Please let me know when there is a blockchain election where I can monitor my votes in real time. Please let me know how I get a copy of my vote tallies today to ensure that it wasn't tampered with?
Please let me know when the spending increase is on open source and open educational platforms to help fix generational poverty and socioeconomic issues caused by the stealing of the land and exploitation of minorities. Also, let's make sure to celebrate their attempts and help them restore God back into school, while we take away science and promote bullying on social media platforms.
I’m sure it’s the same thing over at Fox, which we know has different biases than CNN. Media organization need to deliver an interesting product or they go bankrupt quickly.
Remember that universities pay for the research to be created, but the researchers get to walk away and sell it. Really this is just helping turn more tax payer money into private wealth.
Bayh-Dole is more complex than that. The university gets a part of the proceeds if they manage to license the IP. More important: a university (or even a startup) do not at all have the means to take anything pharmaceutical through clinical testing, once it reaches Stage 2 it's up to Big Pharma, no one else has the means and the financial resources.
Does that come back to the federal funding in any way or do universities capture it all? Maybe there should be a stipulation that university profits above a certain threshold originating from federally funded research should help pay back the grant. That would allow more of the funding to be reused (akin to Kiva's microlending), and wean the system off of taxpayers.
Universities capture it all. I agree with you, and I would further suggest that any publications done using public money should be released under the public domain. As it stands, that research is behind paywalls, and in many cases, researchers pay (again using public funds) to put it there. In other cases, researchers paid using public funds are doing the editing and reviewing for free. That's a whole other discussion though.
This argument is not very good. The researchers apply for Federal grants (funded by the taxpayer) to do the research. The University takes a ~30% admin fee off of that grant and usually gets the patent rights. Then the university will license the IP to someone else to develop commercially. Sometimes this is the researcher, other times it is not.
Another example, we pay taxes for roads, roads are built buy private companies who "turn more tax payer money into private wealth". Same with defense spending.. taxes go to companies to produce weapons which they sell and... increases private wealth.
The (undeveloped) argument seems to be that the costs for university research are borne by everyone (don't start about tuition) but only few people get to enjoy the fruits, and they get to do so disproportionately. A successful founder has wealth measured in tens of millions or even more (when Joe Schlessinger sold Plexxikon it was for 805 millions says Wikipedia), but any drug that falls out of it is expensive and might not be covered by your health insurance. This is a problem.
And the trend continues in which science funding increases under Republican administrations more than it does under Democrat ones. For all their talk, it really is a disappointingly low priority for Democrats.
It's true that there is a weak correlation between the party of the administration and science funding, with funding being more under a Republican administration.
However, there is also a correlation between the House of Representatives and science funding, with funding being more under a Democratic House of Representatives.
(In the Senate, no correlation between party and funding)
If you look at where the science spending goes, the Republican administrations spend more than Democrats largely because they spend more on the military, and so military funded science goes up. Democratic administrations spend less on the military, but more on space, energy, and environmental science.
Mostly because the Republicans cried crocodile tears about the deficit when a Democratic president was in office, but have no problem blowing up the deficit when a Republican is in office now or when Bush was in office. We're already over a trillion up in debt in the past year and trillions more expected for the tax giveaway in the next few years. And this is in good times when we should be paying down the debt, unlike the beginning of the decade when the US was in recession.
I believe Republican obstruction of productive stimulus spending extended the recession longer than it needed to soley for political reasons. Mitch McConnell openly stated his main goal was to prevent Obama from being relected.
I'm severely disappointed that most of this increased debt spending now is being forked over to a bloated black hole military budget.
Congress passes budgets, not the Administration (President). The current President loudly opposed the science funding increase before and after passage.
I worked in a startup founded by DARPA people for a while and my impression was that DARPA is often used to funnel money to well connected friends. They do interesting things but it doesn't seem very efficient.
“Government is often used to funnel money to well connected friends” in general. DARPA is by no means unique in that regard. It is unique in that every 20 years or so it manages to crank out something that turns the world on its head.
My experience is quite different. DARPA is a good agency to work with for engineering seed funding in academic research. They're willing to fund some interesting ideas that other groups think are too risky.
DARPA is effective because, in many ways, it is sort of a research aggregator and packager, focusing basic research into solving specific problems. There's no HN without news elsewhere on the web, just like there's no DARPA without basic research in all the sciences. As such, it's budget should probably be somewhat proportional to the budget of basic research.
The point of the gimmick is that doing it would reduce the net debt that the United States Government had, thereby keeping us away from the debt ceiling.
In any case a fundamental problem is that we have rather more debt than we have any feasible way to pay. A very large part of that debt is held in the form of Treasury bonds issued to Social Security. Which leads to Social Security being financially solvent on paper for many decades to come. In fact it looks like once the Baby Boom retires, either Social Security is solvent or the US government is solvent, but not both.
The Ruble wasn't exactly the reserve currency and the major trading currency of the world at that point in time. If Trump did this 1929 would look good by comparison. You'd be buying bread with a wheelbarrow the week after.
The thing that really matters is whether the US can continue to borrow money at reasonable rates.
That's the harbinger of doom, when treasury bond rates start to act weird, no one knows what level of debt that will happen at so the hand wringing over X trillions is kind of silly.
It's a method of figuring out how a yenn, yuan, ruble, rupee, stack up against the dollar. As US dollars become cheaper, people in other countries end up buying large swathes of land in the US (and vice versa). That or bonds. It IS a real thing.
Yes, it is real. But a debt dollar is not a fixed object like if for example I borrowed your screwdriver and have to return it. It's easy to reduce the value of (fiat) debt by devaluing dollars (inflating the money supply).
How would the world be different if the US spent more on research over the past 50 years? If the Human Genome Project had been completed in 1993 instead of 2003, for example, would our knowledge be 10-20 years ahead of where we are now?
Knowledge we would be discovering 2038 might be discovered this year. If there is some sort of Moore’s Law for investment in research, by 2050, we’d have technology from 2150 at the current pace?
True, but misleading. On a local scale, the ratio seems significantly worse than 1:1. On a global scale, due to interdisciplinary synergies, it seems to exceed 1:1.
I feel like one could draw some connection from this to the fact that technological progress seems to grow at a quadratic-hyperbolic (and not an exponential, as Ray Kurzweil would have you believe) rate, but alas, I can't think of a way to do so right now.
>On a global scale, due to interdisciplinary synergies, it seems to exceed 1:1.
How does it seem to do that? If you're going to call somebody misleading, might as well go through the effort of linking to data that you consider 'not misleading'.
I would have to argue that refinements to our processes for acquiring and sharing knowledge is probably a big player. Yes you need funding for research and more funding helps. More money isn't some sort of guarantee of results though. I would also have to argue that a lot of our technological progress comes from an existing infrastructure and incremental improvements. We have a lot of momentum driving rapid incremental improvements, money does sustain that system, but an infinite amount of money isn't going to yield infinite improvements. And simple more money isn't always going to yield multiples worth of improvements. One of the reason is some things just end up being dead ends. Or some other dependency doesn't exist yet.
We've been making transistor, silicon based, x86 CPU's for 40+ years now. ARM is 33 years old. And we're just making improvements and refinements to those and to most technology for that matter. I would have to so the only thing that's growing at a quadratic-hyperbolic rate is adoption and application, not the technology itself.
Would Celera have done what they did without HGP doing a lot of preliminary research and creating an environment of strong interest?
It seems to me that these kinds of arguments have a "that which is seen vs. that which is unseen" problem. All the preliminary R&D that sets the stage and builds interest gets forgotten after the big "Eureka!" In reality "Eureka!" is a borderline myth. Look at any big invention and you can find that a lot of fertilizer was added to the soil before it sprouted.
Yes, Celera would have done what they did. Remember, they didn't need the preliminary research of the HGP, because instead of using a scaffolding method, they went straight to shotgun sequencing which saved them 5+ years.
Nobody's denying that the HGP and Celera were able to rest on a strong foundation, but the reality is that the HGP was running itself lazily because they had no competition. I worked in genomics at the time and it was really a sleepy corner of bioinformatics.
At the same time, Celera didn't launch until 1998, 8 years after HGP started. So Celera effectively languuished since 1990 as well. Ideas need to ripen in their time. Celera didn't jump in the game until the tech (bio tech and computer tech) was ready, and BTW Celera had the benefit of consuming all of HGP's output while keeping their own secret.
I'm all for more money for research, we spend too much on the military as it is. Learning new things no matter how useless the knowledge seems right now might have untold applications in the future.
That being said, throwing money at science and expecting predictable and measurable results on any sort of definable timetable isn't realistic.
Even if the human genome project had been completed in 1993 that's not a promise that every sort of discovery or applications based on that knowledge would have been discovered between 1993 and 2008. And invariably there's things we've learned between 2008 and 2010 that is a dependency for some of the work utilizing the human genome. So sure, somehow if we knew everything in 1993 that we did in 2003 we'd be years ahead. And if we knew everything we did in 1993 in 1893 woah, just think of that. And so on and so on.
More funding can help in the quest to learn about the universe. But you can't just buy knowledge (doubly so for a specific technology or somesuch) by the year, decade, or century. Money doesn't have that power, and that's not how science works.
> If the Human Genome Project had been completed in 1993 instead of 2003
Could the project have been completed in 1993 with infinite funding? Just taking into account computing power put into the project, it was exponentially greater in 2003, so perhaps in 1993 it wasn't enough. Maybe it would have taken until 2003 no matter what, as the limiting factor wasn't money but something else.
The idea is that we shift the entire timeline of discovery by a few years at first then by more as time passes. I didn’t mean to imply that we spend large amounts of money on one project to get it done earlier.
Simply, that we spend more on research, in general, then would we reach the ability to solve the Human Genome Project earlier. I picked this project randomly. The LHC and Higgs could be another.
One of the remarkable features of the Human Genome Project (HGP) was that much of the technology needed to complete the project not only did not exist (e.g. highly parallel sequencers), but was not even imagined (e.g. PCR - the polymerase chain reaction). Unlike landing on the moon, where much of the science was well understood, the technical solutions to the human genome were not known when it was envisioned. Science is not engineering; the HGP succeeded because science came up with technical solutions that could then be engineered. But both were required. It is unclear that there are effective ways to accelerate unimagined scientific discoveries.
It's an interesting question. I'd look at it from the angle of ability to marshal resources for an to meet constantly arising but unanticipated threats and opportunities. So not the Genome Project, we always knew we'd need to figure that out, same with how to beat cancer, same with fusion, etc.
I'm talking about when internet transaction started becoming an opportunity, there was already a well developed (if esoteric) field of cryptography that could build solutions for that application... and it turned out that was the tip of the iceberg of what crypto is doing nowadays.
On the threat side, there are many examples of Soviet jet can do X, therefore the US has to dip into research on say allow metals, to build a jet that can do Y and counter the threat.
We don't know what grand projects are tractable with today's or tomorrow's technology - beat cancer or invent fusion first, anyone? We know in the future we'll need answers to questions we haven't even asked yet; that's what you're really buying with your research dollars.
Where does this leave things relative to previous years? Does it completely counter any cuts made in recent times? Counter them over-all but still leave some areas under-/un- funded compared to a previous state of affairs?
For NIH, this is massive. NIH lost 19% funding from 2003 (when it was at $40B / year) to 2015. Small gains the last couple years combined with this massive increase almost erases that (2018 budget is $38B).
This is great news and all, but I thought that the administration wanted to slash research spending? Did they change plans, or is this how US politics works.
The administration (ie. the Trump administration, ie. the executive branch) has no control over spending and the president's budget is more of a wishlist than anything else. Congress sets the budget and passes the bill(s) that fund it.
This is the budget that Trump threatened to veto and whined and complained about before he signed, and the one they're writing articles about the Democrats getting heaps of stuff they wanted in it. I don't think it should be taken as an indication of stuff Trump wants, and to some extent the same goes for the GOP.
This is how US politics work. The current president makes a proposal on how they would like for the budget to look, but it's just a proposal. The legislative branch (Congress) is actually responsible for creating the budget. They are not at all obligated to follow the proposal.
The president has to agree to the budget submitted to him by Congress, so there's usually a lot of discussions between the two parties. The caveat here is that Congress can override a presidential veto.
Here is Trump's tweet on what he thinks of the domestic spending increase.
"Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming. Most importantly, got $700 Billion to rebuild our Military, $716 Billion next year...most ever. Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment." (emphasis mine)
Destroy, no that's a lot cheaper. Remain capable of fighting two major wars at any given time, that's more expensive I think they reduced the policy level capability requirement to one major war and something smaller within the last two years.
Source was a naval officer, still keep up with the professional journals.
Exactly. When it's money spent on warships and nuclear bombs, it's money well spent. When it's (comparatively much less) money spent on education, research, NASA, PBS, NEA, meals on wheels etc. Well now, let's not get crazy with spending.
You summarized the tweet with the same amount of words.
Anyway, I don't think he cares about it as much as you think. He knows who his voters are. He also is aware that it makes people like you irritated so that you keep talking about him, which keeps him in the news.
I don't understand what you're driving at. An echo would contain no new information. There's clearly more information in my comment than the original post. That you're upset I did so in the same number of words as a tweet is confusing to me.
It's a Hacker News bug apparently. There was no reply link under your name, and now there is. But there is no reply link under the reply to which I'm now replying (now that's confusing)
This is kind of how politics works. He has to placate his base, while making compromises with the other side. He then has to act like it was a huge deal to make those compromises, and was against his best interests, so they will continue to vote for him.
I'll just note from a political perspective, Donald Trump threatened to veto the final budget bill because of the totality of these spending increases. He was not in favor of these increases.
In fact the budget Donald Trump proposed [1] mainly was massive increases in military spending with sharp cuts to many domestic agencies (EPA -25%, Education -5%), including many research agencies they don't agree with (like the NOAA [2]).
But what happened is many Republicans in the freedom caucus refused to vote for a budget that increased the debt by so much, so a compromise was required as Democratic votes were going to be needed. So to vastly oversimplify, Republicans wanted higher military spending, Democrats wanted higher domestic spending, and the compromise was reached that everybody got everything and who cares about the national debt. The bill actually passed in a very bipartisan way, with 62% of republicans and 59% of democrats in the House voting for the final bill, but with many of the "no" votes for different reasons (no DACA solution, debt increase too much, not enough wall spending, etc).
So while these increases are good (if you happen to like R&D spending), they aren't due to congress shifting their spending priorities, they are just due to a massive increase in the debt.
In other words, at the end of the day, traditional hog-trading politics as usual (going back 30+ years), for better or for worse, which frankly is a bit refreshing in the context of the other insanity flying around national politics this year.
For all the talk of "fiscal conservatism", Reagan was the first post-war president to drastically increase the national debt - he increased the debt by 186% due to insane deficit spending.[1] After Bush Sr. added another 1.5 trillion, Clinton was the most fiscally conservative president in modern times, adding only 32% to the debt after 8 years. GWB of course again increased the debt by 101% and also fuelled a trillion dollar war which destabilised the entire middle east.
Obama, facing the biggest recession in a century(which requires government spending to stimulate the economy) only increased the debt 74% after 8 years. The amount he added to the debt over 8 years is likely to be surpassed by Trump in just 4.
If there's one relatively fiscal conservative party in the US, it's definitely not the GOP. Yet the media just takes at their word and continues to associate them with fiscal conservatism.
It is misleading to fully assign spending outcomes to the sitting president-- Congress has far more control over spending than the White House. Clinton was anti-deficit but he also had the most conservative Congress in modern times after 1994 sending him appropriations bills. Obama had a similar dynamic after 2010. In both cases GOP Congresses imposed hard spending caps-- in fact, in 1994 they even clawed back spending from 1993.
The difference is that the Republicans use "fiscal conservatism" to really mean "Current President we don't like shouldn't get as much money".
And then they give all the money to the Republican Presidents when they come into power (see Tax cuts, which I personally consider to be lavish spending)
There's definitely a large group of Americans (likely a minority, but still a large group) who genuinely care about the debt, deficit, and balancing the budget. But there's really no major powers in Washington who actually do care. (And the few Senators who do care are nutjobs IMO. Its difficult to find a "reasonable" deficit hawk who doesn't believe in "Gold Standard " or other crap)
I'm talking about simple, and reasonable ways to get rid of the deficit here: increase taxes slightly, reduce spending where we can. Is it really that hard? Alas, no one I'm aware of is for both increasing taxes and cutting spending.
Apparently, cutting spending puts you in the group of nutjobs who believe that cutting taxes magically increases revenues due to "economic growth".
Increasing taxes (which is championed by the left) also puts you in with the Bernie Bros who then spend all the money made on free college education for everyone, and other such projects we can't afford.
Personally I think there may be better ways to spend money, but it's interesting that tuition-free college, which is the norm in europe, is considered something the US "can't afford" while a 700 billion dollar increase in military spending is passed without blinking an eye by people who've spent 8 years complaining about deficit.
The huge money sink in the US budget is undoubtedly the military. After the current increase the US probably spends more on military than the next 13 or 14 countries combined. If that can be reduced to spending about 2.5x what China spends(still overkill considering the allies the US has) then you have about 350 billion a year to either spend or reduce the deficit with. More than enough to eliminate child hunger, healthcare problems and infrastructure issues.
There are other cultural issues stopping tuition-free college in the USA. At best, tuition-free community college is the best we might be able to hope for.
Case in point: Europeans don't have for-profit companies extracting wealth from uneducated Americans.
There's fundamental problems to the US's education system at play here. We can't throw money at the problem and hope for it to work. We have to culturally fix those issues.
Tuition was free for in-state students during America's peak post war years in California and other places. It's not like it's completely alien to America. Nobody is advocating "throwing money" at the issue but you can't just sit around waiting for cultural change without doing anything about it.
State-based tuition would work out in America, but case in point on how awful our educational infrastructure is:
National Accreditation is basically a joke. Only regional accreditation matters. If people actually want to have "free college for everyone in the USA", step one would be to actually DEFINE a college education on the national level.
Which the USA does NOT have yet. We are very far away from the point of "sink money into this project". Ever talk education in the USA? How did "Common Core" do? The political culture is incredibly sensitive and paranoid about education changes.
Just think about how such a "free tuition" project would work. You'd have to have a national team standardize a curriculum. You'd have to then inspect various colleges to make sure they're up to standard. The ones that aren't up to standard lose federal money (aka: free tuition money), so it would be a death-spell for any school who fails.
Its not compatible with US Culture. US Citizens are too particular about how their children are taught, and would never accept people from far away telling them that... well... Thomas Jefferson is a founding father (https://thinkprogress.org/texas-board-of-education-cuts-thom...) or that the Earth is older than 6000 years old, or that Radioactive dating works.
Education barely even is a money problem. Its mostly political. Frankly though, I'd prefer if we fixed our High Schools first. Clearly a high school education isn't enough for most jobs anymore.
As with most things that can be measured, it depends on your POV and agenda.
In 2017 dollars Regan increased the debt by ~ 4.15 trillion, while Obama increased the debt by ~ 8.88 trillion (using the numbers found at your link (which is just one way of counting the debt for a president), taking the the entire debt increase as a lump payment in the middle of the presidency and using this inflation calculator to estimate the amount forward to the present http://www.in2013dollars.com .
So in absolute terms Obama increased the debt by more than twice as much as Regan who had "insane deficit spending" according to you.
Also you state that Trump is on track to increase the deficit in 4 years more than Obama did in 8 years. I believe this is a lie -- the estimated numbers even on that website show 1.233+1.225+1.193+1.119=4.775 trillion over four years for Trump which is marginally less than Obama spent over his first four years (even excluding the Economic Stimulus Act in 2009) of 0.672+1.276+1.229+1.652=4.829 trillion even before adjusted for inflation. On what planet is 4.8 trillion more than 8.9 trillion?
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadAnother example, we pay taxes for roads, roads are built buy private companies who "turn more tax payer money into private wealth". Same with defense spending.. taxes go to companies to produce weapons which they sell and... increases private wealth.
However, there is also a correlation between the House of Representatives and science funding, with funding being more under a Democratic House of Representatives.
(In the Senate, no correlation between party and funding)
If you look at where the science spending goes, the Republican administrations spend more than Democrats largely because they spend more on the military, and so military funded science goes up. Democratic administrations spend less on the military, but more on space, energy, and environmental science.
See: http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2015/11/09/do-democrats-alway...
I believe Republican obstruction of productive stimulus spending extended the recession longer than it needed to soley for political reasons. Mitch McConnell openly stated his main goal was to prevent Obama from being relected.
I'm severely disappointed that most of this increased debt spending now is being forked over to a bloated black hole military budget.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/us/politics/17mcconnell.h...
https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/15/donald-trump-...
https://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/10/25/2016/national...
Also bear in mind a lot of that debt is held by Americans...
In any case a fundamental problem is that we have rather more debt than we have any feasible way to pay. A very large part of that debt is held in the form of Treasury bonds issued to Social Security. Which leads to Social Security being financially solvent on paper for many decades to come. In fact it looks like once the Baby Boom retires, either Social Security is solvent or the US government is solvent, but not both.
This is wrong since it doesn't take into account other governments and entities outside of the US that hold treasury securities.
That's the harbinger of doom, when treasury bond rates start to act weird, no one knows what level of debt that will happen at so the hand wringing over X trillions is kind of silly.
Knowledge we would be discovering 2038 might be discovered this year. If there is some sort of Moore’s Law for investment in research, by 2050, we’d have technology from 2150 at the current pace?
I feel like one could draw some connection from this to the fact that technological progress seems to grow at a quadratic-hyperbolic (and not an exponential, as Ray Kurzweil would have you believe) rate, but alas, I can't think of a way to do so right now.
How does it seem to do that? If you're going to call somebody misleading, might as well go through the effort of linking to data that you consider 'not misleading'.
We've been making transistor, silicon based, x86 CPU's for 40+ years now. ARM is 33 years old. And we're just making improvements and refinements to those and to most technology for that matter. I would have to so the only thing that's growing at a quadratic-hyperbolic rate is adoption and application, not the technology itself.
It wasn't the funding that fixed things- it was the competitive spirit and a few smart people with duct tape.
It seems to me that these kinds of arguments have a "that which is seen vs. that which is unseen" problem. All the preliminary R&D that sets the stage and builds interest gets forgotten after the big "Eureka!" In reality "Eureka!" is a borderline myth. Look at any big invention and you can find that a lot of fertilizer was added to the soil before it sprouted.
Nobody's denying that the HGP and Celera were able to rest on a strong foundation, but the reality is that the HGP was running itself lazily because they had no competition. I worked in genomics at the time and it was really a sleepy corner of bioinformatics.
That being said, throwing money at science and expecting predictable and measurable results on any sort of definable timetable isn't realistic.
Even if the human genome project had been completed in 1993 that's not a promise that every sort of discovery or applications based on that knowledge would have been discovered between 1993 and 2008. And invariably there's things we've learned between 2008 and 2010 that is a dependency for some of the work utilizing the human genome. So sure, somehow if we knew everything in 1993 that we did in 2003 we'd be years ahead. And if we knew everything we did in 1993 in 1893 woah, just think of that. And so on and so on.
More funding can help in the quest to learn about the universe. But you can't just buy knowledge (doubly so for a specific technology or somesuch) by the year, decade, or century. Money doesn't have that power, and that's not how science works.
Could the project have been completed in 1993 with infinite funding? Just taking into account computing power put into the project, it was exponentially greater in 2003, so perhaps in 1993 it wasn't enough. Maybe it would have taken until 2003 no matter what, as the limiting factor wasn't money but something else.
Simply, that we spend more on research, in general, then would we reach the ability to solve the Human Genome Project earlier. I picked this project randomly. The LHC and Higgs could be another.
I'm talking about when internet transaction started becoming an opportunity, there was already a well developed (if esoteric) field of cryptography that could build solutions for that application... and it turned out that was the tip of the iceberg of what crypto is doing nowadays.
On the threat side, there are many examples of Soviet jet can do X, therefore the US has to dip into research on say allow metals, to build a jet that can do Y and counter the threat.
We don't know what grand projects are tractable with today's or tomorrow's technology - beat cancer or invent fusion first, anyone? We know in the future we'll need answers to questions we haven't even asked yet; that's what you're really buying with your research dollars.
Pretty amazing
The president has to agree to the budget submitted to him by Congress, so there's usually a lot of discussions between the two parties. The caveat here is that Congress can override a presidential veto.
"Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming. Most importantly, got $700 Billion to rebuild our Military, $716 Billion next year...most ever. Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment." (emphasis mine)
...because, as everyone knows, the US military is in shambles compared to the rest of the world...
(I'm not trying to weigh in on the politics, just pointing out one context where that remark makes sense)
Source was a naval officer, still keep up with the professional journals.
https://www.armed-services.senate.gov
You can do a "wikipedia dive" on that site and take away a depth of understanding that, honestly, probably exceeds 99% of political commentators'.
Anyway, I don't think he cares about it as much as you think. He knows who his voters are. He also is aware that it makes people like you irritated so that you keep talking about him, which keeps him in the news.
Anyway, I don't know why the language I used matters. You knew what I meant and had to be pedantic. My second point was more important.
https://imgur.com/a/5kMTA
In fact the budget Donald Trump proposed [1] mainly was massive increases in military spending with sharp cuts to many domestic agencies (EPA -25%, Education -5%), including many research agencies they don't agree with (like the NOAA [2]).
But what happened is many Republicans in the freedom caucus refused to vote for a budget that increased the debt by so much, so a compromise was required as Democratic votes were going to be needed. So to vastly oversimplify, Republicans wanted higher military spending, Democrats wanted higher domestic spending, and the compromise was reached that everybody got everything and who cares about the national debt. The bill actually passed in a very bipartisan way, with 62% of republicans and 59% of democrats in the House voting for the final bill, but with many of the "no" votes for different reasons (no DACA solution, debt increase too much, not enough wall spending, etc).
So while these increases are good (if you happen to like R&D spending), they aren't due to congress shifting their spending priorities, they are just due to a massive increase in the debt.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/trump-...
2: https://www.aip.org/fyi/2017/trump-budget-cuts-noaa-16-slash...
This can easily be fixed with some more tax cuts if you believe the GOP.
http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1148666/FULLTEXT01...
http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1148666/FULLTEXT01...
Obama, facing the biggest recession in a century(which requires government spending to stimulate the economy) only increased the debt 74% after 8 years. The amount he added to the debt over 8 years is likely to be surpassed by Trump in just 4.
If there's one relatively fiscal conservative party in the US, it's definitely not the GOP. Yet the media just takes at their word and continues to associate them with fiscal conservatism.
[1] - https://www.thebalance.com/us-debt-by-president-by-dollar-an...
And then they give all the money to the Republican Presidents when they come into power (see Tax cuts, which I personally consider to be lavish spending)
There's definitely a large group of Americans (likely a minority, but still a large group) who genuinely care about the debt, deficit, and balancing the budget. But there's really no major powers in Washington who actually do care. (And the few Senators who do care are nutjobs IMO. Its difficult to find a "reasonable" deficit hawk who doesn't believe in "Gold Standard " or other crap)
I'm talking about simple, and reasonable ways to get rid of the deficit here: increase taxes slightly, reduce spending where we can. Is it really that hard? Alas, no one I'm aware of is for both increasing taxes and cutting spending.
Apparently, cutting spending puts you in the group of nutjobs who believe that cutting taxes magically increases revenues due to "economic growth".
Increasing taxes (which is championed by the left) also puts you in with the Bernie Bros who then spend all the money made on free college education for everyone, and other such projects we can't afford.
The huge money sink in the US budget is undoubtedly the military. After the current increase the US probably spends more on military than the next 13 or 14 countries combined. If that can be reduced to spending about 2.5x what China spends(still overkill considering the allies the US has) then you have about 350 billion a year to either spend or reduce the deficit with. More than enough to eliminate child hunger, healthcare problems and infrastructure issues.
Case in point: Europeans don't have for-profit companies extracting wealth from uneducated Americans.
There's fundamental problems to the US's education system at play here. We can't throw money at the problem and hope for it to work. We have to culturally fix those issues.
National Accreditation is basically a joke. Only regional accreditation matters. If people actually want to have "free college for everyone in the USA", step one would be to actually DEFINE a college education on the national level.
Which the USA does NOT have yet. We are very far away from the point of "sink money into this project". Ever talk education in the USA? How did "Common Core" do? The political culture is incredibly sensitive and paranoid about education changes.
Just think about how such a "free tuition" project would work. You'd have to have a national team standardize a curriculum. You'd have to then inspect various colleges to make sure they're up to standard. The ones that aren't up to standard lose federal money (aka: free tuition money), so it would be a death-spell for any school who fails.
Its not compatible with US Culture. US Citizens are too particular about how their children are taught, and would never accept people from far away telling them that... well... Thomas Jefferson is a founding father (https://thinkprogress.org/texas-board-of-education-cuts-thom...) or that the Earth is older than 6000 years old, or that Radioactive dating works.
Education barely even is a money problem. Its mostly political. Frankly though, I'd prefer if we fixed our High Schools first. Clearly a high school education isn't enough for most jobs anymore.
In 2017 dollars Regan increased the debt by ~ 4.15 trillion, while Obama increased the debt by ~ 8.88 trillion (using the numbers found at your link (which is just one way of counting the debt for a president), taking the the entire debt increase as a lump payment in the middle of the presidency and using this inflation calculator to estimate the amount forward to the present http://www.in2013dollars.com .
So in absolute terms Obama increased the debt by more than twice as much as Regan who had "insane deficit spending" according to you.
Also you state that Trump is on track to increase the deficit in 4 years more than Obama did in 8 years. I believe this is a lie -- the estimated numbers even on that website show 1.233+1.225+1.193+1.119=4.775 trillion over four years for Trump which is marginally less than Obama spent over his first four years (even excluding the Economic Stimulus Act in 2009) of 0.672+1.276+1.229+1.652=4.829 trillion even before adjusted for inflation. On what planet is 4.8 trillion more than 8.9 trillion?