Trump gained a lot of credibility in far right (ie Tea Party) circles by pushing birther conspiracies about Obama. There's a reason why I think that MAGA is just a continuation of that shit.
And higher rates=more unemployment. The Fed will have to choose between fewer employee people with purchasing power or more people employed, but at a reduced effective wage.
Because they expected a bailout. Bailouts mean that dipshits continue to be in charge instead of failing. Let the people who are bad at business fail. It's not like these are the farms feeding Americans anyway, if they were they would still have customers.
John Oliver had a really good segment on how useless gang databases are. Ways to be classified as a gang member include such things as using an umbrella and wearing colored clothing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlR8...
I'm one of those medical researchers who is out of work, and has been for the better part of a year. I very much want to resume what I was doing to help develop new therapies for diseases. But between the biotech slump and federal cuts it's hard to put those skills to use.
It's still not clear to me how that would work. Taxes are paid by individuals and businesses directly to the federal government. It's not like it's paid to the state and then the state pays the feds.
Unless you don't have empathy towards them. Look at Elon cheerfully cutting tens of thousands jobs and killing people by dismantling USAID crying about how people weren't buying his car in protest.
If you take the Trump/MAGA/GOP threat to US Constitutional democracy seriously—and I really think you should—then things getting worse faster, before Trump has consolidated authoritarian power, is beneficial, not detrimental.
If Democrats don't fight now, they might never have another real chance.
So in that sense what research is directly useful is very difficult to know in advance and even harder to argue for in a way that will sway the general public. A study that paved the way for ozempic could easily have been mocked as a waste of government money when it was first funded.
I'm largely okay with it, but tempered with the notion that we're really bad at predicting what will be useful so research into fundamental science is very important. For a recent example, ozempic and similar drugs are a direct result of studying lizard venom.
I think we need to ask what is more damaging to people, the cost of living going up and the devaluation of savings or people losing their livelihoods. I know I prefered the inflationary environment under Biden where I could get a job offer in my sleep than my current long term unemployment.
At the same time, the bulk of US spending on science goes to subjects that directly impact humans in some manner. Medical science gets the largest cut, followed by engineering. My experience writing grants has always been that you need to argue how your research will help the American public.
