Quote Originally Posted by Atmosfear View Post
Well, I agree that 2% is a sufficiently small portion of the Federal budget that it's not worth battling over in Washington.

However, the whole system is embarrassing. The Federal Government gives gigantic grants to researchers at Universities, who turn around and license their own developments to their privately-held start-ups for pennies, and then sit on all the profits. The taxpayers get no equity out of the deal; it's a bad investment. Of course, I'm not advocating the government start making money on the science budget; they need to stop the spending and let private firms and non-profits handle it.

I agree that we do need an effective commercial system, and I would like to see the government put its money toward making that system run rather than making direct investment (this would, of course, require less money--which should be returned to the taxpayers who paid it.)
I'm still uncertain about having completely privately subsidized research without any government-supported research at all.

However, I will agree unreservedly that we need to have a lot more privately subsidized research like we had in the golden age of Bell Labs and of IBM's research initiatives. It feels strange to think about the fact that the vast majority of physics research in the US is funded through the NSF and NASA.

Also, government subsidized research at least does what it's suppose to do, and that is to produce world-class research programs and technological advances that help spur the economy. Still, when looking at it in the way you describe it, it seems like a perpetual state of "government stimulus."

I ignored it earlier so that I can address it here: the Department of Defense is a necessarily unique entity for the government and while I do not like it for economic principle, I do recognize it's legitimacy in terms of national security.
Don't get me wrong; I do too. My point, which you supported, was simply that you could probably recover more than 2% of the national budget if wastage and embezzlement in the defense budget were reigned in. I wasn't questioning whether or not the government should spend money on defense vs. spending money on science.