A note from TPM Reader MA on biomedical research. I’m sharing it because it’s a good simple explanation not only of the nuts and bolts reality of “your cure isn’t going to be there when you need it” but the massive hit to global competitiveness and economic advantage …
I’m racking my brain trying to figure out why Trump would want to kill funding for curing cancer/Alzheimer’s etc. I guess, as is often the case, with Trump, the simple explanation is the most likely. He sees the university as the enemy and wants to use whatever federal leverage he can to attack them, even if it ends up destroying one of the areas in which the US has a huge comparative advantage. There are significant economic consequences to spiking medical research in the universities: this subsidizes the training of people who will work in the industry, and it drives the types of blue sky research that industry doesn’t want to do, but that it benefits greatly from. It creates a vacuum that other countries will rush to fill. If it persists, the comparative advantage that the US has gained by attracting top global talent will collapse.
At the same time, what Trump and his cronies are doing to the education system with their anti-science agenda will pretty much guarantee that home grown talent is likely to be non-competitive globally. As the split with Musk over visas indicates, the tech sector knows how much it has benefited from draining the brains from overseas. Trump’s actions will reverse the flow — that loud sucking sound will be top talent leaving the US. US higher ed is a significant export industry in which the US runs a big surplus (a lot more international students come to study here than the other way around). Losing the US edge in higher ed, means not just losing the research expertise and findings, but also the students.
Trump and co. don’t care as long as it means weakening the university system. As is becoming clear, their ideological project outstrips economic considerations.. They are happy to weaken the US and relegate it to second tier status globally if they can remake the cultural and ideological landscape. I guess they don’t care about turning the US into a backwater as long as they get to be the tinhorn dictators.
What continues to confound me is how many people who do not benefit from this support it.
It was striking to me to hear Trump talking about kids getting fewer dolls at Christmas. If a democrat had done something similar, the right would have gone nuts. It’s like some weird Kenedy parody: “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’s billionaires…” It’s fascinating how many Trump supporters are willing to make the sacrifices they would never countenance from a Democratic administration.
