Republicans screw us if they screw government-funded science

They're not in power yet, and they've only been counting their wins for a week-and-a-half,
but already the Republicans in Congress are talking about budget cuts (and not about
not extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Hypocritical.)

As anyone who knows anything about it can tell you, only about 1/3 of the budget is "cuttable", i.e., discretionary spending. And that's what the Republicans always target. And rather than think about what truly robust research-and-development does for an economy (not to mention for our environment, though they'd never mention that, would they?), they target science agencies for cuts. NSF, NOAA, NASA, DoE. Not to mention that they pay lip service to the need for NSF to improve science and math education - to keep the U.S.A. "competitive".

This is so typical of them. "Reducing the size of government" is GOP code for trying to slice and dice out of the government things they don't like. As, for example, cutting the education department and increasing school vouchers. This would allow more religious conservatives to get their kids out of public schools (and their evil curricula) and into private religious schools (with their God-blessed curricula), so they wouldn't have to be taught the evils of evolution. Don't like the EPA's ability to enforce clean air, clean water, and climate regulations, even if the Supreme Court says they can? Cut the EPA!! Don't like the inconvenient data that NASA satellites are transmitting about Earth's declining environment? Cut the NASA budget!! - but keep funding big-ticket, big-contractor projects like the James Webb "1.6 billion over" Space Telescope. (Oh, that might get cut and slowed down too, of course. Happy News for Everybody).

The thing is, there's a pretty general consensus that cutting government science R&D funding will reduce our competitiveness, and reduce our economic ability to generate jobs in new sectors of the economy. But if you want to not have to raise taxes (or even BETTER, cut them!), then research science takes a hit. And that's just plain Stupid, but when Congressmen think that God has promised us he won't raise sea level (subject of an upcoming post), well, what are you going to do.

The budget commission says to raise the retirement age to 67, or 69, in decades. Do something meaningful, you cowards, instead of something Stupid like cutting the budgets of government science agencies.