I’ll go first: $76M (2% increase)

Look at AIDS funding. Look at debt relief. Look at last year’s 1-2 release of first, a major press release talking about the savings in the budget followed by the actual budget (with rather less fanfare) that included tax cuts equal to twice the budget savings.

For evil to triumph, it is sufficient that the voters be complete morons. Luckily for the Bush people, that is what they have in the US, where even supposedly intelligent people like the readers of this blog, fall for the old Lucy-Snoopy-football bit EVERY FREAKING TIME. Five years of this, and you are still running around saying “no, no, this time it will be different”.

It’ll probably come with a few strings attached. Perhaps a requirement to give equal time to “faith-based” physics and “intelligent design”. After all, science is really just a bunch of “theories” and we are talking about public funds here.

Just like the stuff that goes to NASA

From the New York Times

Non pay-wall mirror

“In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word “theory” after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The Times.”

“… The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the “war room” of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen’s public statements.”

“… The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.” It continued: “This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most.”

These problems are caused precisely because people in the US don’t want to pay taxes or pay social premiums etc. Things have to go badly wrong before they’ll see that the ideology of less government, low taxes etc. doesn’t work. Katrina was one such disaster and probably not the last one.

Since the 70′s, experimental particle physics has built and confirmed the Standard Model which is our foundation for understanding the universe. You either find this interesting and worthwhile, or you don’t. But if you don’t, then you’re wasting your time reading this blog.

I plan to blog on the development of the Standard Model fairly soon, so people will understand how long it took.

Actually, this administration has repeatedly increased federal spending rather dramatically since 2000. Why Norquist and the libertarians aren’t in total outrage at all of that is beyond me – but the facts are clear. Even _excluding DHS and DOD_, Bush has increased spending at a rate faster than Clinton while cutting taxes.

Now, given the terrifically anti-science record of the Bush admin, I continue to be very skeptical of this news, but it does look great so far. A long period of decay in physical science funding might be ending.

Somehow, announcements to increase federal funding for anything sound like a scam when they’re coming from this administration, whose strongest allies include people like Grover Norquist, who has declared that he would like to get government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Your share of the particle physics funding increase is about a quarter. I don’t think that eliminating the increased particle physics funding will help you with your rent or fund health insurance for you. If you want people without much money to have health insurance, it’s not going to happen by cutting science research funding. The only way it will happen is by getting politicians ideologically opposed to universal health insurance (and in the pockets of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries) out of office. They’re the people causing you a problem, not high energy physicists.