It is disheartening, but not surprising, that President Obama’s FY2013 budget would slash $10 million (12 percent) from the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab budget (Campus Notebook, March 21). The lab is part of “discretionary” spending. Today “entitlements” devour almost 60 percent of the budget, and we are about to add a trillion or two with a health-care plan that defies economic logic by further divorcing the consumer of services from the responsibility for payment. In an era when restraining the inexorable growth of entitlements from 8 percent every year to 6 percent is decried as promoting “savage 25 percent cuts,” is it any wonder that real science suffers? Actions have consequences.
It is disheartening, but not surprising, that President Obama’s FY2013 budget would slash $10 million (12 percent) from the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab budget (Campus Notebook, March 21). The lab is part of “discretionary” spending. Today “entitlements” devour almost 60 percent of the budget, and we are about to add a trillion or two with a health-care plan that defies economic logic by further divorcing the consumer of services from the responsibility for payment. In an era when restraining the inexorable growth of entitlements from 8 percent every year to 6 percent is decried as promoting “savage 25 percent cuts,” is it any wonder that real science suffers? Actions have consequences.