On a Bill Maher show, "Stephen Moore, libertarian economist and Wall Street Journal columnist" kept pounding away that we must reduce the debt and one way to do that is to cut funding for science grants, like $2 million for snail mating research. "19-year-old Zack Kopplin, science advocate and history student" retorted that government-sponsored science often gives far better returns than many investments. He gave as an example that the government investment in genome research paid back 140 times the investment. See "College Kid Forced To Remind Know-It-All Economist That He's Actually Not A Scientist".
Warning: this segment deteriorates into a shouting match!
I might add, would we be reading these stories if the government hadn't invested in the Internet decades ago? Would we have had Google if the government hadn't given a California university a grant to study search algorithms?
About the snail mating research, "it's to prevent children in developing countries from getting parasitic worms…" Why should we protect these children from parasitic worms? Parasites increase poverty. Poverty leads to corruption. Corruption leads to terrorism. Two million dollars is a much better investment to prevent terrorism than two hundred million dollars and rising per F-35, a plane that still has many problems.
