What are they smoking in Washington? Congress recently cut the budget of the National Science Foundation by $105 million,or roughly 2%. That's beyond insane.Today's productivity increases are the direct result of R&D funding — most of it by the government — in the 1970s and 1980s. Government-subsidized IT research in those decades transformed the face of businesses in the 1990s and today A few figures: 1. Research directly drives business, according to the Alliance for Science and Technology Research in America. MIT alone has spun off 4,000 companies with 1.1 million employees and annual revenues of $232 billion. 2. Studies indicate that up to 75% of all economic growth is directly attributed to innovation. 3. The primary source of basic research funding is the government. In 2003 it was responsible for 85% of all basic research, most of which was performed in universities and national laboratories.
展开▼
