & their “funding being cut.” Donald Trump & his Congress might oversee the first substantial cut in your funding due to profligate spending that has been taking place for eons. Your unaccountable gravy train is over!

Average yearly in toto NIH funding FY 2011-13 = $30,187,177,667. Look like any cuts are happening?

From FY 2001-2003, total Research Project Grants (subtotal, RPGs) yearly average = $12,973,607,333. FY 2011-2013 yearly average = $16,173,435,000 & FY 2021-23 = $25,374,170,667 (95.5% higher in nominal terms than FY 2001-03). You will still hear them whine about cuts. There’s always a #science crisis & humanity is on the cusp of destruction because of this. Reminds me of the shrieking during the TARP bailouts in 2008. “If we don’t do this, the Apocalypse will happen.” These people are lying to you!

Let us now turn to Table 12.1 in the OMB Historical data & tally “Table 12.1 - SUMMARY COMPARISON OF TOTAL OUTLAYS FOR GRANTS TO STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS”. I’ll start with “As Percentages of Federal Outlays” & this includes “Capital Investment” & “Payment for Individuals.”

FY 1970-2023 “Summary Comparison of Total Outlays for Grants to State & Local Governments” as a % of all federal outlays = 15.083%

FY 2000-2023 “Summary Comparison of Total Outlays for Grants to State & Local Governments” as a % of all federal outlays = 16.712%

FY 2010-17 “Summary Comparison of Total Outlays for Grants to State & Local Governments” as a % of all federal outlays = 16.637%

FY 2018-23 “Summary Comparison of Total Outlays for Grants to State & Local Governments” as a % of all federal outlays = 16.816%

Stay at the same table & we’ll tally this spending per capita from various time frames.

FY 2000-23 “Summary Comparison of Total Outlays for Grants to State & Local Governments” (In Billions of Constant (FY 2017) Dollars (7,473,134,960 population & $15,444,100,000,000 spending) = $2,066.61 per capita.

FY 2010-17 “Summary Comparison of Total Outlays for Grants to State & Local Governments” (In Billions of Constant (FY 2017) Dollars (2,536,990,138 population & $5,072,700,000,000 spending) = $1,999.49 per capita.

FY 2018-23 Summary Comparison of Total Outlays for Grants to State & Local Governments” (In Billions of Constant (FY 2017) Dollars (1,986,627,255 population & $5,199,700,000,000 spending) = $2,617.35 per capita.

There is no cutting going on, not even close! These people are lying & they won’t care until the dollar collapses & the shelves empty. Then they’ll be screeching that the government owes them a meal, but they might as well be hoping for manna from heaven.

If you go to the first two links I provided at the very top of the page (I’m not going to reproduce them here, save a short synopsis) you’ll find some NIH waste such as: Studying people’s rejection threshold for spice & bitterness, federal funding for research has been increasing at massive rates for over half a century, telling young adults to eat more fruits and vegetables, why mother’s love their dogs as much as kids, giving truckers tips to lose weight & motivational phone calls, billions of dollars on “alternative medicine”, smartphone apps aimed to getting cannabis users to exercise, post-incarceration health care for “trans” women, promoting safe sex in South Africa, helping homosexuals quit smoking, understand how sexual risk behaviors among homosexual men may be facilitated by the nature of GPS-enabled smartphone applications, studying the effects of sex-selective abortions in India & the list goes on. Read them all if you want.

Don’t forget, the NIH was at the forefront of pushing these garbage-can COVID-19 “vaccines” https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/experimental-coronavirus-vaccine-safe-produces-immune-response https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9734065/ that were not only not effective at preventing transmission, but I believe they killed a lot of working-age people. https://rumble.com/playlists/TRwipQjtxfk *That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a worthy gamble for a person aged 60+ who has immunodeficiencies. However, anyone who is “in good health” should’ve taken a hard pass on them*

I’ll close w/ some salient comments from a few people over at the Cato Institute on the efficacy of “government research.”

Pertaining to research funded by the taxpayers, it’s a lot like paying for one’s own education. If you have some skin in the game, you’re more likely to work harder & take it more seriously. If you’re being handed a pile of money, you’re more likely to shirk your duties because you have an (hypothetically) endless stream of money coming from taxpayers.

NIH/HHS has succumbed to this, they’ve been getting piles of money (and Congress has abdicated their duties as taxpayer watchdog) for so long, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing & here we are. IT ENDS NOW!

What if Washington & the NIH were able to raise the average life expectancy to 90, as well as eradicate Alzheimer's & Parkinson’s, but it cost so much the dollar collapsed & the grocery store shelves were empty? Worth it? Can we all live to 100 if the national debt triples? No sane person would say, “yes.” Perhaps the people who depend on NIH funding might say yes until they waddle their fat ass down to Starbucks & there are no egg sandwiches or anything else. America is four missed meals away from chaos.

https://www.cato.org/blog/dont-we-really-need-government-research To take the Internet as proof that the government is a necessary producer of research and innovation, you have to reject the scientific method. Unfortunately, there are rarely controls in public policy. We can’t find out what would have happened if government policy had taken a different course, so we don’t know anything more about who should fund research from the fact that government-funded research has produced good things in the past.

But what would have happened if U.S. public policy had taken a different course? I’ve thought about the impossible-to-answer question of where we would have been without DARPA and other government influences on telecom. What most people don’t consider, I believe, is the restraining influence the government-granted AT&T monopoly had on telecommunications for most of the 20th century. AT&T developed a “Teletypewriter Exchange” system in 1931, for example, but had no need to develop it, there being little or no competitive pressure to do so. (Its patent on attaching devices to phone wires undoubtedly helped as well, preventing anyone using AT&T’s wires for modem service.)

Had there been competition, I suspect that someone would have come up with the idea of packet-switched networks—that’s what the Internet is—before Leonard Kleinrock did in 1962. Kleinrock was a student at MIT—he wasn’t at DARPA, which didn’t get into packet-switching until about 1966. (Then again, MIT was almost certainly awash in government money—specifically military money—so there you go. Maybe we owe all the good things we’ve got to war, but I doubt it.)

My guess—and it’s only that—is that we would have had the Internet some decades earlier if not for government interventions in telecommunications. We probably would have had multiple, competing “Internets,” actually, adopted more slowly than the Internet we got. (In a chapter of Privacy in America: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, I explored how government has accelerated the development of computing and communications, overpowering society’s capacity to adjust, with negative consequences for privacy.)

Support for government-funded research requires one to elide opportunity costs, the things foregone when one thing is chosen. As I said before, tradeoffs are ineluctable: Money spent on government research takes away from private research, or from other priorities such as reducing debt. In the absence of taxation to support research, the money would go to the public’s priorities as determined directly by the public in manifold spending and investing decision. Taxation and spending on government research is merely the substitution of centralized, political decision-making for a distributed, direct decision-making system. Its supporters are generally going to be beneficiaries of that system—elites, in short.

Even these beneficiaries of the status quo tend to agree that political decisions about funding for scientific research are warped. The solution to that problem, they’ll say, is fixing the political system—that is, creating a political system that is not so political.

And: https://www.cato.org/blog/subsidizing-research-technology Technology expert Jeffrey Funk has a great article on innovation in American Affairs. He critiques venture capital markets and current U.S. research funding. I am not on board with some of Funk’s ideas, but he nicely summarizes the bureaucratic distortions of government-funded research that policymakers should consider before increasing subsidies further.

University engineering and science programs are also failing us because they are not creating the breakthrough technologies that America and its start-ups need.

… This decline in technological breakthroughs cannot be attributed to a lack of funding: governments have been funding university re­search for more than half a century, yet research productivity has declined overall, including research into semiconductors, agriculture, and pharmaceuticals. Other than the internet being commercialized in the 1990s—the technological foundations of which were created in the 1960s and 1970s—few new science-based technologies have emerged in the last thirty years. And the small number of successes were mostly achieved by foreign competitors: lithium-ion batteries, OLEDs, and solar cells, for instance, were commercialized by Japa­nese, Korean, and Chinese companies.

Even Nobel Prize–winning research seems to lead to fewer techno­logical breakthroughs than in the past, according to a survey of top scientists.

… Furthermore, looking at some of these prizes in more detail reveals that much of the research work was done at corporate and not uni­versity labs. For instance, among Nobel Prizes for physics and chem­istry awarded since 2000 in lithium-ion batteries, LEDs, charge-coupled devices, lasers, integrated circuits, and optical fiber, nine of the seventeen recipients did their work at corporate labs. The only high-impact award that solely involved university research was graphene.

Many scientists point to the nature of the contemporary university research system, which began to emerge over half a century ago, as the prob­lem. They argue that the major breakthroughs of the early and mid-twentieth century, such as the discovery of the DNA double helix, are no longer possible in today’s bureaucratic, grant-writing, administration-burdened university. The idea of scientists following their hunches to find better explanations and thus better products and services has yielded to the reality of huge labs pursuing grants to keep staff employed. Young scientists have become mere cogs in a grant-seeking machine, forced to suppress their curiosity and do what they are told by senior colleagues who are overwhelmed by administrative work. Two-author papers, like the one describing the structure of DNA, have been replaced by hundred-author papers. Scientific merit is measured by citation counts and not by ideas or by the products and services that come from those ideas. Thus, labs must push papers through their research factories to secure funding, and issues of scientific curiosity, downstream products and services, and beneficial contributions to society are lost.

Nobel laureates have similar criticisms of the contemporary cul­ture of academic research. Various laureates in biochemistry, biology, computer science, and physics have claimed that they would now be denied funding for their prizewinning research because of grant-issuing bodies’ preference for less risky projects; one physicist even claims he could not get a job today. In today’s climate every project must succeed, and thus our scientists study only marginal, incremental topics where the path forward is clear and a positive result is virtually guaranteed.

… One option is to recreate the system that existed prior to the 1970s, when most basic research was done by companies rather than uni­versities. This was the system that gave us transistors, lasers, LEDs, magnetic storage, nuclear power, radar, jet engines, and polymers during the 1940s and 1950s. Apart from these past successes, there are a number of structural reasons why conducting basic research at corporate labs is likely to produce more useful results than in uni­versities.

First, corporate scientists are focused more on solving prob­lems, whereas scientists in universities must also take on the administrative work of writing papers—often in collaboration with dozens of coauthors—managing PhD students and postdocs, reading dissertations and draft papers, writing letters of recommendation, and filing grant proposals to keep themselves, their students, and their staff em­ployed. Unlike their predecessors at Bell Labs, IBM, GE, Motorola, DuPont, and Monsanto seventy years ago, top university scientists are more administrators than scientists now—one of the greatest misuses of talent the world has ever seen. Corporate labs have smaller administrative workloads because funding and promotion depend on informal discussions among scientists and not extensive paperwork.

Second, the informal discussions and collaboration characteristic of corporate labs allows the scientists who work there to make better decisions about both the merits of different designs in the short term and problem-solving approaches for the long term. These informal discussions can also focus on issues of cost and performance: how to measure them and how to improve the technologies along these metrics. Such discussions rarely occur in universities because their goal is the publication of research rather than the development of new products and services.

Third, conducting basic research at corporate laboratories can help avoid the problem of hyper-specialization in academia. Because publi­cations are the key output of university professors, there has been a growing number of journals over the last fifty years to accom­modate the growing number of university scientists, and these jour­nals have become increasingly specialized. For example, Nature now publishes more than 144 journals and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers more than 200. This growing specialization turns professors into narrowly focused researchers unable to understand not only the needs of the marketplace but also the metrics of cost and performance for a new technology, which should dictate long-term goals. Relocating more basic research to corporate labs can reduce this specialization by placing scientists in an organization whose goal is to commercialize new technologies.

And lastly: https://www.cato.org/blog/governments-should-not-fund-research https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23320 In fiscal year 2022, the federal government spent $76 billion subsidizing nondefense, scientific research. This component of federal expenditure is modest relative to the $6.27 trillion total or the $632.7 billion private sources spent on research and development in 2021. It nevertheless merits scrutiny…

Private charity also funds basic research. The American Cancer Society, 100 years old this year, collects personal donations and invested more than $145 million in cancer research in 2022, and more than $5 billion since 1946. Its history suggests that private charities are willing to invest in research that government might avoid. When the ACS was founded, it was taboo to even discuss cancer in public.

Private charities fund numerous areas of research. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute funds about $660 million in medical research per year, and countless charities focus on specific diseases (the Alzheimer’s Association, $90 million in 2022; the Parkinson’s Foundation, $24.9 million). The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation distributed $3.6 billion in 2021 for global health research and development. Additional examples include the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (economics, energy, the environment, and physics; $48.1 million in 2022), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (arts and humanities; $592 million), and the Ford Foundation (drivers of socioeconomic and political inequality; $713 million).

Moreover, much innovation does not rest directly on basic research: Microsoft Windows, TurboTax, and the iPhone did not spawn from some grand theory but instead grew from ongoing trial-and-error processes in response to pressing needs.

Regardless of these issues, the long-term record suggests little impact of federal research funding on the U.S. economy. The graph below plots real GDP per capita since 1870 along with federal nondefense research and development spending since 1949, when the government began reporting this statistic. Funding existed prior to 1949 but was small and embedded in other parts of the budget; in 1940, it was under $105 million (in 2012 dollars).

The growth of GDP per capita seems unaffected even as research funding rose dramatically following World War II. The average annualized growth rate of real GDP per capita was 1.96 percent between 1870–1948 and 2 percent between 1949–2022.

Thus, the standard model likely overstates the need for government funding to generate innovation. In addition, government funding generates substantial costs beyond its monetary expenditure.

If government funds research, it must decide which projects to fund, allowing political forces to influence the choice. President George W. Bush limited federal funding for stem cell research that used human embryos in response to pressure from anti-abortion forces. The recent affirmative action case against Harvard is a legal issue because Harvard accepts federal research funding. The National Institute on Drug Abuse has been criticized for displaying bias in favor of drug prohibition.

Another concern is that a central source of funding may limit which projects can access funds, reducing research variety. Special interest groups can successfully lobby for funding that supports their research even if it is not the most deserving. Indeed, private research funding is distributed more widely: between 2010 and 2019, 200 organizations received 80 percent of National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, whereas the top 200 recipients of private funding received only 33 percent of donations. Scientists have explained how private funding has enabled them to explore new ideas, adjust budgets, and avoid lengthy bureaucratic approval processes.

Finally, much government funding goes toward applied, not basic, research. In FY 2022, 38 percent of nondefense federal R&D funds were earmarked for applied research. This piece cannot be justified on the grounds that private actors will systematically undersupply it due to a lack of monetary incentive.

{X} I guess if we spent a few hundred billion dollars more every year, suddenly all these kids that can barely read, will suddenly be able to read? Will the perpetual test score gap between Asians & Blacks or Whites & Blacks suddenly evaporate? https://rumble.com/v52f3kv-creepy-old-man-sam-seder-hates-charter-schools-part-i.html https://rumble.com/v52fjnm-creepy-old-man-sam-seder-hates-charter-schools-part-ii.html https://rumble.com/v52fp43-creepy-old-man-sam-seder-hates-charter-schools-part-iii.html The Federal Department of Education is unconstitutional & ineffective, to boot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsTPvxHKjPw

{Y} https://wamu.org/story/12/06/08/from_tim_to_sarah_au_student_body_president_unveils_big_news/ This is hilarious! Tim McBride says, “McBride said [he] was wasting [his] life pretending to be someone [he] wasn’t. So on Christmas Day [he] came out to [his] family, and later shared [his] secret with close friends and teachers.” #science https://rumble.com/playlists/dMJZl8ovgts

What the heck? Tim, you are currently continuing this masquerade, trying to make folks believe you are an XX chromosome homo sapien, when you are not. You are delusional, my friend. If you want to dress like a girl (and why do these folks usually have to dress like the opposite gender, as if there are differences in the way each gender dresses, odd, huh? Why not say, “I’m a girl” & dress like Donald Trump going to a board meeting) go ahead, I don’t care. However, when you demand I join you in that delusion & *ATTEMPT* to enter my daughter’s locker room, you & I have a problem little man. You’ll get arrested if you try this in Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I Yield Back!