Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Science Budgets

A few years ago I wrote about how both Republicans and Democrats were generally pro-science funding, and that the problem with science funding is that it wasn’t a priority to either group and so would be left off at the negotiating table.

The Trump administration has been repeatedly and broadly anti-science and anti-education. The Republican Party has changed to match Trump on many of his positions, and while there has been push back, in the Republican Party, against Trump's broad anti-science and anti-education tilt, I am concerned that the Republican Party will become broadly anti-science and anti-education.

The Trump administration recent budget had cuts to Higher Education (10% cut) (trumps budget proposal would cancel public service loan forgiveness), the NSF (12% cut, 1 billion) (trump proposes cutting national science foundation budget by billion dollars) and NASA (3% cut, 550 million) (President Trump proposes 550 million cut to NASA).

I am suspicious that this is similar to his tax cuts which were design to hurt the upper middle class in blue states, and is based on transactional politics.

I can hope that the Republican Party in the senate continues to push back against this anti-science budget and the Democrats in the House continue to support Science.

Friday, March 1, 2019

Kim and Trump

I don’t usually make many predictions about the future, but I am going to predict that Trump and Kim come to an agreement in 2020. They will do this because Trump will want to boost his chances for reelection and Kim will want to have an agreement with Trump before he leaves office. The agreement will probably be more to Kim’s advantage than the one just discussed in Vietnam if Trump is seriously facing impeachment or his approval drops below 35%. It will probably be more to Trump’s advantage if it is rather happening in the context of Trump wanting to increase his approval in July, August or September (maybe even October).