Subsidies Beget Subsidies
For years in Arizona we have been told by the state government that we need to subsidize science. I have never really figured out why my life would be better if scientists lived in Arizona instead of California, but apparently when governors get together and compare their states' penis lengths, this is one of the key topics that come up. Why we need to subsidize, for example, bio-science in Arizona to keep up with California but folks in Kansas don't need to subsidize, say, awesome golf resorts to keep up with Arizona has always escaped me. I have always felt that if we just keep taxes low and wait long enough, California is going to blow up and we will collect a lot of the best and brightest with no extra effort.
Well, I am starting to understand why we needed to subsidize bio-science with our Arizona taxes. We apparently need to do so to ... attract large grants for Federal tax money. So by subsidizing this sector locally, we built it up enough to attract Federal subsidies. Great. Actually we probably did not build up the sector per se, we just built a quality private bureaucracy that had the skills and incentives to write lots of successful grant applications. Apparently there is still work left to do, though, as other states have invested in even larger grant-magnets:
States with strong science bases such as California, Massachusetts and New York, each landed more than 1,000 grants.
Twenty states secured fewer grants than Arizona's haul of 101 awards.
Arizona scientists will study things such as predicting asthma in babies, prostate cancer and the behavioral responses of kissing bugs, which are blood-sucking insects linked to a blood-borne disease that afflicts 11 million to 13 million people in Mexico and Latin America.
Arizona scientists say the batch of stimulus dollars through the NIH is a welcome change from years of stagnant federal funding for scientific research.
"There was no increase in federal funding for cancer research for five years - that was devastating," said Dr. David Alberts, director of the Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson. "Now, I'm encouraged."
Wow - thus we see why government spending grows so much faster than inflation. Flat spending = devastating.
If I were in academia, the study I would like to do is to try to assess the total value destroyed by state and local governments merely in trying to move businesses and facilities from one part of the country to another.
Michael:
Our Ohio governor is upset because his 800 million fund the schools program with gambling scam is now up to the voters (Ohio voters have always rejected this idea by vote.) He is upset because if he can’t pull off this scam, the federal government won’t give him 800 million in matching funds.
The federal matching fund concept needs to end.
October 5, 2009, 10:59 amDrTorch:
I agree w/ Michael, this Fed gov't matching is nonsense. Talk about your Ponzi schemes.
As an ASU grad, I suppose I benefitted somehow from the effort to scrounge federal dollars. Nonetheless, I could always have stayed in OH for grad school. Or perhaps started a career w/ a science-based company that could hire b/c they weren't paying so much in taxes...
October 5, 2009, 12:58 pmjt:
One of my doctors, who is a top medical researcher, told me that the NIH stimulus grants required a two-year completion date for all work. "You can't do serious medical research in that time period," she said.
October 6, 2009, 7:40 amjt:
One of my doctors, who is a top medical researcher, told me that the NIH stimulus grants required a two-year completion date for all work. "You can't do serious medical research in that time period," she said.
October 6, 2009, 8:23 amOH! You're my new favorite blogger fyi
mthomas:
Agreed, this is another huge waste of money by our govt. But our govt has proven that the worse things get because of reckless spending, the more they feel they have to spend to fix the problem. This is the definition of insanity, continuing to do something wrong that created the problem in the first place. And in my opinion one of the only ways for the average person, without much political influence, to protect him or herself against this is to invest some of their money in gold related assets, which should continue to do well as the government spends all kinds of money to prevent deflation and minimize job losses. I recently read several good articles at http://www.goldalert.com/gold_price_blog.php that discuss this problem of continuing to try to cure a patient with the drugs that made him/her sick to begin with. I especially liked the article titled "Gold Price Up, Dollar Down – Does it Really Matter?", which discusses the potential investment implications for fiat currencies, the gold price, and gold mining companies due to all the money printing by central banks around the world. There are many serious unintended consequences of such huge amounts of government spending, and I think this is ultimately going to severely damage the long term health of our country.
October 7, 2009, 1:15 pm