This is still a funny strip, but in the current political climate regarding taxes, spending, and science, this isn’t exactly a view I want promoted. That grad students are lazy and tax dollars spent giving them stipends are wasted.

In my experience, while every grad student has their off days and their less productive times (like every employee everywhere, including me right now as I type this), in general graduate researchers work very hard. My colleagues spent long nights at the computer, summers hacking through the jungle with machetes, and winters drilling ice cores in the arctic. None were wasting grant money, which they had to work very hard to earn and track every dime of (and if it was a professor’s grant, the university got their cut off the top for overhead, an amount that could not be included in the grant writing, so basically the professor had to make up that difference). In addition, some research, like mine, is university funded, and much of it is funded by private companies. The results of this research are owned by the university and/or the company, and are not necessarily shared with the public as the results of a government grant are more likely to be.