All of you winers, complaining that the government should do all these things seem so willing to spend other people’s money for the world’s public good.
What’s wrong with you and others, privately, sending money to fund such work? Someone did just that, and look at what will come out of it. Apparently something good, but at an individual’s expense.
Welfare whores!
What’s wrong with freeing private enterprise to go fund such work?
You’d think, from the way you all speak, that Ben Franklin couldn’t have invented great things for his time without a huge government grant.
Get real
Private business will not fund initiatives with payback measured in decades. This is basic research, not technology or product development.
You owe a good part of your current standard of living to the commercialization of basic research from decades ago.
I have no problem with the relatively minuscule portion of my taxes which funds such research, nor would I have a problem with it being doubled.
What I do have a problem with is the transfer payments that make up the vast majority of the federal budget. Cut that to just enough to support those few who legitimately cannot work, and nobody would care about investments in basic research and space exploration.
Nothing, but they won't. They are too risk adverse. Funding science, and even the things that came before science, is a traditional function of government, and unlike many such, one that ultimately benefits everyone. Government needs to fund the leading edge stuff, where no private business will go. Once the basics are known, then private enterprise does a great job of applying those basics as needed and appropriate. The difference is one between basic and applied research.
In the 50s the military funded a lot of both, although not in general the most basic stuff, but rather stuff that might conceivably have some military application, with the emphasis on *might*, or which would serve to train the next generation of scientists, most of whom would work in the applied area rather than the basic research. And it paid off handsomely.
These days the government actively discourages applied research, by deeming the funds that would pay for it, "excess profits" or the result of monopoly power (you could take a look at Bell Labs, probably the finest corporate applied research organization the world has ever known, if it still existed as something other than the Alcatel/Lucent advanced developement organization It is today. . (And Not the rodent control folks either. :)) The old Bell Labs was killed by the United States Government.