What a sleight of hand to suggest that science funding gathered from taxes is impacting the ability for poorer Americans to afford their food. No wonder politicization of science funding is so successful on the right: it’s so rhetorically intoxicating.

I was raised in a working-class family in Greece in the 1980s. We lived in what the average US person would describe as "squalor". Cockroaches crawling on our faces style.

My parents made only a few luxury expenses: encyclopedias for us children, and especially books about space and the cosmos. So please speak for yourself when talking about the interests of struggling people.

Sure, and it's a huge indictment of our K-12 educational system. Investments in science, as a whole, pay off many, many, many times in returns. Same with universities and other knowledge-building institutions. If you want to raise everyone's standard of living, the most certain way is to increase investment in those things.

But alas, after many years of convincing people that going to college makes you dumber, enough people have started believing it that they willing vote against their own self-interest.

> A person who struggles to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, for one.

Most of humanity shared this existence, and yet the language, institutions, ontologies, etc around existence come from those people who did not have the food and housing security of most Americans.

The counterexamples are numerous, but just start at the arts and you'll quickly see there is not a correlation between material comfort and basic curiosity.

Well it’s not like the budget cuts to science are being redirected to those people. It’s going to the already rich.

I agree. But that's what functioning government is supposed to be for. You don't build centuries long institutions by focusing on day to day concerns. Sure putting food on the table is important, but also a lot of that food comes from decades of research on agriculture and how to breed genetically diverse yet resilient crops.

Today's standards are yesterday's luxuries which were the day before's scientific breakthroughs.

And the idea that science is what's breaking the bank when it's barely a rounding error in the US budget is laughable. It's hard to get exact numbers for all R&D funding vs how much we spent on the Iran war but my estimates put just the single Iran war at anywhere from 20-50% and the goals for the Iran war are even more abstract and arguably make things much worse for average Americans on a day to day basis.

This implies that the money saved by cutting research was fungible and not part of a still increasing deficit, that the government doesn't debt spend, and that there aren't positive externalities (including jobs, education, and supporting services in addition to outcomes from the research.

Indeed, not only did research programs get cut, but so did USDA funding which both balanced farming and put food on table. And this was a year after the previous administration reduced the deficit, sent food funding to states, of which ~13 rejected the funding.

Food funding, which, has been studied to increase economic output beyond it's costs, similar to research funding.

I thought we all learned our lesson from DOGE. These savings don’t go to you, bubba. There is no check.

Plenty of poor people across the world have scientific curiosity

stupidest response. There are tons of gov waste that's 100 times more expensive, less effective without any returns. Wars are lot more expensive, net negative for common folks (positive for war machinery though..) And out of all this, you would steal money from research and put it to put food on table? :(