Budgeting For Stagnation

Medicare privatization gets all the attention, but in some ways I think this is the least important part of the budget plan the House GOP adopted this month. After all, it's not scheduled to happen for another ten years so it's kind of a freebie. The catastrophic disinvestment in science charted by my colleagues Adam Hersh and Sarah Ayres, by contrast, would start right away:

To return to Big Government Liberalism 101, scientific and technological advances have a lot of positive spillover effects. Consequently, we use the mighty power of the state to subsidize them in a variety of ways. One is that the patent system allows innovators to have time-limited government sponsored monopolies. A second is that the tax code offers an indirect subsidy to rich people who want to give money away for this purpose (among others). And a third—and important—way is that the government directly spends money on science and technology. This third leg of the stool plays a particularly important role in "the basics" while the patent system does more to encourage the direct application of science to marketable technologies.