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Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

Yeah that's kind of the thing.

I think a lot of these guys and gals are fooling themselves with the whole, "find another country" thing. There is no other country that is A) doing research at these levels, B) Flush with cash, and C) needs you because they don't have a population that produces the necessary thinkers. That's basically only the US.

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The European research budget is not insignificant. Horizon Europe 2021-2027 is the current vehicle that much of the funding is going through (European Research Council [ERC] being one of the most well known parts). It has a budget for the time-frame (all years) of EUR 96,899,000,000. [1] Of that, the ERC has EUR 16B [2], Digital, Industry and Space has ~EUR 15B, Climate, Energy and Mobility has ~EUR 15B, and several other sub-groups have smaller amounts.

Those then work with the country level organizations of Science Europe, and those together each spend about EUR 25B each year. [3] It's not insignificant. I tend to pay attention to space, and lately almost all there's been is European achievements in telescopes and astronomy.

[1] Horizon Europe, https://www.ffg.at/sites/default/files/downloads/HorizonEuro...

[2] ERC, https://erc.europa.eu/about-erc/erc-glance

[3] Science Europe RFOs, https://www.scienceeurope.org/about-us/members/?type=Researc...

Thanks for the numbers!

For comparison, the NSF budget is about $8 billion. DOE Office of Science is about the same. NIH is $45 billion

(Also, compare that with the profit of large tech companies)

That isn’t going to be anything even close to accurate before the week is over and that is kind of the entire point here.

Is the USA flush with cash? Last I checked they were deep in debt and its getting worse

I think GDP/economic output/labor productivity continues to rise briskly. The government accounts are in debt because people in the US refuse to consistently vote for [people advocating] high enough taxes. But we could tax more (still less than Europe) and get balanced budget.

Higher taxes do genuinely restrict economic growth, so it's not like raising taxes is a magic bullet.

Personally, I think there is plenty of grift and wasteful expenditure we could look at addressing first, especially within the healthcare and defense portfolios.

Not as much as having insufficient resources dedicated to the education of the young hurts economic growth (long term).

I agree not using the world proven efficient healthcare strategy of universal coverage is pretty stupid economically, as is spending a trillion USD per annum on the military. But we are so rich these mistakes can be absorbed for surprisingly long.

The US controls its currency and has no mandate for a balanced budget. So yes, the US is very flush with cash

And importantly enjoys a privleged position in the world economy that enables them to run these types of long term deficits with minimal negative consequences.

Something which might shift over the coming decades.

Those are the same thing. Higher public debt means there's more private credit available.

Yes, but when you borrow, you have money in your hands.

US firms are also very highly priced relative to their profits when compared to firms elsewhere. So while things are probably not quite sensible in the US there's still money.

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