A rant about decreased funding

I hate my president for a variety of reasons.

One is his lack of increasing funding to the NIH and the NSF. He's spending money on defeating the OMG TURRURIST EESLAM NUCULAR CAMELJOCKEYS who come from, frankly, a part of the world that may be affected by the idiocy that is fundamentalist Islam but in which most of the people that aren't extremists or government officials are actually fairly sane. Especially the academics, who have had their institutions mutilated to hell by their government.

According to the government spending in the last sixteen years, defense spending has skyrocketed while NIH and NSF funding remains stagnant or decreases.

This hinders young PhDs from getting grants, this turns principal investigators into salesmen who are forced to make their project look as good as possible (and some scientists who are desperate for a grant have unfortunately been forced to falsify data to get grants - one Elizabeth Goldman, I think, was hard up for a grant and ultimately resigned from UW because of this shit - falsifying data is wrong, but President Bush carries the blame for forcing many researchers into this position for the sake of their livelihoods. Even we scientists have to eat. I'm the sort who would live in a small efficiency apartment for the sake of comfort (partially because I prefer to minimize the amount of daily maintenance-type shit that I have to do around my dorm or apartment), but I need to eat and have enough that I can ensure my persistence into old age.

Hindering young PhDs kills people. Bush does not know the young graduate student scientist whose hopes for a research career are dashed by too many unaccepted grants from his principal investigator and kills himself in despair, the patient with a rare disease who dies after too long of a period without treatment, the seasoned researcher who loses his livelihood and job because he has gone without a grant for too long and may not be able to apply his specific skill set anywhere else (I hate people who use the word 'overeducated' in seriousness. You can never be too educated.) How many cancer patients will die this year because Bush underfunded the NIH and the NSF?

Principal investigators with extramural grants can't even do much basic research work anymore. They have to write grants, which pay their lab workers, who do the bulk of the research without the thorough knowledge of the subject that the principal investigator has.

Hopefully, my research will be of the nature that permits me to do some of the lab work. At least I'll be directing it.

Neuroscience especially needs funding right now, because we are a rapidly growing field. There seems to be less than enough money to fund the massive amounts of research we are conducting. This makes me angry at the people who determine how much money can be distributed. We need funding for our researching .

UPDATE: Edited because, unfortunately, I live in a police state.