Brit view of Yank budget turmoil (The Economist)

At least one respected British media center has voiced a notably askance view of the GOP level of insanity on current budget cutting:

Budget cuts at the NIH: Department of nose-cutting, face-spiting

This is choice. I recommend reading the whole juicy thing, but I'll provide the finale, with breaks for emphasis:

"And for what? Once again, and for the umpteenth time: the United States faces a serious debt problem on the order of trillions of dollars over a 20- to 30-year time frame.

This debt problem is overwhelmingly driven by rising Medicare and Medicaid spending due to rapid cost inflation in the medical sector.

Other significant budget problems include a substantial but demographically limited increase in Social Security expenditures,

and immense and spectacularly wasteful defence spending.

The final serious budget issue is that American taxes are set at a level that remains several per cent of GDP lower than expenditures throughout the business cycle,

a problem either created or severely exacerbated by the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.

Every other federal spending category apart from the ones I have mentioned is, from the point of view of our debt problem,

trivial,

and cutting any other category has a negligible effect on the debt. [Interjection: thus, fully fund commitments to science!]

Cutting peer-reviewed research funding in order to generate trivial savings that will have no measurable effect on the debt problem is just ridiculous.

It may be tedious to just keep repeating, over and over, that these cuts are ridiculous. But they're the dominant political event in the country this spring, and when the dominant political event consists of

overwhelming, repeated ridiculousness,

there's not much to do but keep pointing out

how ridiculous it is."


YES. And that's exactly what I said (or close enough) in my "I am seriously p*ssed off at the GOP in Congress" post.