John McCain Answers Science Debate 2008. Compare with Obama's side by side.
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Several comments in no particular order:
McCain mentions ending earmarks in reference to supporting scientific funding. How are those two even related…
I find it interesting that McCain says that he opposes "wasteful earmarks" when instead the funds can be used for research, while it was a research plan (the study about bears) that he gave as his prime example of "wasteful earmarks" at his VP announcement. Maybe he was for it before he was against it.
I suspect it's the problem of one person seeing research as useful and another as wasteful. Deciding what to fund or not and what is wasteful or not is tricky. For instance one person might argue you could fund a hell of a lot of mathematicians for the price of an accelerator trying to track down the higgs boson. Is one more valuable than the other?
I don't know how to make that decision despite having been on teams getting millions of dollars of government grants for research I found frankly wasteful.
It's not just science research though. Even a lot of government "pork" can be seen as helpful or not. Obviously a lot of Alaskans thought the "bridge to nowhere" wasn't pork but many of us down here to the south did. I recall a great NPR show that looked at examples of pork and tracked down the defenders. There's a lot of subjective judgment in all this. (Just as it is in your own personal budgets - what is wasteful spending and what is valuable?)